Morris Minor Owners Club

I see, occasionally, Morris minors offered for sale with Morris Ital engines in them. I don't have a problem with swopping non-standard engines into Minors (the Minor I owned thirty years ago had an Austin-Healey Sprite Mk 1 engine in it after all) but my question is this - what are the advantages/disadvantages of using an Ital engine? Presumably, being a Morris engine, it's easy to put it in a Minor, but is it as reliable and as long-lasting as an A Series? Is as fuel economic? there are loads of other questions, of course, most of which I haven't even thought of! What do people think?

The marina / Ital 1275 engine is an A series with much stronger bottom end than the Minor engine and also a useful and easy power increase...

I had an Ital A+ mated to a ital gearbox with the triumph dolomite on the back and it would cruise happily at 70 - 80 all day and still return 40mpg.

It has several advantages mainly revolving around that the marina and ital 1300 engines can be dropped fairly easily into the minor engine bay without a great deal of work and at one time they were plentiful and cheap in scrap yards every where.

So, do you think you could put an Ital engine into a Traveller, then? Would you need to change the whole drive train as well - Engine, gearbox, diff, etc, or could you just whack the Ital engine straight in?

It doesn't just go staright in - It needs some mods, but no need to change anything else in the drivetrain unless you wanted to. Use the search facility to find a number of threads on the fitting of a 1275 engine.

Have a look on my website. Just put a 1275 in my series ll shows whats involved in prepairing the engine to fit straight in using the standard 1098 running gear which was already in my series ll. My traveller is also fitted with a 1275 Ital engine. www.morris-1000.co.uk