Impromptu Road Test

With little left to do on the Austin Healey BN7 two seater for the time being, we decided to move it back out to the barn.  It started right up and Patrick backed it out of the shop, but much to our surprise and consternation, he couldn’t back it into the barn.  It was an overdrive adjustment issue, but first Patrick tried running it down about the only dry stretch of road we’ve seen in weeks, which is what you’re looking at here.

On the outbound leg the car coughed and stalled and ran out of gas.  On the in-bound leg it overheated so we ran it back in the shop instead and Butch put it back up in the air and pulled off the transmission tunnel.

Butch reset the solenoid plunger stop and dumped the coolant.  Interestingly, while coolant ran freely out of the radiator drain, it only dripped out of the engine after we popped off the thermostat housing and refilled the cylinder block.  A few minutes of independent head scratching later we both came to more or less the same conclusion and took off the lower hose, and Et Voila !   There she was, a concealed piece of paper towel.  It’s all visual logic.

Last Friday we shipped the Morgan back to ‘Vermont’s Premier Automotive Restoration Shop’ for a little after-care.  Regrettably, the passenger door fits flush at the top but stands about 3/4″ proud at the bottom.  A consultation with the lead technician suggested the possibility that this had been caused by your scribe bungee-cording the door closed for transportation (because it was otherwise unsecured) but the owner quickly rejected this theory, and Mike Savage hauled it back up there and returned with a completely dismantled series 2 E-type bonnet from a car previously recovered from the same source.  We’re still trying to figure out what that had to do with the rocker panel repair (uncompleted) that it went in for, but so much of life is a mystery, anyway.