You'll find everything you need to know right here -
http://www.morrisdownunder.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1397

and yes the Japanese did take the Morris Minor engine and 'tidy it up a bit' to produce their A series.

pretty sure they tidied it up a bit to form the J series, then the a series came from a revamp of that

Quote:No they didn't.

I'd be happy if someone can show me the similarities between the Morris A series & the Datsun A series engines. Apart from the fact that they are both four cylinder pushrod engines, the similarities end there.

Datsun took the Austin A40 engine & made the J series from it, but the Datsun A series was a clean sheet of paper design.

where do the similarities of the MG A series engines / trannies and ours come from?

it's pretty close...

i'm not saying anything other than they bolt together some and are interchangeable, but the datsun ones are preferred...

Nissan was a licensee of Austin Motor Company technology and the Nissan A series was supposedly a modern replacement of the earlier iron-headed Nissan E engine and is of similar dimensions. The E series was a design inspired by Nissan's improvements to the BMC A-Series engine design in the 1950s. The J13 and J15 series were basically copied from the Austin A40, 1200cc engine but were mostly used on what they termed pickup trucks.