The BMC B series was a line of straight-4 & straight-6 internal combustion engine mostly used in motor cars, created by British automotive manufacturer Austin Motor Company. Design The precursor of the "B" series engine was a 1200 cc Overhead Valve (OHV) engine which was used in the 1947-1952 Austin A40 Devon, and, in slightly modified form, in the 1953 Austin A40 Somerset. This engine had many of the same basic dimensions as one of Austin's pre-war sidevalve engines - the 1125cc engine fitted in the Austin 10 which had the 89mm (3.5 in) stroke common to all later B-Series engines, allowing the use of much of the same installed equipment to produce the block and crankshaft - but to an all-new OHV design. Beyond this relationship to the pre-war Ten's engine, the lineage of the new OHV 1200cc power unit was somewhat complex - in the rest of its design it was in essence a scaled-down version of the 2199cc engine introduced in 1945 on the Austin 16 hp. The design of this unit were derived from the much larger OHV engine developed for the wartime Austin K5 military truck, which used a 3995cc straight-six engine (minus two cylinders this engine became the 2660cc four-cylinder engine used in the Austin A90 Atlantic and the Austin-Healey 100). The K5 engine was broadly an Austin version of the 3519cc engine built by Bedford for its military trucks, and in turn the Bedford engine was similar in design to the Chevrolet 235 straight-six engine - Bedford and Chevrolet both being part of General Motors. The common features found on all these engines, from the Chevrolet 235 to the Austin 1200cc, include the design of the valve gear and the cylinder head, especially the siamesed cylinder head ports. The A40 engine was originally drawn up to be produced in two capacities of 990cc and 1200cc to fall into the Eight and Ten tax horsepower classes. Before the A40 was launched, the British government removed the tax horsepower system in favour of a flat tax rate making the smaller capacity redundant. Therefore only the 1200cc version was built but could not be increased in capacity any further since it was already nearly at the maximum bore and stroke dimensions permitted by the design of the block casting. The long stroke, narrow bore characteristics of engines designed for the British taxation system remained. Austin realised