Final Roadtest on A Chilly Day

Last week after the roads dried out and the snows receded, there was a window of opportunity to get in a final roadtest on this very healthy TR3.  I put it thru its paces on a variety of road surfaces ranging from Bank Run Gravel to Interstate 91.  The fictional New York City Private Detective Nero Wolfe would have summed it up as “Satisfactory”.

Butch checks a Rover 3 litre engine for coolant leakage

Another wonderful car from Tom Rymes collection of off-beat (at least over here) british sedans is this 1966 California Rover 3 litre Mk III Sedan.  This is a classic british “L” head engine, which means an overhead intake and side exhaust valve arrangement like a six cylinder Rolls Royce.  Coolant leakage was suspected.  I ran a compression test which simply revealed good compression pressures, but Tom was pretty sure there was a problem, so I asked Steve to pull off a crankcase oil sample we could send out for an oil analysis.  In the event, there was no need for the oil analysis because the first thing that came out was water.

Butch stripped off the aluminum head, checked it for straightness, and we’ve sent it up to River City Machine in WRJ (White River Junction, if you’re not from Vermont) to be pressure tested for leaks.

Jaguar Mk2 at Hurds Upholstering for retrimming

In other sedan news, after having received a full paint & sheetmetal restoration at East Coast Collision & Restoration, we delivered this Jaguar Mk2 sedan to Hurd’s upholstery for complete retrimming.  This circa 1962 sedan has a Detroit Gear (Borg Warner) PiNDLR  transmission, same as a Studebaker.  It’s unique among automatics because it’s capable of a rolling start by virtue of it’s unusual rear pump which can lock up the entire TX from back to front.

Picking up a MGTD in Walpole, N.H.

Stephan Stefanko lives about as close to Mecca as an mere mortal can possibly live, he’s less than half a mile from Abingdon Spares.  He called us up because his MG TD was leaking gas out of the rear float chamber.  As soon as we replaced the sunk float in the rear, the front float began misbehaving, too.

This "H" type carb float has taken on fuel. Click to Enlarge

How it should look: replacement float. Click to Enlarge

It’s worth pointing out that part of the basic physics of SU carburetors is that the float mechanism must maintain the fuel level below the bottom of the throat of the carburetor itself, otherwise fuel is going to flood the carburetor simply by the effect of gravity, and there’s no amount of carb tuning that’s going to offset that condition.

Opposite lock is applied to counteract engine torque on a loose surface. Steve Reed TR3 photos

The Answer to last week’s trivia question about Indy Race Cars is NOVI.  The NOVI was built in Novi, Michegan, and although it was a definite crowd pleaser with it’s banshee wail and staggering acceleration, it never won a race in its 25 year career.

MGB Friday morning, October 28

Much of the Northeast got hammered Saturday by a late October snowstorm which left a foot of snow in Westminster, Vermont, but upwards of 30 inches on the higher elevations like fairly nearby Jaffrey, New Hampshire, but we’re always ready for it here.  Although I drive my rubber bumper MGB GT with four studded snowtires all winter (see “Winter Motoring”, January archives), my long serving MGB has a pair of studded Pirellis in the trunk as soon as the weather turns cold.  It’s been thru the Sierra Nevada on Interstate 80 a time or two with cable chains on.  This picture is just the tuneup from last Friday to the main snow event on Saturday.

Larry Perry and his "new" Shorrock Supercharger

A couple of years after the close of World War II, Larry Perry bought an MG TC and supercharged it, and now 60 years later he’s about to supercharge his “new” TC.  Steve snapped this picture Tuesday morning as we uncrated this one, which came from Novi, Michegan, complete with Shorrock overhaul instructions.  This interesting project is now in our queue.  I’m hoping to get some of Larry’s reminisciences jotted down for a future issue of MESH New England magazine.

Contest: What famous four cam V8 engine was campaigned at Indianapolis for 25 years without ever winning a race ?  The first three correct answers will win an oil filter, if we stock it

The shop was once again the scene of a great deal of activity this week, and here are some snapshots of the passing scene:

view behind the shop last Friday

John & Steve help Butch wrestle the Mini rear suspension into place

David runs a leakdown test on a 4.2 E-type

One of the basic diagnostic tests which is familiar to almost everyone is the cylinder compression test.  Anytime compression pressures run within a range of 10% between the high & low cylinders everyone is happy.  Sometimes, however, we’re looking for just a little more information from those same cylinders and in those circumstances we go with 2nd level diagnostics in the form of a leakdown test.  This is also dead simple:  Just add air and see how well the cylinder retains pressure.  Above a 15% decay rate, everyone’s dancing in tall clover.  This engine was in the zone.

