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

New top hose for a TD

Current work in the shop includes the Austin Healey 3000 BN7 two seater restoration which should be running  in a week, the MGC with all the marbles, built up by MGC Tony during the Dot.Com boom of the ’90’s (with an engine built up by us), the 1953 one family MG TD seen here with John in the process of changing the radiator hoses for the first time in more than 20 years, and a long door TR2 with a chronic vibration problem which appears to be a bent right rear hub.  That’s what’s upstairs.

Early MGA bottom end

Chris and I have been working downstairs, where I finished pulling down the early MGA bottom end seen here.  Of particular interest, at least to me, is the early oil pump arrangement, which is immediately identifiable by the oil pick up strainer, most MGA’s use the same strainer as found in all 3 main & 5 main bearing MGB’s.  This is a previously rebuilt engine, which can be judged by the shiny, but retrograde 5  ring pistons which have an additional oil control ring around the

Special tool 18G 42A

skirt, a bad idea if ever there was one.  We believe the 2nd oil control ring wiped the cylinder wall dry and caused the engine failure in the Elva which we’re temporarily re-powering right now.

The main bearing caps of BMC “A”, “B” & “C” series engines (Sprite/Midget, MGA/MGB, 4&6 cylinder big Healeys) are housed entirely within the cylinder block, and those caps are a press-fit.  Life became much easier about 25 years ago when I was able to acquire an

A cobbled together Elva Courrier engine

Austin-Healey main bearing cap puller, Churchill tool # 18G 42A, which, with adaptors fabricated in-house, also pulls other MG & even Triumph bearing caps.

Pictured here is a formerly clapped-out 1972 MGB bottom end with a new set of piston rings & con-rod bearings, plus a used Piper 270 degree cam with a set of AE cam followers.  Holding it down is a cast-off Paeco gas flowed MGB cylinder head, originally delivered with MGA valves installed.  It’s painted grey, with Austin I.D. plates.  That should give us plausible deniability.

We’re hoping it’ll run long enough to get Mike Drew to the British Invasion of Stowe next month.  Maybe over the winter we’ll be able to build him up a real engine.

MGA front suspension repair

John has been sorting thru and re-wiring a partially restored MGA 1600 which has handed him a few challenges.  MGA front shocks are mounted on top of the coil spring towers by way of four 3/8″ studs & nuts, however the inner front mounting on the driver’s side was thru-bolted with a 5/16″ nut & bolt, which is a blinking red danger signal for us because the shocks hold up the top of the front suspension.

He pulled down the suspension and it was an ugly sight, as only one of the three remaining  studs had any grip at all in its tapping plate.  Worse still, one hole wasn’t even round any more.

John ground out a crack

The crack after grinding

John ran two 3/8″-16 heli-coil inserts into the two repairable tapping plate holes and Butch welded a captive nut into the irrepairable hole.  Additionally, John discovered a nasty crack running all the way thru the spring tower from top to bottom which was also ground out and welded.

Butch preps a BN7 Healey dashboard for installation. More on this next week.

If you’re not familiar with the term “heli-coil” here’s a quick primer on the subject.  A heli-coil is a stainless steel replacement thread insert which is used to repair a threaded hole where the hole has been irreversably damaged.  It’s a clever and effective technique in which you drill an oversized hole thru the damaged threads, and re-tap the hole with an oversized tap.  Using a special installation tool the repairer winds in the stainless steel insert and , Et Voila !  Back in business with the original size thread & thread pitch.  We heli-coil most of the usual Imperial thread forms found on Jaguar, MG, Austin Healey, etc, as well as the somewhat more esoteric British Standard Fine sizes which feature on “T”series MG’s & Morgan etc., as well as the truly esoteric metric sizes, most commonly (for us) the 8×1.0 milimeter threads found in the engines of those “T” series MG’s.  And as if that’s not bad enough, the original bolts have Whitworth heads

Girls Can Do It in New York

A TD delivered in Vermont

It’s a short report today.  We’re storny busy which means a lot to write about next week.  So here are a couple of recent pictures that haven’t made it in yet. On the outbound leg, the now fully fettled  Daimler SP 250 didn’t make it on the trailer under its own power.  No one could find a team of  horses, either, so we used the next best thing.  The MG TD picture is self explanatory, the owner & the repairer are happy.

Ayuh, it's a Hemi

Sometime around 1959 the English carriage trade manufacturer Daimler, maker of the bespoke limousines favored by the House of Windsor, took a 90 degree turn and produced a small fiberglass bodied sports car built on a modified TR3 chassis and featuring a rorty V8 hemi power plant of their own design.  While somewhat less than brilliant in its execution, and with looks that might be charitably described as ‘peculiar’, it was none the less a storny good performer, and we’re always thrilled when one shows up here.  Behind Butch, Hobie Terhune is thrilled to be looking over an Austin Healey 3000 Mk III much like the one he owned until recently.  BTW: Hobie’s dad was a paving contractor at Lime Rock Park when it was being built in the 1950’s.

We’ve already detailed the travails of the steering gear & transmission.  In the picture at the top, Butch is hard at work sorting out the carburetors, because having got to the point where it could safely be driven on public roads, our next task was to make it run well.  We expect to be returning it to the owner  on Friday.

Chris preps an XJ6 cylinder head for removal

Around the same time that Daimler released the SP 250 for production, William Lyons who owned Jaguar was deep in talks with Birmingham Small Arms (aka “BSA”) for the purchase of their automobile company.  It certainly wasn’t the SP 250 that Lyons was after, he desperately needed more production space for his own rapidly growing car company, and Daimler had it.  And that is how a very classy small V8 engine found its way into the Jaguar Mk2 sedan, badged as a Daimler V8 Saloon.

Later on in the sixties Jaguar consolidated its saloon car range into just one model, the XJ6, which many automotive enthusiasts will argue was an even better car than its

A hole in two

contemporary the Rolls Royce Silver Shadow.  It certainly was faster and much better handling.  That is was probably even quieter too might be debatable, but this much we know for sure:  When we rolled it up on the trailer to put it back in the barn after Chris lifted the head and found a holed #2 piston from a dropped valve, we had to have John lower the window so he could hear our directions  as we pushed the car onto the trailer for the short trip back to the barn for storage.

This is a beautiful car and as a series 1 XJ6, arguably the best iteration of the line, graceful from any angle.  the black on grey color scheme with red leather upholstery is a stunner, I think.  Look for it at Stowe.

Tying down; Clockwise from top: Chris, John & Butch