Rod's delivers an MGC Friday afternoon
This is roughly week 12 of no road tests. The winter weather has been quite tenacious, and I’ve coined a new expression: “Every day above zero is a good day”. That’s on the fahrenheit scale, and the last three days have not gotten off to a good start. But we’re adapting.
Friday we had this MGC trucked in by Rod’s Towing & Repair of Putney (802-387-4771). Greg & Vicki have been very creative about making the Triple A Plus zone work for our clients.
Just finished: XPAG TD & MGB 3 main
Monday morning we had the soon-to-be Gunmetal Gray XKE series 1 OTS transported to Jay at Windham Coach & Carriage in Brattleboro (802-254-1114) by Mike Savage of Weston in his enclosed trailer, and Mike will be back tomorrow morning to move the Healey Blue over OEW BN7 to Hurd’s Upholstering in Springfield, Vt for the installation of the interior. We’re running out of space, but not out of work, and anyway, Dick’s better, faster and cheaper.
Butch expresses himself in paint
I put final paint on these two MG engines at the end of last week. Butch has already installed the TD engine in the car seen here, but while he was painting the tank board, Patrick changed out the broken TD cluster gear. New ones are available for about a thousand dollars, but the one and only used TD transmission part we had on hand was… Ayuh, you guessed it, a TD cluster gear. Someone from Coram, Long Island was very, very lucky.
obstructed access
Patrick applies heat
One of the major items on the MGC owner’s punchlist was an overdrive leak. The solenoid power wire aperture in the O/D maincase is always a suspect, but in this case it was one of the solenoid housing cover hold down bolt holes instead, and it was the only one conveniently located under the exhaust where the only repair access is created by taking the exhaust down. Fortunately for us, but not so much for the owner, this exhaust was pretty much at the end of its useful service life, and taking our advice he opted for a stainless steel replacement. In the photo below left, you can see Patrick heating up the manifold studs to replace them, although after this picture was taken the manifold ended up on the Bridgeport to mill out one stud that still twisted off in the manifold flange.
Monday afternoon Patrick and I rolled the TD known as Myron out of the shop to get at some Myron parts that were boxed up and in the attic. The car had been outside for only a few minutes when a passing snow squall created this winter tableau:
Just a sudden snow squall.
