John changes bearings in an MGB engine

We were on a tear all week with MG’s.  In this picture John can be seen changing out the main & rod bearings in an MGB engine.  If you look closely you’ll see that with the exception of removing the front & rear bearer plates, it’s an intact engine.  While he was in there, he also re-keyed the camshaft for more advance to wake things up some.  Butch did the high speed testing and reported that it pulled cleanly past 4500 rpm going up  the northbound grade by the weigh station on I91 in Putney.

If you take another close look, you can see that in much the same way we don’t stock Chinese-made brake master cylinders, we do stock almost all of our gasket sets in the familiar blue & white striped Payen packaging, with a smattering of red Unipart sets.  They’re behind John at pants pocket level.

Cutting away the frozen distributor housing on an MGA. Click to enlarge

A common scenario we encounter with MGA’s & MGB’s is Frozen-In-Place distributor syndrome.  This is caused by a persistant leak from the heater valve, setting up a bi-metallic corrosion between the aluminum distributor body and the steel distributor housing.  When this happens it’s a really bad idea to try to effect a timing adjustment with waterpump pliers, as it’s a very effective way to make a two piece distributor.

The only cure  that we’ve been able to come up with so far is by elective surgery.  First we pull the distributor clamp plate hold down bolts, loosen the clamp and tap it clock-wise out of the way, and then we undercut the hold down screw, usually Phillips, hidden underneath the clamp plate, at about 7:00.  This is what die grinders are really for.  Use a carbide cutter.

The housing will now be easily removable, along with the captive distributor.  Most of the time heating around the outside of the housing with a propane or oxy-acetelene torch, and then some penetrating oil applied to the bottom of the dizzy is all it needs.  Sometimes we have to put the #$!!%& thing on the press and push it out.

There’s also a six cylinder Jaguar variation of this dance step, whereby the car stops running after it warms up.  It’s just a loose hose clamp allowing a fine mist (usually) or heavy rain (sometimes) of coolant to cause the spark from the distributor directly underneath it to go to ground.

Butch stitches up the drip edge on an MGA

Same week, different MGA.  We were asked to get the aluminum frame sliding side curtains to fit on this car, because they wouldn’t clear the forward edge of the top.  Fortunately, the header rails on MGA’s are made of wood, and it was a relatively simple procedure to pull out 5,000 tacks & staples and peel back the drip edge far enough to cut the necessary clearance into the header rail and tack everything back together again.

Hurd's Upholstering in Springfield, Vermont

A few years ago I kept running into car calendars with an absolutely stunning MG YT decorating one of the warmer months.  A YT, if you don’t know it, and they’re always been pretty thin on the ground, was the open touring version of the early Post War MG YA, & YB sedans, featuring  suicide doors, a full back seat and a folding top, plus a “JackAll” hydraulic system.  If you ever came across that picture, you’re now looking at a picture of where that drop-dead gorgeous upholstery came from.

A Survivor: This one owner TD has new seats, carpet & panels from Hurd's Upholstering. Click to enlarge

We’re storny busy right now, so we arranged for Richard Hurd to install the new seat upholstery, carpet & panels in this TD.  We’ll recover the dash ourselves because Dick wisely decided not to take on the 60 year old wiring & plumbing behind its walls.

Perhaps you’ve also noted the bungee cord running from door handle to door handle.  This is one of our routine precautions for transporting a “T” series car.  Many years ago I was trundling very slowly down a badly rutted dirt road in Bedford, N.H. with an MG TC , when I happened to glance back in horror to discover that the air brakes were full on !    Luckily, there was no damage done at 15 miles per hour, but ever since then…

Next week, perhaps, a report on a very special Austin Healey.

We received an urgent letter in the mail this week from Moss Motors to say they were issuing a recall on virtually all of their Chinese-made reproduction Girling brake master cylinders.  Be On The Look Out for the following:

180-791   MGA Twin Cam & Deluxe

513-319  Austin Healey BN7, BT7, BJ7

581-011  Triumph TR3 (TS 13046 on) thru TR3B

581-032  Triumph TR4 & TR4A from CT 5784

581-101  Austin Healey BN7, BT7, BJ7, BJ8

581-512  Austin Healey BN 4 to CE 48862

These master cylinders were packaged as “Classic Gold”, and are at risk of a ‘foot valve’ failure.  The foot valve closes off the return port to the fluid reservoir when you tromp on the brakes.

