Why the Window Wouldn’t Roll Down

Patrick applies heat to a stuck bolt

Patrick uses Heat

One of the daily challenges in this business is getting things apart.  Frequently, this problem is exacerbated by the effects of 40 give or take years of New England winters and the continuous application of road salt to the highways to break up the ice which is often the aftermath of daytime warming following a storm.  People from the Northheast  reading this page already know that after about Thanksgiving, many of us switch to a vehicle which is known colloquially as a “Winter Beater”.  Mine, of course, is a rubber bumper MGB GT which is mainly distinguised by its willingness to start, irregardless of how cold it gets, up to Tuesday morning anyway, when the head gasket blew between #’s 3&4 cylinders, a simple weekend repair job I have scheduled for Saturday morning.

John grnds out a repair on an E-type IRS cage

John grnds out a repair on an E-type diff. cage

But back to the matter at hand, in the picture above Patrick can be seen parting some long stuck nuts & bolts which we want to capture alive, so to speak, in order to accurately match them during the rebuild process.  Since we employ a Mig-Welder for most repair work, our  Oxy-Acetylene torches are mostly used for superheating things which are super stuck, although they are also indispensible for brazing work.

E-type door-hotel for mice

Door-Hotel for Mice

So back to the question of the moment.  One of the items on the early E-type owner’s punch list was to fix the driver’s door so the window would roll all the way down.  Usually this is a problem with how the glass slides in the tracks or the winder mechanism, but in this case it was caused by a physical obstruction, a super-sized mouse nest.

mouse nest

Condominium for Sale

We can’t even figure out how they got in and out, only that they did in large numbers.  Fortunately, no one was home when Butch got going on it.  Possibly they had vacated the premises because the plumbing had failed.  We’re surmising this by the fact that the bottom of the door was pretty well rotted away by the retention of mouse effluent.

Downstairs Drying Rack

Downstairs Drying Rack

This is a cautionary tale (or is it tail ?) for owners of cars in long term storage under indifferent storage conditions.  No advice is proffered here.  Search the internet.

John is mostly through the prep stage of his E-type IRS overhaul.  Once everything is dismantled, cleaned & checked, its path is thru the bead-blast cabinet and then it gets etch-primed, painted and hung up to dry, in this case on the I-beam which supports what we call the “Morgan” room, where the E-type of the 2nd part, the one without the mouse problem, is undergoing repair.   Stacked on either side of the I-beam are boxes of new brake drums, mostly for MG’s, and looking past the hanging coil springs you can catch of glimpse of a couple of rows of built-in shelves with two rows of mainly Jaguar radiator hoses ( a V12 E-type has 23.  Yes, we have ’em).  and above them a full row of new brake rotors, almost none of which are from China, for Jags, MG’s Austin Healeys & Triumphs.  All of this is taking place in our driveline room, where in a few minutes from now, I’ll be snapping together an MGA transmission before I start prepping its engine parts for assembly.

This entry was posted in This week at the shop. Bookmark the permalink.