We received an urgent letter in the mail this week from Moss Motors to say they were issuing a recall on virtually all of their Chinese-made reproduction Girling brake master cylinders. Be On The Look Out for the following:
180-791 MGA Twin Cam & Deluxe
513-319 Austin Healey BN7, BT7, BJ7
581-011 Triumph TR3 (TS 13046 on) thru TR3B
581-032 Triumph TR4 & TR4A from CT 5784
581-101 Austin Healey BN7, BT7, BJ7, BJ8
581-512 Austin Healey BN 4 to CE 48862
These master cylinders were packaged as “Classic Gold”, and are at risk of a ‘foot valve’ failure. The foot valve closes off the return port to the fluid reservoir when you tromp on the brakes.
Sports Car Services does not use Chinese made Master Cylinders
Pictured on the left are some master cylinders from our inventory. The red boxes are TRW, the green boxes genuine Girling, Lockheed is the black & silver box, and the blue box is B.I. (Brakes India) TVS, which is Girling India.
Machining a slave cylinder for an MGA application. Click for detail
Although we keep a Lockheed slave cylinder in stock, which is very pricey, we are using the aftermarket slave cylinder for MGB’s. It becomes an MGA slave cylinder if you swap the hose & bleed screw. These are essentially fool proof in design, being simply a hydraulic cup and a piston with a spring and an expander, but sometimes they aren’t machined flat enough for the copper washer to seal the hose if it’s being used on an MGA. As illustrated above, this is a simple fix on the Bridgeport, where it took about five minutes to set it up and whack 7.5 thousandths off the face.
A blown head gasket on a TF 1500 Click for detail
Every now and again we have to confront our failures. We overhauled this engine on a cash & carry basis about ten years ago and got to see the car for the first time last Thursday. As you might suppose, it hadn’t been running very well.
John ran a compression test which revealed scant compression in #’s 3 & 4 cylinders. He used our leakdown tester to confirm his findings. By attaching the leakdown tester to #3 cylinder, and varying the distance between his thumb & #4 spark plug hole, he could perform a passable rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, so we knew we had a head gasket blow out.
A one owner MG TD with the original paint
This MG TD rolled back in here Tuesday. We had our hands on it last year, and it’s a one owner car still with the original black paint on it. If you look closely you can see the dealer installed pinstriping. Now incredible as this car is, we’ve also had our hands on its twin, which is also from New Jersey.
We’re going to ask David Pound to scan an old film picture of that car so we can post it up sometime. Perhaps even more incredibly, it is also a one owner TD, and also black with red pinstriping. Things tend to come in threes, and surely enough we service one other one owner TD, from New Hamshire, but it’s a British Racing Green TD Mk II.
“See You in a Tin Can When You Get Shipped Around”*
Seth Holton takes profits on Black Monday
While Wall Street was busy again on Monday fleecing the small investor, Seth Holton decided it was time for the big herd to go on the auction block. In this picture Paul Bannik from Windshire Trucking works with Wayne from Holton Farm to round ’em up and load ’em on, right next to the shop. This leaves us with the small herd of about a dozen Holstein dairy heifers. Just like the money you used to have in your pocket, we were sad to see them go.
*Woody Guthrie, “Lay Down Little Doggies”
