Patrick uses Heat

One of the daily challenges in this business is getting things apart.  Frequently, this problem is exacerbated by the effects of 40 give or take years of New England winters and the continuous application of road salt to the highways to break up the ice which is often the aftermath of daytime warming following a storm.  People from the Northheast  reading this page already know that after about Thanksgiving, many of us switch to a vehicle which is known colloquially as a “Winter Beater”.  Mine, of course, is a rubber bumper MGB GT which is mainly distinguised by its willingness to start, irregardless of how cold it gets, up to Tuesday morning anyway, when the head gasket blew between #’s 3&4 cylinders, a simple weekend repair job I have scheduled for Saturday morning.

John grnds out a repair on an E-type diff. cage

But back to the matter at hand, in the picture above Patrick can be seen parting some long stuck nuts & bolts which we want to capture alive, so to speak, in order to accurately match them during the rebuild process.  Since we employ a Mig-Welder for most repair work, our  Oxy-Acetylene torches are mostly used for superheating things which are super stuck, although they are also indispensible for brazing work.

Door-Hotel for Mice

So back to the question of the moment.  One of the items on the early E-type owner’s punch list was to fix the driver’s door so the window would roll all the way down.  Usually this is a problem with how the glass slides in the tracks or the winder mechanism, but in this case it was caused by a physical obstruction, a super-sized mouse nest.

Condominium for Sale

We can’t even figure out how they got in and out, only that they did in large numbers.  Fortunately, no one was home when Butch got going on it.  Possibly they had vacated the premises because the plumbing had failed.  We’re surmising this by the fact that the bottom of the door was pretty well rotted away by the retention of mouse effluent.

Downstairs Drying Rack

This is a cautionary tale (or is it tail ?) for owners of cars in long term storage under indifferent storage conditions.  No advice is proffered here.  Search the internet.

John is mostly through the prep stage of his E-type IRS overhaul.  Once everything is dismantled, cleaned & checked, its path is thru the bead-blast cabinet and then it gets etch-primed, painted and hung up to dry, in this case on the I-beam which supports what we call the “Morgan” room, where the E-type of the 2nd part, the one without the mouse problem, is undergoing repair.   Stacked on either side of the I-beam are boxes of new brake drums, mostly for MG’s, and looking past the hanging coil springs you can catch of glimpse of a couple of rows of built-in shelves with two rows of mainly Jaguar radiator hoses ( a V12 E-type has 23.  Yes, we have ’em).  and above them a full row of new brake rotors, almost none of which are from China, for Jags, MG’s Austin Healeys & Triumphs.  All of this is taking place in our driveline room, where in a few minutes from now, I’ll be snapping together an MGA transmission before I start prepping its engine parts for assembly.

Last Ride

We’ve had some great weather this week for working indoors, and in fact most of that time has been taken up with the marque “Jaguar”.  We noted with some amusement here that an E-type Jaguar was alleged to have crossed the auction block in New York a week ago for a reputed $420,000.00, the result, we are guessing, of a pissing contest between a couple of Hedge Fund managers.  Locally however, our clientele still drives them instead of trading them like stock futures.

Back to Life

Just in time for Thanksgiving, Butch brought this E-type (875014) back to life again after many years of slumber.  It was a couple of days of tweaking this and that

Ground fault Dizzy

but finally on Wednesday Morning Butch summoned John to take the controls and monitor the vital signs while he administered a little starting fluid, and Et Voila !   the Old Girl rumbled back to life again.  This situation was complicated somewhat by a total ground fault on the 12 volt feed to the

Men at Work

distributor.  The insulated low tension side terminal wasn’t insulated, but Butch found the insulator (extreme left in the distributor picture) in a largish box of ‘stuff’ in the trunk of the car.  It’s running points ignition again, and just fine, too, thank you very much.

In the North end of the shop, which we still call the “Morgan” Room, John was also at work on an E-type which is in for an IRS overhaul.  This independant rear suspension is a mechanically elegant device and very straightforward, though somewhat time consuming in it’s servicing.

John pulls down the E-type IRS unit

Although we do have some special tools for it, in the main, all you really need is a set wrenches, a floor jack and some patience.

John’s got it pulled down and washed up now, I was strolling by and snapped this photo when he was about to separate the lower wishbones from the differential.  It’s hard sometimes to get your head around the idea that this is a fifty year old design now.  A former editor of Hemmings Motor News, who was at an apparent loss for superlatives, finally summed it all up by saying that when the  E-type came out, it was a like a fighter jet in a propeller aircraft era.

