Warner strips a Girling Mk2A brake servo

The red Austin Healey gave us a little surprise Tuesday.  After sitting for a couple of weeks while we were waiting for upholstery, it lost its brakes, but curiously, not its brake fluid.

After a certain amount of head scratching Warner pulled down the brake servo and, Et Voila !  there it was, pretty nearly a quart of it.  Brake servos are a great place for brake fluid to go and hide.

Twenty-five years ago I was recommissioning an MGC  which had been off the road for a very long time, and although

Mk2 vacuum chamber: Where the brake fluid went

it was not rusty, nearly everything was stuck, right down to the switches in the dashboard.  I stripped and re-ringed the engine & got it running, but after overhauling the brake & clutch master cylinders, the calipers, the slave cylinder and replacing the wheel cylinders, I bled and bled & bled, but couldn’t come up with a decent brake pedal.  Even more puzzling, my recently freed-off engine wouldn’t turn over anymore.

I pulled the plugs, cranked it on the starter and was instantly bathed in so much brake fluid that I needed a shower and a change of clothes.  After filling up the servos (MGC’s have two), fluid pumped its way thru

Steve is carpeting the red BJ8

the vacuum lines into the manifold, through an open intake valve or two and filled the cylinders creating the perfect hydraulic lock.  Always remember, the servo is an integral part of a brake overhaul.

Steve is carpeting the red BJ8 now.  Next week he’ll be on to the rest of the upholstery.  He’s captured here with a drill in one hand, and a can of penetrating oil in the other, having just drilled out the stuck hardware securing the dimmer switch bracket to the floor and retapped the weld-nuts.  The oval intakes below the radiator grill are for the oil cooler.

Patrick shows why air tools are a bad idea

Patrick’s holding the  hub nut for this TD.  It’s been stripped by the indiscriminate use of an air impact wrench.  TD’s, MGA’s and some others use a left hand thread hub nut on the left side  so it won’t wind off if it gets loose.

Unfortunately, a previous repairer didn’t know that, so when it wouldn’t loosen (for obvious reasons) out came the air impact wrench.  We have to score that round as a draw, because although he got it loose, he never got it off, even after taking most of the threads out of it.  Fortunately, however, the thread on the stub axle is hardened, so it survived.

Coming Out Soon: The engine in this Mk2, for detailing

Patrick inspects a '67 Cooper "S"

Saturday afternoon my MGB GT stalled abruptly out on the Westminster West Road, and I coasted into a farmer’s barnyard for a perfunctory look under the hood.  No spark.  It was close enough to walk home, so I wandered into the milking parlor and asked if it would be O.K. if I left it there for a while.  I was dressed for it, of course.  You’re a fool if you venture out in the wintertime dressed otherwise.  It’s been a good car, so I gave it one last try, and wouldn’t you know it ?  the old warrior started up.

Butch looks on while John cranks the Mini under Patrick's watchful eye

Sunday morning it wouldn’t start at all, but a close inspection of the ignition system revealed the cause: a rust-out on the bottom of the coil drained it’s liquid medium, a condition known as “No Juice”.

It’s kind of unusual to run across an unmolested Mini Cooper “S”, even more so in this case because the odometer is reading around 34,000 miles, and it carries a set of  1974-issued Maine plates.  Judging by the general lack of wear, the milage is almost certainly genuine.

Patrick got it running with a condensor and a new set of points, but not for very long , because with no oil pressure showing either on the gauge, or around the cylinder head, he shut it down before it made any of the expensive noises.    We consulted with the owner, who said, “Take it out and fix it !”.  O.K.  Can Do.

Lift Off: John & Steve pull the TD body tub with Patrick helping on the right.

Last week Steve was breaking down another MG TD and Friday afternoon with a little help from Patrick and John, off came the body tub.  Patrick has already stripped the engine, and I hauled the chassis frame and body panels up to East Coast Collision & Restoration Wednesday.  Today they were at work on it.

There’s quite a bit going on up at E.C.C&R, too.  Go to our “links” page and log on to their website to have a look at what’s happening in ‘Their Week at The Shop’.

Patrick pulls off the old XPAG head gasket.