Butch measures up an Austin Healey BJ8 differential

While I was doing my engine diagnostics, Butch was preparing to recondition this BJ8 differential which ran a little too long with the drive flange loose.  This didn’t do the pinion bearings any favors, and we decided that if we were going to have the whole thing apart for assessement and remediation, might as well replace all the bearings and reset it completely.

Pinion marked for tolerance: plus or minus zero. Click to enlarge

Once everything was cleaned up we found an exceptionally legible tolerance marking on the pinion gear: plus or minus zero.  Because these typically ran as much as .005″ either way, this was definitely one of the Thursday gear sets.  Fully assembled now,and painted black, it’s ready for reinstallation.

An MG Midget uses a miniturized big Healey front suspension.  It’s a huge irony for this cheap & cheerful sports car that it’s not a cheap & cheerful front end, and it costs a lot more to put it right than it’s larger breathern.  The major Achilles Heel of this

Steve assesses lower trunnion wear on an MG midget

arrangement is lower A-arm & trunnion arangement which utilizes a threaded trunnion pin to locate the lower king pin in the A-arm.  As long as it gets greased every thousand miles or so it works wonderfully well, and when it doesn’t get greased the male & female threads wear rapidly, producing an astonishing amount of transitional oversteer.  At the very least, remediation means replacement of A-arm & trunnion pin, but most of the time it costs us a set of king pins, too, because the trunnion pins fuse themselves in place.  The unique and almost obscenely expensive taper thrust wheel bearings can run the price up quite a bit.

Engine-in time for this Mini Panel Van

By mid-week the action had shifted downstairs where John, operating the motor hoist, Butch steering the engine & suspension unit, and Steve controlling pitch & yaw with the floor jack, stuffed the driveline and suspension subframe unit back into this Mini Panel Van.  It’s nice to step back sometimes from the two seat sports cars that are our principal interest and admire the handywork of one Alec Issigonis, who’s designs spanned the latter half of the 20th century and charged into the first few years of the 21st, first in the form of the Morris Minor, and after 1959 as the ubiquitous Austin Mini.  So simple and yet so clever.

Patrick comes back from a road test

Here’s another reminder of sportscar 101: Road test your work, first before you start, then as you complete repair operations, and finally, when you think you’re done.  We do this because it’s the first best way to quantify the results.  We also do it because usually it’s really fun !

Way, Way Back before there was a BMW M3, the British Motor Corporation  was already very busy building performance sedans for sporting motorists who now placed as much importance on having four doors as they used to  on a slick four speed.  In much the same manner that General Motors was  flogging Buicks and Oldsmobiles to the newly prosperous throughout the fabulous ’50’s, BMC was niche marketing, too.

Riley One Point Five

The British Motor Corp. offerings were the Riley One Point Five and the Wolesley 1500.  These were Morris Minor-based cars, but with the big MGA 1500 twin carb mill, instead of the Minor’s 948 engine, driving thru an MG Magnette four speed.

Goodness knows where Tom Rymes found this gem, it’s about as pristine a car underneath as you’ll ever see around here.  The rest of the car doesn’t hurt your eyes, either.  This Riley put in an appearance here a week or two ago on a roll back transporter, because all that extra torque snapped the left rear half shaft.  We had one in our used parts collection that has rendered it mobile again while we wait for some high strength Morris Minor axles, no they’re not the same as Sprites & Midgets.

No Draft Tube Equals Big Leak

Tom also asked us if we could chase down a largish oil leak on the left side of the engine.  We both assumed it was the tappet covers leaking, which was in fact correct, sort of.  The front side cover was leaking because the draft tube which vents the crankcase had gone missing.  This wonderful technology predated the Positive Crankcase Ventilation valve by quite a few years.  Although used draft tubes should be thick as thieves around here, a 40 minute search turned up nary a one.

A rear side cover in Austin Green installed on the front makes a nice contrast

Apart from the non-billable 40 minutes, it wasn’t a big deal, actually.  We know from observation and experience that these crankcases will vent perfectly adequately thru the valve cover because of the generous oil drainback passages from the cylinder head to the crankcase.  I ran this arrangement for years on my MGA before the 1600 MkII engine swap.

Steve and I were in hot pursuit Monday night of a Triumph TR 250 parts car down the road apiece in Gardner, Massachusetts which eluded our apprehension .  Lucky thing he had his camera with him, because he did manage to capture this magnificent fall scene in Winchendon taken from Spring Street, of the chair factories over across Whitney Pond.

The chair factories in Winchendon as viewed from across Whitney Pond. Stephen Reed photo.