The Wrecking Crew gets a move on

In other Jaguar news, last weekend we started pulling apart the XK 140 MC that I traded even up for my chainsaw

The Genuine Article

about 30 years ago.  In early 1956 it was purchased new from Pries Motors of Hayward, California by an architect named Bernard Dierks, who subsequently moved to Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, along with the car.  In perhaps a final twist of irony, while I was on my way with it for a look-over by master sheetmetal shaper  Wray Schelin (see his webtile on the right) I stopped for a consultation with Jaguar machinst extraordinaire Steve Dutcher, also of Shelburne Falls, who told me he bought his house from … you guessed it, an architect named Dierks.

John strips the M/Cyl's out of an Alpine

John is full speed ahead on the Sunbeam Alpine we retrieved last week from Enosburg Falls, right up on the Canadian border.  The license plates in the trunk suggest it came from Alabama, and apart from some so-so new floors, it’s in pretty good nick structurally.

Brakes are always of paramount concern in sports cars which do not have dual circuit brakes, the loss of hydraulic pressure anywhere in the system instantly become a loss of pressure

Self-adjusting brake mechanism

everywhere in the system, and the Alpine is no different in this regard.

Later Alpines have a self-adjusting mechanism on the rear drum brakes.  In the photo here, John is pointing at the ratchet wheel which is actuated by an arm attached to the handbrake lever, so every time the handbrake is applied, the brakes are adjusted !   Of course the front disc brakes adjust themselves as the wear in the brake pads is taken up by the

Butch adjusts the carbs on the XJ6

displacement of column of hydraulic brake fluid behind the pistons.

With Chris having returned to his day job engineering air bearings, Butch has taken up the cudgel and completed the few loose ends on the series 1 Jaguar XJ6 which stood between it and the road.  Regular readers may recall that an exhaust valve crashed thru #2 piston during the summer.  Not being able to come up with a replacement long skirt

LHD OTS 875014

14th open 2 seater built

8:1 piston, we tossed in a complete set of 9:1 pistons  salvaged from a 4.2 E-type, and re-fitted with a new set of Hasting piston rings.

Both Butch and I put it thru its paces earlier this week, and while there’s still some tweaking to do, we’re pretty happy with it.

The early E-type pictured here arrived earlier today.  We’ll be working over the next few weeks to make it road worthy again.

XJ6 on test Wednesday

A very naughty repair

Several years ago the owner of a very spanky Pre-War VA engined MG TA Trials Replica brought it into us for some tidying up.  His major complaints were a severe steering wander, and bad brakes.  A simple brake rebuild cured the latter problem, but the steering issue was two fold.

The first fold was the fact that the car probably pranged a stone wall sometime around 1937 in the heat of a trials contest, opening out the kingpin eye in the front axle.  When we machined & bushed the by now severely oversized king pin axle thru-hole, we had a pretty severe positve camber situation because that long ago accident had also bent the axle, so we fixed it again.

What's wrong with this picture ?

The secondary, but far more dangerous problem was the loose steering box to frame bracket.  When Butch put a wrench on it, the bolt broke off in his hand.  It was a clean break, because some individual with little apparent regard for human life had found it a difficult fit with the engine in the way and had resorted to cutting the bolt in half ( first picture) center drilling it and running a 10-32 dowel down the middle, an even more outrageous repair than the the Triumph steering coupler from the week before last.  Oh, right, what’s wrong with this picture is that this TR3 flywheel has no dowel pins to positively locate the clutch.  They tend to induce a pretty good engine vibration under these circumstances, so we’re replacing the flywheel.

The Good & The Bad

We go through brake fluid like circus elephants go thru peanuts.  John was in the process of flushing out some grotty old brake fluid last week when I snuck up on his work piece with my camera.  That stuff on the left is lethal to the brake system.  It’s a witches’ brew of moisture, dirt and some residual brake fluid, and it’s death to hydraulic pistons & cylinders.  One more time now:  Change that brake fluid every other year.

Patrick puts the hammer down in a Moggy recently

Monday was a nice day before Tuesday’s ‘dusting to an inch’ of snow.  We had the dusting here, but Butch reported that East Dover got the inch.  Some of it’s still around in the higher elevations such as South Londonderry, which I passed thru earlier today on my way to retrieve an MG in Manchester, Vermont.  Speaking of winter, I did the 5,000 mile service on my winter beater MGB GT (with four studded snow tires) over the past weekend.  The lights have been checked, the chassis lubed, and the brakes adjusted.  I’m good to go, although I’m hoping it won’t be for awhile.

Post Script:  This is our 150th consecutive weekly newsletter