This is the second XPAG engine Patrick’s stripped in a week.  An MGA 1500 with a broken crankshaft is on the yellow engine stand, and  on the floor next to it is an MGC.

Directly behind him is the gear set from a four synchro Jaguar transmission, with a damaged mainshaft.  The damage is to the hardening on the nose of the shaft where it is supported on the input needle roller bearings.

You can buy a new one of uncertain parentage for around $1000.00, but we have it out for repair, which is to hard chrome and regrind it.

Sports Car Services uses Borg & Beck clutches

George Borg apprenticed under his father Carl at John Deere and hated it.  Marshall Beck was a lawyer with a mechanical aptitude.  Working together they developed the most widely used automotive clutch design in the world, which is still the standard by which all other power transmission clutches are judged.  You can buy a cheaper clutch, and some of them are very good, but not all of them.  Sports Car Services uses only Borg & Beck clutches, and stocks them for everything from a Bug Eye Sprite to a V12 Jaguar.  We’ll change your Sprite clutch in a day, but give us a week, please, with your E-type.

Engine & transmission installed in the Austin Healey BN7 two seater

A Jaguar 10″ clutch is a heavy duty replacement clutch for an Austin Healey 3000 (except BJ8, which is a 9.5″ diaphram clutch).  All it takes  to make the conversion is the Healey graphite release bearing, which has just a little more offset than the Jaguar bearing.

Warner lowered the engine and new side shift transmission into the Healey 3000 two seater late Wednesday afternoon.  There are bags of room with the sheetmetal off the front of the car ,which makes it a very easy job.  It’s a little more fiddly when everything’s there, but the only time we haul the engine out of an Austin Healey is when we’re doing engine work, because to get at the clutch you pull the TX thru the passenger compartment.

We’re storny busy right now, but if there’s something you’ve been putting off, please don’t put off that e-mail or phone call too much longer if you’ve got springtime motoring on your mind.

A Click Will Enlarge All of These Pictures

Steve strips a TD for restoration

When Steve started working last October, his first assignment was to take a partially dismantled MG TD (the ‘TD Ondelawn’) completely apart, and that’s what he was doing again today.  It’s a car that ‘back in the day’ would have been a parts donor, or even worse.

Now days we value these cars for what they are: heirloom quality machines oozing charisma from every angle, that are elegant in their mechanical simplicity, built to be rebuilt and then used without restraint for years and years in-between.

Patrick pulls another TD engine while John heads for the phone

This is “Myron” a well known TD out around Port Jefferson on ‘The Island’.  Myron’s been in hibernation for about 25 years, you saw his profile on the ferry  with Port Jeff’ receding in the background a few weeks ago.  His engine was stuck tight, but using a little patience,  Patrick pulled it down and it will be at River City Machine for a valve job and a rebore before Friday is over.

A major curiosity for us is that although it’s already been bored to a  +.060″ oversize (we’ll go +.100″), the very tidy crankshaft was running a set of standard Vandervell connecting rod bearings in good nick… and a set of V.P. mains, also very tidy, at .002″.  Could this have been a new crank with a very small “Oopsie” on the initial main cut ? Not good enough for a new engine, and tossed into the factory-exchange bin ?

Gus stops by to do a minor remediation

Our favorite guest worker Gus Scott blew in here Wednesday afternoon for a minor remediation to the Blue over O.E.W. BJ8 which has occupied Butch’s attention for the past couple of months.  We’re not going to tell you what he’s doing, although the masking tape on the floor is one clue, and you can find another in last week’s post: “Building Sports Cars…”

Our favorite Parts-Person, Jean, at English Imports asked me earlier today if we were going to have another puzzler anytime soon, so it looks like this is it:  If you can tell us what Gus is up to and WHY, the first three people with the right answer will receive a free oil filter for their british car, if we stock it, and chances are, we do.

Butch assembles the fascia trim to the glovebox

Here’s a visual reminder that we do everything except ‘paint & fender’ work here at Sports Car Services.

Butch ended up rejecting the first chrome outer molding, and he had to work to get the mishapen glovebox to conform to the contour of the new veneered fascia panel, but the end result was worth the effort.

