A TR3 comes off the transporter

Monday morning a transporter rolled in our yard and disgorged  a TR3 which arrived here F.O.B. New Orleans.  It was from  an old client who relocated to that part of the world a few years ago.  It’s a car with nice paint & upholstery and very clean underneath, but the steering and suspension are a bit sketchy.  We are addressing that with a full suspension package from  Revington TR.  Read about it here

Road test & a bath

The Triumph arrived in the rain, not the kind of crashing, 50 foot visibility electrical storms we’ve had today, but after traveling 1500 miles and undergoing a brief, but wet road test, we took the wash hose to the car and ran it into the downstairs of the shop, where the dehumidifiers are always going, to dry out.

Repairs begin upon receipt of parts from Revington in about a week.

Butch & John and a windshield

John has almost finished retrimming his project MGB.  It’s been a solitary road, mostly, but there are some things, like the windshield which are still a two man job.  Remove & Replace windshield in an MGB is a struggle from the beginning to the end, and as I’ve said before, the only easy part of it is presenting the bill when the job is finally finished.  This one was no exception to the rule and the struggle was exacerbated by the faulty placement of the captive hardware that anchors the center rod when the body was built about 40 years ago by Pressed Steel, Fisher.  Who knew ?  The good guys won again in the end.

Rare Rubber Bumper Twin Carb MGB

In 1974 the MG factory in Abingdon produced the last of the chrome bumper MGB’s, and very late in the year they built the first batch of Rubber Bumper MGB’s.  These are rare and interesting cars, because as you will notice, it still has the twin SU HIF carburetors, and hasn’t yet acquired a power brake servo.

Apart from a pair of aftermarket air cleaners which are not a performance enhancement, this 58,000 mile car is remarkably original, and it has overdrive!   It’s here to tidy up the front supsension, the rubber bumper cars are very hard on the original A-arm bushings.  They’re only good for about 30,000 miles and we replaced them with the ultra-long wearing “V-8″ type, part number BHH 1123.

Right side suspension

MGB left side suspension

We also pulled down the king pins to take a look.  They were perfect.  Our technique to reassemble these is to get the back of the car slightly higher than the front for weight transfer, then we loosely assemble the lower A-arms and mount the stub axle assembly to them.  Next we set the spring in place and locate the saddle of our floor jack (a Lincoln jack, not a Walmart jack) on the spring pan as close to the kingpin as possible and one man lifts while the other man guides the upper trunnion between the shock arms from which the pinch bolt has been removed to allow a cold chisel to spread them wide.

Tighten everything up while still jacked to set the pre-load, and keep you dental work out of the way of the spring in case it escapes.

The question last Thursday was whether the Austin Healey BN7 would run on Friday.  See answer below:

Running up the BN7: David Haber cranks the starter, Butch runs the throttle and John feeds in fuel

Stowe bound MGB

Last winter we uprated the engine in this MGB. It’s running a set of  +.100″ JE pistons, with an APT pocket-ported cylinder head and an APT VP 11Bk camshaft.  Power transfer to the four synchro overdrive transmission is thru an AP Borg & Beck racing clutch.  Not long after we managed a few break-in miles on dry winter roads the owner asked us to strip it for paint, and having arrived back here recently,  John is now trimming it out again.

Possibly Stowe bound Austin Healey

Butch has been working diligently on this Austin Healey BN7 two-seater, which was mentioned briefly in passing last week as a temporary throttle linkage donor for Mike Buonanduci’s Lime Rock Park bound cab-over Land Rover.  We’re wondering if we’ll be on target to run it up in the shop tomorrow.

As you can see, we have a heavy investment in fender covers, but hey, the paint on this car is at least as good as the paint on Edd Lobacz’ MGB, photographed without its fender covers because John was about to cover it up for the night.

Another Stowe-bound Austin Healey

Because this is the Internet, there’s a very good chance that a couple of hundred of our readers will know Chris’ next assignment before he finds out on Monday.  This car’s owner is going for all the marbles in Concours at the British Invasion.  We think it’s gonna stand out pretty good in a sea of Healey Blue Austin Healeys.

Details to follow next week as Chris takes up the cudgel.

Right

Wrong

These days for a little extra,  Dayton Wheel Service will furnish you with a set of wire wheels sealed for tubeless operation.  That’s a pretty good idea from a safety perspective because most younger tire jockeys don’t know how to properly install a tube in a spline drive wheel.  This isn’t going to be a tutorial, but if you click on these pictures for a closer examination you’ll see that the valve stem in the wheel on the left is centered, while the stem in the wheel on the right is not, in fact it’s pinched.

Sometimes you can deflate them with the car standing on the ground and re-center the stems.  Raise the car up again before you do this,  but if you can’t, a return trip to the tire shop is most definitely in order.  Be safe, not sorry.

Verifying tire balance

Seldom Seen: Mike Buonanduci

The clock is ticking for the British Invasion of Stowe, and the hour has already struck for Vintage Festival at Lime Rock Park, so what should come limping into our dooryard Thursday afternoon, but the oft-rumored, yet seldom actually seen, Mike Bounanduci, purveyor of truly esoteric british car parts, source of the Jaguar Mk IX steering side rods, and always our first call when we need a camshaft & seven tappets for a Triumph Mayflower.  In this case the rescue call was going out in our direction.  Mike’s “Military” as their fanciers call them, suffered a sudden loss of power on the highway near Bernardston, Massachusetts while en-route to Lime Rock Park.  He limped it the 25 miles back to Westminster on one carburetor, barely scaling some of the steeper hills, where ground snails were leaning on their horns for him to get out of the way.  This truck has a cab-over 3.5 litre V8 and one carburetor just isn’t equal to the task.

