There are three principal East-West highways crossing the Green Mountains.  They are Vt. Rte. 9, badly damaged, which is open from Bennington to Brattleboro, but best traversed by British Invasion attendees with Land Rovers, U.S. Rte 4, completely impassable in places, and U.S. Rte 2, which I understand is still tenuous.  Much of Rte. 100 is also still out, so avoid it.

I am taking my E-type to the British Invasion of Stowe

If you are planning to attend from the New York metro area, your best route will be Interstate 91 North to White River Junction, and then Interstate 89 North from WRJ (as we call it) to the Waterbury Exit and onto Rte 100, allegedly in reasonable shape between Waterbury and Stowe.

From Albany and points West, use the Massachusetts Turnpike (I 90) to Westfield/Springfield and pick up I 91.  From Boston & environs, use Mass. Rte. 2 to Rte. 140 and pick up Rte 12 in Winchendon.  Make your first LEFT after the blinking light by Abingdon Spares in Walpole, N.H. and cross the bridge into Westminster, Vt. then follow the signs to I 91 North.

John road tests this Austin Healey Tuesday

We’ll be around Friday to backstop you if you need a set of ignition points or a radiator hose or something on your way to Stowe.

The Holy Grail of successful automotive repair is the road test, and we start all repairs that way.  We road test as we complete stages of repairs, i.e. between the brake work and the tune up, and we always road test when we think we’re done.  In this picture John is headed out to run our 25 mile loop with a freshly rebuilt Austin Healey on which we did the final trouble shooting, it’s owner having put it together himself in a fully workmanlike manner.

MGB back from a road test in the rain today

Here’s another car which is Stowe-bound.  Last year at this time it was V.O.R.*.  This is the one for which we fished the engine out of our snow-bound cellar thru the coal bin last winter.  We gave it a going over for a couple of hours, but the only repair we made was to change the gear lever shift bushing .  MGB’s continue to get the nod as the best British Sports cars ever built, and believe me, we know ’em all.

*The first three people who can explain what V.O.R. means will win a free oil filter, if we stock it.

News Update: Since this post went up Thursday, VTrans engineers have succeeded is opening up a travel lane on Vt. Rte.9 between Brattleboro and Bennington.  Also, on Saturday the Rutland Herald reported that barring any weather reversals, VTrans expects to have U.S. Rte 4 open from Rutland at least as far as Killington by Saturday, Sept. 17.  These are in many places “Blue Stone” highways, and Governor Peter Shumlin has pointed out that conditions can approximate your grandparents’ roads.  Not recommended for Concours entrants.

The East-West roads are still severed.  Sections of U.S. Rte 4 and Vermont Rte. 9 have simply ceased to exist, and this week’s rain has undone some of the stop gap repairs in other places.  The Brattleboro Reformer tells us that new temporary signage in Halifax informs the routes out of town: Blue plastic plates mark the Brattleboro road, White plates lead to Whitingham, and Green plates direct traffic to Greenfield, Massachusetts.

Tide Going Out Again

However, the Southbound I91 bridge in Greenfield is open again, so we have relatively unfettered access to Connecticut and New York, even if we can’t get to Bennington or Albany.

Left front fender with new paint from East Coast Collision & Restoration. Click to Enlarge

Butch & John have been scrambling to get this red Austin Healey roadworthy in time for it’s scheduled departure Saturday for Connecticut.  It arrived on a trailer, but the owner wants to drive it back, so they’ve been busy installing reliability.  So far they’ve put the seats & carpets back in, repacked and adjusted the wheel bearings, and secured the somewhat shakey exhaust system, among a host of other tasks.  This is also a Jule-framed car, probably an early one, because the first order of business at East Coast Collision & Restoration, was to section the front crossmember in order to clear the front engine downpipes.  Tomorrow’s beginning task is the replacement of the steering column wiring conduit a.k.a. Stator Tube.

Two & Four Seater Austin Healeys at E.C.C & R last week. The car in the foreground is back in our shop for final assembly. Click to Enlarge

One of the very great advantages that we’ve gained from working with Jason Marechaux and his crew in Mount Holly is the enormous peace of mind that comes from knowing that their standards of workmanship are fully the equal of ours.  This picture was taken late at night under the fluorescents in their panel shop, but the paint and panel fit will withstand any amount of close scrutiny, and we will be working very hard to uphold our end of the bargain.

TRIVIA CONTEST: The first three people who can identify all four cars in the picture will win a free oil fitler, if we stock it.

Lastly a Reminder: The British Invasion of Stowe is still on for  next weekend, September 16 thru 18, and the road is open.  Interstates 91 & 89 will get you there from the New York metro area without a problem, and Rte 100 from Waterbury, Vt.  is back in business.  This is the largest all british show in the U.S. and very likely the friendliest, too.  Last year my MGC was car # 648.  You can track me down on the show field by calling the cell number in our ad in the program.  Hope to see you there.

Saturday night it began to rain steadily and became much harder toward morning.  Because of our location next to East Putney Brook we had already taken some precautions, and I was still moving things up onto the downstairs work benches when around 10:30 Sunday morning the column of moving water finally overwhelmed the Beebe Road culvert and the flood came cascading in.