There’s also a little something extra going on here with those wires running out of the top of the ‘box.

Extra music carrying capacity inside the glovebox. Click to Enlarge

Sirius radio and an I-pod in an Austin-Healey, why not ?  Surely the British Motor Corporation would have offered them in 1965 if they were around then.

We’re effecting it with a change to negative earth and some additional wiring to the amplifier in the trunk.  Out of sight and out of mind, maybe, but the system should be at least as effective as a set of diesel air horns out on the highway at 70 mph.

John comes up for air

John has been putting this freshly painted TR3  back together.  I snapped the picture while he was enjoying a pensive moment, probably wondering what it would be like to stand up straight again.  It’s what we might call it a “rolling refinish” because we didn’t take the car completely to pieces like the BN7 Healey he’s contemplating here.

We’ve converted this Triumph to overdrive, which is a MUCH more elegant way to go than the five speed conversions that the big players in the aftermarket are pushing so hard right now.  Once a car’s been restored about all that’s left to sell is the bling, but then that’s what those color pages in the front of the catalogue are all about.

Building up a two seat Austin Healey BN7

Last week I said we’d have something to say about our Austin Healey projects.  This enlargable photo is a good illustration of where we start with a completely dismantled car; installing the front & rear suspension.  Because they have the better facility for it, Elisha at East Coast Collision & Restoration bead blasted this axle for us.

Shortly after this picture was taken, Warner humped the axle downstairs and stripped it for reconditioning in our driveline shop, which is where, if you flip back to last week’s commentary, you might have seen the sparks flying as Patrick re-sized a Jaguar IRS thrust washer on the surface grinder.

Warner bolts up the left side suspension

Although the Healey rear axle is pretty robust, the pinion flange in the BJ8 differential ran loose for a long time, and as a result we had to change out both the pinion and carrier bearings.  You know  we’ll be looking very closely at the BN7 diff.

Warner can be seen here working to Sports Car Services standards of workmanship and detail.  Because they were kept well greased, these stub axle assemblies  still had a useful service life ahead of them, as did the brake rotors, which we media blasted and painted before they were resurfaced.

By the way, did you know that we can supply stub axle sets on an exchange basis for big Healeys, disc braked Sprites & Midgets, MGB’s and also MGC’s ?   This is because we have the correct   Churchill tools to accurately ream king pin bushings to size for these cars.  Inquire..

Same Old, Same Old: More stunning paint work by E.C.C &R.

Don’t be fooled by the wheels, this is a no-holds barred restoration built on a Jule frame.  The uprated engine is fully balanced and features a stage 2 Dennis Welch aluminum cylinder head breathing thru a DMD intake manifold and a DWR extractor exhaust, as modified* for the application by Butch Howe.

Previous remarks not withstanding, this car is also running a Toyota five speed transmission, just like the one we exorcised from the BN7 in favor of the original side shift TX.  We have our opinions, but when it’s your car you ought to be able to have it your way.

Butch devised this service access for the Toyota TX slave cylinder

Of course the service access to the slave cylinder was a little squirrely, there wasn’t any.  Butch put aside the temptation to simply use a cold chisel and instead cut a very nice access hole which uses an MGB bulkhead plug to seal it, very much like a Midget or a Sprite.  As near as we could figure it, the only other way to bleed the slave cylinder was to do it before stuffing the transmission in the car.

It’s just another typical aftermarket parts engineering challenge, of which we seem to encounter many.

Patrick tweaks the Webers on the series 2 E-type

Late Wednesday afternoon Patrick managed to get a road test done on the red E-type.  With the benefit of new valve guides, there’s no blue cloud trailing behind at longish stop lights anymore.  Patrick asked me to see if the engine felt like it was hunting at small throttle openings, but when I managed a quick (the operative word) ten miles behind the wheel, I forgot to drive slow.

I actually saw 70 click up on the speedometer, but it wasn’t until after I got back that I realized that on the new 3.31 final drive ratio (was 3.54) it was probably a pale imitation of the actual road speed, which is also, I suppose, a favorable commentary on our suspension work as well.