A TR3 comes off the transporter
Monday morning a transporter rolled in our yard and disgorged a TR3 which arrived here F.O.B. New Orleans. It was from an old client who relocated to that part of the world a few years ago. It’s a car with nice paint & upholstery and very clean underneath, but the steering and suspension are a bit sketchy. We are addressing that with a full suspension package from Revington TR. Read about it here
Road test & a bath
The Triumph arrived in the rain, not the kind of crashing, 50 foot visibility electrical storms we’ve had today, but after traveling 1500 miles and undergoing a brief, but wet road test, we took the wash hose to the car and ran it into the downstairs of the shop, where the dehumidifiers are always going, to dry out.
Repairs begin upon receipt of parts from Revington in about a week.
Butch & John and a windshield
John has almost finished retrimming his project MGB. It’s been a solitary road, mostly, but there are some things, like the windshield which are still a two man job. Remove & Replace windshield in an MGB is a struggle from the beginning to the end, and as I’ve said before, the only easy part of it is presenting the bill when the job is finally finished. This one was no exception to the rule and the struggle was exacerbated by the faulty placement of the captive hardware that anchors the center rod when the body was built about 40 years ago by Pressed Steel, Fisher. Who knew ? The good guys won again in the end.
Rare Rubber Bumper Twin Carb MGB
In 1974 the MG factory in Abingdon produced the last of the chrome bumper MGB’s, and very late in the year they built the first batch of Rubber Bumper MGB’s. These are rare and interesting cars, because as you will notice, it still has the twin SU HIF carburetors, and hasn’t yet acquired a power brake servo.
Apart from a pair of aftermarket air cleaners which are not a performance enhancement, this 58,000 mile car is remarkably original, and it has overdrive! It’s here to tidy up the front supsension, the rubber bumper cars are very hard on the original A-arm bushings. They’re only good for about 30,000 miles and we replaced them with the ultra-long wearing “V-8″ type, part number BHH 1123.
Right side suspension
MGB left side suspension
We also pulled down the king pins to take a look. They were perfect. Our technique to reassemble these is to get the back of the car slightly higher than the front for weight transfer, then we loosely assemble the lower A-arms and mount the stub axle assembly to them. Next we set the spring in place and locate the saddle of our floor jack (a Lincoln jack, not a Walmart jack) on the spring pan as close to the kingpin as possible and one man lifts while the other man guides the upper trunnion between the shock arms from which the pinch bolt has been removed to allow a cold chisel to spread them wide.
Tighten everything up while still jacked to set the pre-load, and keep you dental work out of the way of the spring in case it escapes.
The question last Thursday was whether the Austin Healey BN7 would run on Friday. See answer below:
Running up the BN7: David Haber cranks the starter, Butch runs the throttle and John feeds in fuel
