sump pump on standby in the cellar of the shop
New York & New Jersey were hit hard we have been told, and considerable uncertainty reigned here on Sunday when we made the decision to pack up the vulnerable machinery from the lower shop where Hurricane Irene left her high water mark at 32 inches just over a year ago.
We were completely recovered from that deluge in about a week, almost the same amount of time it took for Vt-Trans to reopen the roads sufficiently for Butch to be able to get to work without detouring thru Greenfield, Massachusetts. So Patrick and I packed everything up on his flatbed Sunday afternoon and parked it in the barn. Nothing much really happened here, but we’re simply awestruck by the amount of damage less than 200 miles away.
Steve repairs the windshield while putting a top on a TC
We spent Monday distracting ourselves with work while waiting for the other shoe to fall. Steve has been putting a new top on Larry Perry’s MG TC. The previous top was a semi-permanent installation that was not intended to be folded. The Hershey AACA first place badge on the badge bar attests to this. Steve had a little trouble with the mounting peg for the top on the left side, it broke. He took a quick ride over to Abingdon Spares for a replacement, which uncharacteristically didn’t fit ! So Steve, with some help from Butch fixed it. When he stripped the windshield he discovered that the right side peg had also been repaired sometime in the past.
Warner ball hones an MGB cylinder block
Lane Construction called off work Monday & Tuesday so Warner came in pulled down John McCracken’s MGB engine for a ring & valve job. He boxed the head and sent it to River City Machine in White River Junction. After a quick application of the ridge reamer he dropped the oil pan and pulled out the pistons & connecting rods and ball honed the cylinders with the Flex-Hone tool.
Flex-Hones are both the world’s most sophisticated cylinder wall prep tools and arguably the easiest to use. Because the globules of abrasive are suspended on nylon filaments the tool conforms to the shape of worn cylinder bores like these and imparts a uniform finish that is simply unobtainable with conventional rigid-stone tools.
Click the picture for a closer look. It’s why our engines don’t use oil.
It took us more than two hours to load up Patrick’s flatbed, but fortunately it’s a dump body, so unloading took about 45 seconds. A close perusal of the debris field here will reveal a number of interesting components including, but not limited to a dual underhead cam hemi, an MGC overdrive transmission and some six cylinder Jaguar engine parts destined for the strip, clean, blast & paint process. Click to enlarge the picture and see what else you can find. We had already re-shelved several six cylinder engine blocks and some transmissions.
Eclectic debris field, waiting for re-shelving
