Morgan & Mini
John has been working on the MGC GT recovered from Fitchburg about a month ago. It’s running now and it’s smoothness even after an eight year layoff is uncanny. As the owner commented, “An inline six is a wonderful thing, isn’t it ?” Wednesday night I was out retrieving two of them from River City Machine in White River Junction about which there will be more to say next week, including some secret history from 1968 recent unearthed by Wayne & Randy while they were working on another MGC engine for us.
On my way back from White River, I plucked this two toned Morgan 4/4 off a side hill in Windsor, Vermont. It’s quite a nice car, actually. John is now fully engaged in a complete brake & clutch hydraulic overhaul on this Ford Kent 1500 engined car.
Stripping the inboard brakes off the differential assembly. The diff is upside down
Meanwhile Steve and I ran a tag team event on the Jaguar IRS unit from last week. After I broke down the IRS unit, I handed the subassemblies off to Steve for further dismantling and clean up.
The dismantling was complicated by two stubborn pairs of caliper mounting bolts. Because of their location, it’s not possible to get a box wrench all the way around them, necessitating “Plan B” which is to unbolt the outside half of the caliper, which allows removal of the brake rotor and access to the caliper mounting bracket hardware. This caliper was coming apart anyway for overhaul, as will soon be obvious
The Problem
The Solution
Plan “B” put into action: The caliper mount bracket is removed with the inner half of the caliper
Here’s the next hurdle, Sticking brake caliper pistons. We have a special tool for removal of caliper pistons, but if they’ve been frozen in place long enough, a more drastic strategy is sometimes called for. We pick out the center of the caliper piston as nearly as we can, drill a hole thru it and tap it 5/16″- 24 (tpi) and use a bolt as an extractor.
Steve pulls a caliper piston by the drill & tap method
Steve took this picture as he extracted the caliper piston. You can do this at home if you have a tap & die set. What comes next for this caliper is a wash up and a trip thru our glass bead cabinet, followed by another session with the 5/16″ & 3/8″ -24 taps to clean the threads. After that it’s the immersion cleaner to get everything inside scrupulously clean, and finally a coat of paint before reassembly.
Seth Holton loaded up his Holstein Heifers on Tuesday. He’ll be wintering them over at Holton farm in Westminster. After feeding them twice a day for the last month or so I’ll be kind of missing them.
Seth Holton loads up his holstein heifers Tuesday
