Jason Marechaux inspects an Austin Healey 3000 Mk III
It’s been a busy week for our truck & trailer. Friday night I slipped into Manhattan and retrieved a TR6 from the East Side, and Sunday night I headed down thru Worcester and Providence to fetch this Austin Healey in Westport, Massachusetts. As luck would have it, Jason & Eddie from East Coast Collision & Restoration showed up just in time to make a spot inspection before we covered it up until we start to put it in running order very early in the new year.
We’ve also had a very nice MG TF delivered into our hands on Wednesday.
John has nearly completed a complete hydraulic overhaul on the Morgan 4/4 pictured here last week. He’s onto the electrical work including an ignition tuneup, and if the weather holds off next week, we’ll be out on the road with it for testing and evaluation
E-type rear calipers after reconditioning
Right now Butch is being greatly challenged by the fresh air tubing in the Healey Blue over O.E.W. BJ8 seen here previously. Expect a fuller report on that next week.
Meanwhile, Steve has been methodically working thru the E-type IRS. Here are the same calipers you saw him taking apart last week cleaned up and assembled with stainless steel caliper pistons. If we can presume that this car will now be on a Sports Car Services maintenance schedule where the brake fluid is changed completely every two years, it will be a very long time before these components will be seeing another major servicing.
40 DCOE carburetors before & after. Click to Enlarge
These are the 40 DCOE Webers which were also on Steve’s ‘do-list’ recently. On the right is one carburetor before cleaning: Take a close look at the float chamber bottom cover just about in the center of the picture, it’s a mess. The carburetor on the left has just been rinsed and dried after its trip thru the immersion cleaner. In our experience there is no better way to get carburetor parts as thoroughly clean as what you see here, and we employ the same cleaning method very extensively when we’re prepping engine parts during a rebuild, too.
Last week we picked up two in-line six cylinder engines from River City Machine, another 4.2 E-type, and an MGC.
AEC 879 factory installed liner from an MGC. Click to Enlarge
For any number of reasons it’s sometimes necessary to install a liner in a cylinder bore. this seems to happen most commonly when a cylinder wall cracks because of overheating, or when a block has reached its maximum rebore size and is sleeved back to standard. We got a call from River City Machine in White River Junction last week because the .030″ oversized cylinder block had already been sleeved in all six cylinders.
Working methodically, Wayne bored out the sleeves until they simply collapsed and fell out. Can your automotove machine shop do that ? He retrieved this one, and as you can easily see, it carries the genuine factory part number of AEC 879… a cylinder block almost certainly sleeved by Austin Engines Branch. While we’re used to encountering oversized camshaft & main bearing tunnels in the Ford Kent engines like the one fitted to the Morgan 4/4 we’re working with, it’s the first time we’ve seen a BMC cylinder block where they didn’t get it right the first time. What kind of wonderful story explains what happened here ?
