Where's Butch ?
George Borg was the son of a skilled fitter working for John Deere. Marshall Beck was a lawyer practicing in and around Moline, Illinois. Together they invented and perfected the penultimate automotive clutch, a design still in use today and licensed for production for many years by Automotive Products (aka AP) in England.
When people ask us why we use Castrol Lubricants my answer is “Because we’ve never had a problem”. Much the same can be said of a Borg & Beck design clutch, and this car here is a case in point.
LUK the Nasty
Borg & Beck the Sublime
The TR6 seen above arrived with one of the worst clutches we’ve ever encountered. It was terribly notchy and required extreme care because it was fully engaged with the clutch pedal barely off the floor. Even more alarming, it was a replacement for a recently failed clutch job. Click on the left hand picture and you can see how the release mechanism was cutting its way thru the diaphram fingers, the result of too much spring pressure in the wrong place. We replaced it with a 2006 vintage AP Borg & Beck, and now the clutch action is sublime.
Many TR6’s have similar clutch problems of a less severe nature, and other contributing factors in this case were a broken clutch fork lock pin which allowed the fork to wobble on the clutch shaft. We replaced the shaft & pin, but this wasn’t the only lousy clutch assembly in current circulation so pay up and fit Borg & Beck.
Here's Butch
This mid-fifties drum-braked Morgan ironically came into us about 15 years ago with a severe clutch judder. When we re-surfaced the flywheel and changed the clutch, we didn’t use an LUK.
Our Bad
Recently it suffered a unique brake failure when a rear wheel cylinder broke in two, sending the driver thru a rural stop sign. Fortunately, no one was coming the other way. So he asked us for a little redundency, which we supplied in the form of an early +8 dual circuit master cylinder. Butch is seen here last Friday backing out on his way for a rainy day road test.
Everything went well, of course, even if it appears that we also managed to install a significant scrape on the left rear fender while the car was in storage last winter. Responsibility, what’s your policy ?
