Dick Wierwille heads home
The Reverend Richard Wierwille retired from his post at the West Lebanon Congregational Church at the end of November and headed home to Ohio. However, he left his cherished MGB out behind a friend’s barn in Hanover Center, N.H.
We’ve done some work for him over the years since he first came East with two MGB’s. The other one had an electrical fire out around Cayuga, New York, where his younger son staunched the flames with a can of Mountain Dew, but it still ran so they limped it on in. Monday morning Dick called up from Pennsylvania and asked us if we’d go fetch this one and make it ready for the trip back. Retrieving it wasn’t so hard, our truck has four wheel drive.
Completely worn out clutch linkage
This is a picture of the clutch master cylinder, the clutch pedal and the clevis pin. The clutch slave cylinder end was just as bad. Amazingly enough we actually were able to drive the car into the shop in this condition. Some welding to the pedal, two new pushrods and a couple of clevis pins later, Dick was quite surprised at how much better his clutch had suddenly become.
Our encore was to also change the steering wheel as per his request, although this also entailed a foraging expedition out on parts car row for a late model MGB steering column assembly because the end of the steering shaft had been badly damaged by some long forgotten hammer-mechanic somewhere.
Dick mapped a route back to Ohio via the blue highways.
The Elva starts up
Chris ran up the pieced together engine in the Elva Courrier Wednesday afternoon. It ran O.K. but it took a little while to burn the oil and coolant out of the exhaust which found its way in there when the first engine blew up. Back in the beginning of May we put up a short video clip of antifreeze spurting out of the Elva’s dipstick tube. It’s an unusual thing to see, even around here. The cause of this phenomena was a gaping hole thru #1 cylinder wall behind the water pump. By adding enough coolant, Mike Drew was also able to fill up the exhaust system as well via the exhaust manifold.
Running-in the new engine
Once we do an initial start up and we’ve retorqued the cylinder head and re-adjusted the valves we like to get the car out on the road to run the engine under load in order to properly seat the piston rings. As you see here there’s no engine compartment lid on the car so we can keep an eye on things. Later we’ll run the car around our 25 mile loop like this before it goes back on again. Just superstitious.
Wednesday was a an August day in all it’s glory, so out we went to give the horse its head. The results were deeply satisfying.
Chris puts his foot in it and opens the taps