An enraged Saxtons River rushes past underneath the New Tenney Bridge around 6:00 Sunday afternoon

I left when the water was over my knees.

By that time the phone & lights were already out, and walking home I was reminded, inexplicably, of the Arthur Kuestler novel, “Darkness at Noon”.

This picture is of the normally placid Saxtons River, taken from  the New Tenney Bridge in S.R.  Earlier, the water had risen nearly 16 feet and was splashing over the deck.  A close associate of ours a few miles up river in Grafton told me later that the homes of two neighbors close to the banks were washed downstream in the flood surge.

Conducting Drainage Operations

Monday was a solo clean up day.  Butch lives between Rte 100 & Rte 30, the epicenter of Southern Vermont flood damage.  He mostly  dodged the bullet, but his only way out right now is thru Colrain, Massachusetts, another 40 miles in the wrong direction.  John made it in Tuesday and we began drainage operations, mostly on our rebuildable transmission collection, but also on two engines  left behind our coal furnace waiting for the cars to come back from being painted.

While I would hestitate to list it in our menu of routine services, we gained useful experience of this type of conservation work as a result of drying out several british  cars after the Alstead, N.H. flood of 2005, which caused severe damage in that town across the river.

John Drains a TR3 Engine

Here’s a wonderful picture of John draining off a TR3 engine.  If you back up to the last picture, you can see that our protocol is to pull the timing cover & oil pan, check the bearings, and clean & repack the oil pump.  The transmissions will get a pint of hydraulic oil sloshed around inside them , and then we’ll spin them up with the 1/2″ electric drill.  Pretty straightforward stuff.

Seat upholstery and door panels should be stripped off  (no problems of that sort this time, however), and ventilated with a household fan.   Some seats, “T” Series MG’s for instance, have horsehair padding, and the treatment for those is a good soak in a kiddie wading pool with a strong bleach & water solution followed by a session with the fan and some strong sunlight, should you be so fortunate.

We’ll be back to the same old same old on Tuesday, may your Labor Day Weekend be a pleasant one.

Addendum Back in the halcyon pre-9/11 days we were putting engine work into four different machine shops, but times change and by this past spring the last man standing was Dale Spooner who had moved his operation, Motion Machine, to Danville, Virginia.  While we continue to  send Dale our Jaguar cylinder head work, the distance is still an impediment.

River City Machine in White River Jct. Wayne & Randy at the boring & honing work stations

It was already a good day last month when I walked out of Traffic Court in White River Junction with my “Click It or Ticket” Campaign speeding violation dismissed, but it was about to take an even bigger turn for the better when I saw the “Open For Business” banner flapping in the breeze in front of the late and very much lamented business premises of what used to be Upper Valley Auto Machine.  With a little help from Wayne, Randy Barrell has opened the doors back up again as

River City Machine (802-295-5788).

These guys know how to hold a tolerance, and we have a long history together, going back to when they were working under the watchful eye of Robbie Patterson at Alsup Racing Engines in Woodstock, Vt. where you could almost always find Sports Car Services machine work in the house.

Picking up an MG in Harwich Thursday night

Thursday night found your scribe picking up this MGB in Harwich on Cape Cod.  This was a recovery originally planned for Tuesday, but I decided to get out in front of Irene a little bit, because inside our car barn trumps outside in a hurricane.  As it was we got a little wet anyway on the return trip.

Butch recovers an MG TD dashborad while John sorts TR3 parts

Butch pulled the dashboard out of the black MG TD Monday and got to work Tuesday on recovering it.  A slight variation in the thickness of the replacement vinyl, rexine was probably the original material, was just enough to prevent the glovebox door from fitting.  Undeterred, even though he had a few bad words to say about it, Butch

Butch wires up the TD dashboard Thursday

stripped the door back down and took it home for a trip around his belt sander which produced a more favorable outcome.  When we work behind the dashboard on “T” series MG’s we frequently suspend them from the windshield to get them at a comfortable working angle.  The factory left enough extra cable and pipe back there to accomodate this procedure.

John builds up the engine bay in this TR3

We’re about to receive an Austin Healey 3000 MkIII from Jason Marechaux at East Coast Collision & Restoration which has been the subject of what may have been the most extensive sheetmetal & structural renovation of a big Healey ever undertaken anywhere.  The car is new from the Jule frame on up, and is finished in a stunning, and correct, shade of Healey Blue over Old English White.  It is a much greyer blue than the Jaguar Opalescent Silver Blue most commonly seen  on Austin Healeys.

We have been anticipating this car for several weeks, but while we were waiting we thought we’d slip in a few more days on this Marechaux-refinished TR3, and we really like this car quite a lot, too.

Finished dashboard. Click for detail

Here’s a picture of the finished product, look at last week’s picture for comparison. This afternoon while  Butch & John are hoeing out the shop to make room for just painted Healey, I’m underway in a few minutes for Ridgefield, Connecticut to retrieve an 1962 MGA 1600 MkII which has been in one family since 1963.