Your Scribe

There are several reasons why we think we do a better job than most other people in this industry.  To begin with, we repair british cars exclusively, and if it’s not british, we don’t work on it.    Another reason is other people don’t have our people.  We have had very little turnover over time, and when we do we’ve plugged the gaps slowly and deliberately.

Patrick & Butch ran up a fresh XPAG  engine, but the customer was still unhappy

John Manning left us over a year ago in order to work a lot closer to home, and our new guy is George Rowbottom who is still in the process of proving his bonafides.  It doesn’t hurt him any in our eyes that in his feckless youth he wrecked his dad’s E-type pretty thoroughly.  After all a job worth doing is a job worth doing well.  Now he’s a couple of months into our retraining program which is a cross between getting grease under your fingernails, and testing one’s restraint in learning our somewhat esoteric inventory practices.

George prepped a TD for engine removal

If patience is a virtue, then he has proven to be pretty virtuous so far.  The working plan is for George to subsume my responsibilities in the parts department, thereby allowing me to spend more time swinging a wrench.  Over time as this business has grown I have found myself dealing with administrivia having very little to do with the core mission.  George’s role is going to be dealing with these daily tasks that keep me away from my service bay and work bench.

Reilly tuned an MG TD

Reilly was back in the shop this past summer after a five year hitch in the Marines.  He got here just in time to put this two-tone TD  together ahead of an important Wedding Anniversary on L.I.  It arrived  here from Vermont’s Premier Automotive Restoration Shop with some assembly required.  While we don’t normally get involved with sheetmetal work, we bolted the body back together, wired it up, installed the drivetrain & upholstery and spent time trouble shooting it and ran it 85 miles for what worked out to be about $28.00 an hour.  It’s not a misprint, we knew the owner hadn’t got it.  I dropped it off gratis at his front door, but final chapter in this saga will take place on January 21st in a Small Claims Courtroom in Ronkonkoma, New York.  While I don’t mind being taken advantage of occasionally, I stop short of being played the Fool.

On your smartphone

Being the Luddite is a more comfortable fit.  You are reading this missive now because at some time in the past we were encouraged to put up a website, which was a task far beyond our native abilities.

David Pound Advertising Design solved this conundrum.  David put up the main site, and gave me sufficient instruction to be able to scratch together the words and images on this page.  His most recent major accomplishment was to make us compatible with so called ‘hand-held’ devices, so if you’ve navigated here from your smartphone, David, who also does all of the artwork for our magazine ads, deserves all of the credit, and that’s why I make the checks out to ‘David Pound, Advertising Genius’.  Go to our “links” page if you want to know more.

Butch surveys the future

As for what’s in store for 2015,  I would like to commend to your attention this photograph of Butch surveying 9,100 square feet of shop space less than half a mile off the interstate.

While we love our space in rural Westminster, it’s a bother this time of year when we have to open the bay doors on a 20 degree day to jack up the back of a car, not to speak of the logistics involved in moving work into or out of our downstairs driveline shop when there’s snow on the ground.  So what we may have to give up in rural ambiance will be more than offset in efficiency.  It will allow us to finally spread out our very extensive parts inventory properly, pipe in bulk lubricants, and with 11 foot ceilings we can even have lifts ! This is going to  be a slow build out, but it’s what’s up in 2015.

So thank you for your continuing support, and we’ll look forward to hearing from you in the new year.   -David Clark

14th E-type

The end of the year is almost upon us again, and although we have two cars in the complete restoration queue and one for major renovation, it’s not like it is in June when the floodgates  really swing open  and we’re completely awash in tune ups, breakdowns, brake jobs, and sundry titivations too numerous to mention, or even remember.

One which I do remember is pictured here:  It’s the 14th left hand drive open two seat E-type off the Jaguar assembly line in 1961, and after a hiatus of many years the owner summoned the gumption, and cracked his checkbook open just enough for us to get it in running order again.

Morgan on a Vermont road

We shall have more to say about it in another week or two.  In the meantime you can have a look at the January cover story in Hemmings Sports & Exotic Cars.

Although we had a heavy snowfall the day before Thanksgiving which is still on the ground here, the late fall and opening days of winter have really been quite mild overall, and this image of the Morgan plus 4 was taken within 48 hours of that storm.  We have been graced with an abundance of interesting and  rewarding work this year, running the gamut from #875014, pictured above (and about half a dozen of its series 1 breathern) thru a lowly Spitfire shipped up from Houston, Texas, another car coming back from a Rip Van Winkle-like slumber.  You can see its abbreviated roadtest at the bottom of the page.

Jaguar 5.3 litre V12

Of course these first two pictures represent the culmination of an event.  The next two are about getting there.

