BEST 'ERGO' ?

cargo:
I can’t believe the fixed head engines were pulled due to a height problem■■?
This coming from a company that had no trouble modifying the cab for the Marathon, or splaying the chassis to fit the GM in the Crusader.
A company that manufactured trucks as futuristic as the gas turbine powered prime mover or strange engines like the L60 horizontally opposed tank engine.
To me this engine was a fail from the get-go and it took the bean counters to finally do the deed.
Why a fixed head at all, what were they thinking.
OK they had a cylinder head to block sealing problem, it could have been solved without resorting to this idea.
Most modern high powered diesels today have twin overhead cam and a head gasket…can be done.

I think the 1960s was an exciting time for engine designers, especially in a big company like Leyland which, at the time, was at the forefront of innovation. There were all sorts of ideas floating about- high speed V’s, even higher-speed short stroke V’s, Foden were still enthusing about the future for their two-strokes, while the turbocharged in-line six asserted itself as the standard. Mack were engineering the future of every lorry engine, but nobody recognised that fact, even when the Maxidyne was in production! In that climate, Leyland could be forgiven for pursuing a theoretically superior concept. I suspect that, if they had a few more Dr. Engineers in the office, they would have made it work. The field now known as Design for Manufacture seems to have been short of brains at Leyland, as it was in many British companies. It still is, come to think of it. In the past few years I have paid countless invoices to firms with the word “Engineering” on their letterheads, and the proprietors would not even know how to add up a tolerance stack.