Sports Car Services does not use Chinese made Master Cylinders

Pictured on the left are some master cylinders from our inventory. The red boxes are TRW, the green boxes genuine Girling,  Lockheed is the black & silver box, and the blue box is B.I. (Brakes India) TVS, which is Girling India.

Machining a slave cylinder for an MGA application. Click for detail

Although we keep a Lockheed slave cylinder in stock, which is very pricey, we are using the aftermarket slave cylinder for MGB’s.  It becomes an MGA slave cylinder if you swap the hose & bleed screw.  These are essentially fool proof in design, being simply a hydraulic cup and a piston with a spring and an expander, but sometimes they aren’t machined flat enough for the copper washer to seal the hose if it’s being used on an MGA.  As illustrated above, this is a simple fix on the Bridgeport, where it took about five minutes to set it up and whack 7.5 thousandths off the face.

A blown head gasket on a TF 1500 Click for detail

Every now and again we have to confront our failures.  We overhauled this engine on a cash & carry basis about ten years ago and got to see the car for the first time last Thursday.  As you might suppose, it hadn’t been running very well.

John ran a compression test which revealed scant compression in #’s 3 & 4 cylinders.  He used our leakdown tester to confirm his findings.  By attaching the leakdown tester to #3 cylinder, and varying the distance between his thumb & #4 spark plug hole, he could perform a passable rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, so we knew we had a head gasket blow out.

A one owner MG TD with the original paint

This MG TD rolled back in here Tuesday.  We had our hands on it last year, and it’s a one owner car still with the original black paint on it.  If you look closely you can see the dealer installed pinstriping.  Now incredible as this car is, we’ve also had our hands on its twin, which is also from New Jersey.

We’re going to ask David Pound to scan an old film picture of that car so we can post it up sometime.  Perhaps even more incredibly, it is also a one owner TD, and also  black with red pinstriping.  Things tend to come in threes, and surely enough we service one other one owner TD, from New Hamshire, but it’s a British Racing Green TD Mk II.

“See You in a Tin Can When You Get Shipped Around”*

Seth Holton takes profits on Black Monday

While Wall Street was busy again on Monday fleecing the small investor, Seth Holton decided it was time for the big herd to go on the auction block.  In this picture Paul Bannik from Windshire Trucking works with Wayne from Holton Farm to round ’em up and load ’em on, right next to the shop.  This leaves us with the small herd of about a dozen Holstein dairy heifers.  Just like the money you used to have in your pocket, we were sad to see them go.

*Woody Guthrie, “Lay Down Little Doggies”

HDR43 42624

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I handed over $500.00 in cash for an MGA and drove it home.  Incredible as it sounds now, I paid about twice what the car was worth.  When I see one on the road these days I always think to myself, “this is where I came in”.  We’ve not seen a superabundance of them this year, and right now we’re being clobbered with Austin Healeys.

Force bleeding an MGA clutch master cylinder

The tandem master cylinders in MGA’s are often the devil’s work to get operative again after an overhaul.  Because we have some suspicions about the accuracy of the currently available service kits, we always bench bleed the cylinder before re-installing it in the car, and even then they can still be a struggle.  I was able to get the brake side working without a large amount of trouble, but the clutch side  challenged my sanity.

Illustrated above is a technique we use when the pistons won’t return in the bores.  It’s pretty simple: Just take out the front bolt and loosen the back bolt so you can swing the cylinder up to a convenient working angle and stuff your slotted screw driver (that’s the one that isn’t a Phillips) into the piston and work it up and down the bore, twisting it radially as you go.

You can bleed off the brake & clutch hydraulics completely by this method if your arm doesn’t fall off.

Secret Revealed: click for detail

That’s my secret.

Now here’s the secret referenced above:  Look carefully just below the heater box side clip, and, Et Voila !   It’s the spare key still secured by the heater box hold down screw !   Now how many times (MGB’s don’t count) have you seen that ?

Butch preps a TR3 fuel tank for installation

While I was having my ego flattened by a 55 year old MG, and John was at East Coast Collision & Restoration sorting out a recalcitrant TR6, Butch was making steady progress reassembling yet another recently painted TR3.

While we’re skipping a few degrees of detail, this car makes no pretentions about the show field, it will still have a tidy

TR3 in a 'one off' opalscent silver grey. Click for detail

mechanical appearance as well as a new wiring harness and some other general freshening up.   Soon, however, it will be yielding the floor to this season’s major undertaking…    More about this later on.