Strictly as an exercise in proving a theory, Patrick took on an unusual spare time project and converted his series 3 E-type 2+2 from an automatic to a four speed manual.  Unlike mine or yours, however, he has a reasonable chance of actually seeing the 160 mph register on his speedometer because his car has a little something extra, a ‘compact’ “A” series Laycock deNormanville overdrive.  Here’s the seat of the pants math:

Warner sets cam timing on an XPAG engine

On the installed 3.54 rear axle, direct drive 4th should be good for about 130 mph at 6000 rpm.  Add in the 20% overdrive reduction and the terminal velocity comes up to around 155 mph, exclusive of factors such as increased rolling diameter of the tires at high speeds and the fact the torque curve goes flat after about 5750 rpm.  We’ll let you know when we find out.

Looking back through the photo archives I see we overhauled at least four engines over the course of last winter, mostly MG’s but Jaguar as well.

A Texan out of its element

The picture above  is a fairly typical snapshot of an MG TD going together. Warner can be sen here establishing the cam timing on a 255 degree Cam Techniques camshaft.  In my experience of these engines this was a much better bump up cam than the Crane cam available from Moss Motors, which has always seemed like much Fuss and very little Bother.  Alas, Cam Techniques is no more, so if you’re gonna bother, the standard grind Crane (part # 342-0002) is a much better cam.

Back to an earlier topic, I’m attaching a pictorial explanation of the short road test cycle of the Texas Spitfire.  We had just enough time to run it out of the shop and up the road into the barn before the salt spreader came thru minutes later.

Butch checks a wiring harness before installation

George and I are engaged in the end of the year ritual known as “inventory”.  We have quite a bit of it and it is extremely compressed.  I’m hopeful but not very confident that we can get through it in about a week.  Some of it can be seen to the left of Patrick’s toolbox and to the right of the window which this afternoon’s high winds sucked the glass out of, and is  now temporarily covered with cardboard.

On the upper shelves are instruments, mostly tachometers and oil pressure/water temperature gauges, and then in descending order, temp. senders, voltage stabilizers, speedometer cables, mirrors, “P” clips, seat belts, lights, lenses and sub-harnesses for things like headlights & overdrives.  You get the idea.  It will take about two and a half hours for the two of us to do just this shelf.

And installs it in the gunmetal grey E-type

However it’s not as bad,  as it used to be when I worked at Abingdon Spares and we did inventory in June because it was the end of the fiscal year, which coincided very nicely with the busy season, and we counted every last nut, bolt and chrome pan head screw.  It’s much more efficient to weight them, but Abingdon Spares was, and is, very Olde Worlde about that kind of stuff.  Well we have our own challenges based on space, or more accurately the lack thereof, and some of our bin boxes have as many as 20 different small parts in them.  Think carburetor parts, for instance.

The Rapture (see text)

As planned, I did make it down to the blasters in Agawam on Monday  to retrieve the MG TF frame, and  I delivered it to Windham Coach & Carriage in Brattleboro, where Jay is seen here dancing a small jig because he already has a shop full of work.  I offered to bring it back on a date certain, but he allowed as how conditions were unlikely to substantially improve between now and whenever that turned out to be, so it was best to just leave it, which I did.  Jay & Nate (on the right) will measure it up and the next time you see it, it will be in chassis black.  Hopefully, we’ll also be seeing the E-type’s front suspension back from Westfield Electroplating next week and that  will allow us to turn the gunmetal grey E-type back into a roller again.

Rush Hour

Around here we were greeted with a heavy snow fall the day before Thanksgiving and we haven’t seen bare ground since.  The weather pattern of the last week has been a little snow, a little sleet, a little freezing rain ad naseum.  This is the driver’s view from  what may be the last MG in daily service in the Northeast at this time of the year.  An MGB GT on studded snow tires that starts easily in cold weather, as this one does, is entirely suitible for winter driving conditions.  I speak from experience, this car has been in service since 2007, replacing the one which entered service in 2001.  Not much heat, but entirely competent in limited traction situations.

Not Mistletoe

First up on next Monday’s agenda is to retrieve the TF chassis from the blasters in Agawam.  The plan is to drop it off woth our friend Jay at Windham Coach & Carriage in Brattleboro to check it for straight and then bolt the suspension back in inorder to turn it into a roller again at which point we’ll ship it off to Mark Goyette to reassemble the body.

In this picture most of the front and some of the rear suspension is hanging from the main carrying beam in the cellar of the shop.  that big lump in the back corner is an XK 140 chassis suspended like the Sword of Damocles over my Moggy.

Work in Progress

While George was painting I was blasting the rear axle housings which I pulled apart and washed up yesterday.  The left housing has been blasted while the right housing awaits (in the foreground is a front spring pan and some a-arms).  Once the R/H housing is done they we’ll send them out to be pressure washed before painting them.

Butch spent part of the day today stripping and cleaning the steering rack for the Gunmetal Grey E-type.  You can anticipate a more complete report on that next week.  With pictures.