190 horsepower, 205 ft. lb's of torque, before tuning

The cause of Mike’s distress was a collapsed ball socket on the right hand carburetor.  The solution came from the Austin Healey BN7 that Butch has been assembling.  We had hoped that it would be running Friday, but it’s throttle linkage will be putting in a cameo appearance at Lime Rock Park, instead.

Here in the shop we’ve been engaged in a heroic struggle to get this MGC running right again.  This is a car that will keep up with a series 1 E-type and say ‘good-bye’ to a series 2.  MGC Tony put the car together back during the Dot. Com boom.

Red TDC mark & an advance scale hi-lited now in black

We put the engine together.  After Bob Couch ran it on his dyno, with the results noted in the picture caption, we tuned it up, it had been running horribly rich on the engine brake, so it wasn’t producing the kind of power it is now.  The MGC is now part of the Lippoth stable of fine british cars and it came back in a week or two ago to address a poor running problem in the form of a skip at low rpm and lack of power.

When you’re not certain about a running issue the place to begin is at the beginning.  I ran a compression test, which was good, and handed off to Chris to do a valve adjustment, which was also good.  However, what he did find was a loose metering needle in the center carburetor.  Reattaching it to the carb piston made an appreciable difference in the power, but we still couldn’t shake off the low speed skip.  The distributor was checked by substitution, but it was Butch who had the “Ah Ha” moment when he discovered two timing scales on the crank pulley, which meant the car came in running about 60 degrees of ignition advance.  We should have known right away by the abundance of “Octane Booster” visible on the spark plugs.

Extracting MGA caliper pistons

Badly neglected MGB rear brakes

This has also been brakes week.  On the right is an MGB brake assembly which is probably about the worst we’ve ever seen.  The brake linings look like someone used up the last of a batch of chocolate frosting on them.  Gear oil had been leaking on them for years.  Chris remediated it.  On the left is an MGA 1600 brake caliper in the vice.  In order to remove severely seized caliper pistons our procedure is to drill and tap the piston and use a bolt as an extractor.  MGA calipers are a bit more challenging because they have a central guide pin which locates in center of the piston.  Also, the pistons are hardened.

Back from a road test

So to extract these we drill two extraction holes using cobalt bits and run the tap VERY carefully.  We rebuilt them with stainless steel caliper pistons, so with regular maintenance it should be close to a forever repair.  I forgot to snap a picture of the very attractive finished product.  They rolled back to Peterboro, New Hampshire aboard a very attractive MGA last night, so here’s a picture of Chris coming back from a road test earlier in the week, instead.

This journal is a little late going up because of a “Brute Force” attack against our web host’s servers.  Welcome to the New Normal.

Chris wheels in the gravity propulsion vehicle with Shot-Gun Johnny

Repairs commenced Wednesday on the series 1 XJ6 with the hole thru #5 piston caused by a dropped valve.  Things are not always what they seem.  The car was stored up in the barn and I took this picture from the back seat as Chris wheeled the car into the downstairs service bays completely under the effect of gravity.  Those doors are a tight squeeze, but Chris is a good driver.

We want this car to go to the British Invasion of Stowe under its own power on the 3rd weekend of September.  The Invasion is the largest all-British meet in the U.S.

XJ6 engine coming out

A strategy session on the pros & cons of an in-chassis repair program ensued.  Taking that approach would have meant suspending the engine and dropping the cross-member from underneath it for access to the oil pan.  Labor-wise we decided it was more efficient to just take it out and mount it on the big engine stand which was already set up for Jaguar 4.2 engines.  by doing it this way, it also allows us to clean down both the engine and the engine bay, as well as making the engine repairs much easier.

Member of The Wedding

In other Jaguar news, this Mk2 was dumping copious amounts of power steering fluid from the pump when we brought it in the shop Tuesday.   Butch hauled out the generator and power steering pump before he had to go home to rendezvous with the cable guy, so I pulled the pump down Tuesday night and re-kitted it in my spare time.  It’s off to a Wedding this weekend.  Butch & John loaded it up about 4:00 Wednesday afternoon and I delivered it to Sterling, Massachusetts.

Hoburn-Eaton roller pump

Pump drives off the generator

This is a later Hoburn-Eaton roller-type pump.  The pump is driven off the back of the generator, those clever Brits.  The leak, a large one, was coming from the housing seal on the generator end.  It was a relatively simple repair to make once Butch had cleared the A/C compressor, Dealer-installed by Import Motors of Fort Worth, Texas.  This took him a couple of hours because the layout was planned for ease of installation, without much thought given to service access later on.  Well this ain’t Texas, so when he pulled it off, we left it off.  Click on these pictures for more detail

Sunny Day: Mike & Kate head North

It’s been a busy week of comings & goings.  This time of year one of our measures of success is whether we’re getting cars back out of here faster than they’re coming in.  The past week has seen three departures and two arrivals, one unplanned.  The Elva came in in May, but after a decision how to proceed was made, it was still two weeks before it was out the door again.

We have one malingerer, a Bentley MkVI Standard Steel Saloon, but the scheduling is strictly a space problem and no fault on the part of the owner or the car.  That situation could be summed up by saying, ‘there’s always room for improvement’, we just wish we had a little more of it.