Butch expounds, Ernest listens

Ernest Hillier is a skilled upholsterer.    Fortunately for us he’s taking fiddle lessons from Amy across the road, and one day Ernest said, “Amy, what’s with all those sports cars down there ?”,  and she told him.  In as much as Ernest is also a member of The Loyal Order of Owners And Admirers  of The Immortal and Ubiquitous MGB, we bonded immediately.

This solved a huge problem for us because we’re going 10/10ths on the series One 4.2 E-type in the foreground and we really wanted to conquer the rest of the world by the time we’re done.  If you’d like to know more about Ernest’s resume just google him at Ernest Hillier.com.

George scatters while Butch gazes upwards

George got the MG TF rolling chassis from Glens Falls, New York pulled apart last week, and because space is always tight around here, Saturday morning Patrick and I hung up the frame above bay #1.  Although Butch possibly looks startled, and it may appear as if George is fleeing for his life, it’s  the third time in the last few years we’ve utilized the space for this exact purpose. In point of fact we were just setting up to retrieve it from its temporary domicile in order to load it on the truck for delivery to the blasters  earlier today.

Out on the Lonesome Highway

The temperature dropped quite precipitously overnight so your scribe decided to take advantage of a  small window of opportunity in  the middle of the spate of  sloppy weather we’re going through right now.  So it was down to the blasters in Agawam and from there to the plating shop in Westfield with the E-type front suspension, a drop-off of the XPAG TDC block from the failed rebuild for cleaning, and finally a stop to see Jeff at Keene Driveline about the installation of a Thornton Powr-Loc into the rear axle of my XK 140, all accomplished by noon today.

The roadside relics seen here were on Rte. 22 in Granville, New York on the way back from Glens Falls two weeks ago with the TF.

Former MG TF

Tom Hoy was a mighty lucky guy.  When he sensed a ‘lack of progress’ he pulled his MG out of the restoration shop shortly before the fire that burned the place down.  In fairness they’d done a pretty good job of tearing down a pretty good car, and apart from the driver’s seat and the front & rear valances it looks like it’s mostly all there, and if push comes to shove, we can always convert it to right hand drive.  Seen here are Patrick & Warner walking the body tub over to the barn for storage.

Allard-like Suspension

This photo is from Tuesday.  We had just unbolted the front shocks while they were clear of the bump stops to relieve the stored energy in the front springs.  This makes disassembly a bit safer.  As of Wednesday the chassis has been torn down to the bare frame which we’ll send  out to the blasters to strip the surface rust.  After an application of chassis paint it will be time to start putting everything back together.

George got it

I like this photo because it reminds me of an Allard trials car with the front suspension fully unloaded at the top of a hill in the English countryside somewhere around 1948.

A common wear item on TD’s & TF’s is the clutch pedal shaft.  The grease fitting on the end of it, which is outside the frame on the driver’s side is commonly neglected with the result that the brake pedals often times have a sideways wobble of a couple of inches.  This is a miserable job when done in the car because there’s not much room for your hands, head, droplight, wrenches &  elbows in the small amount of space between the steering wheel above you and the pedals underneath it.  Failure to attend to it when the body tub is off the frame with the  superior access which results is a very big mistake.

Monday

Wednesday

The weather took a 90 degree turn this week.  Monday saw the temperature hit 60 in the afternoon, and by late Wednesday afternoon we had a foot of snow and counting, courtesy of an early season Northeaster.  This did not stop us from getting the long dormant Texas Spitfire out for an initial test, Butch ran it out onto the Westminster West road and up into the barn as we’re taking a long Thanksgiving holiday break now.

Pinchbolt socket

Well that TD crankshaft would have quite a tale to tell if it were a sentient being.  In addition to being marked .010/.010 on one side of the number one & two throw, it was marked .020/.020 on the other side , but it was an obviously welded-up crankshaft because the main and connecting rod bearings were standard size as previously mentioned, and a  closer inspection revealed the center main thrust surface was also welded.  Whoo-eee that’s a lot of welding and grinding.  Of course it’s not the most radical crankshaft repair we’ve ever seen, because this one is:

Seeing is believing

Seeing is believing. What you’re looking at is a reconditioned Laystall crankshaft for a 14 HP Lea-Francis.  It’s an archival photo from an earlier engine rebuild.  Incredibly the rear main bearing journal and flange are spliced into the rear counterweight, and we have it on very good authority that it ran like this for many thousands of miles before the subsequent regrind that you’re seeing here.   This is a remanufacturing tour de force, in my judgment.

Nice radius

We didn’t end up using it, but not out of disrespect for the anonymous engineer who managed to pull it off.   It is recorded in the literature that about 15% of the strength of an XPAG  crankshaft journal is imparted by the radius and in our experience many of the broken or soon to break cranks (as determined by a magnaflux inspection) we’ve seen have suffered at the hands of a machinist who was too lazy to dress his grinding wheel properly.  The radius on this Laystall crankshaft is quite a nice one, I think, however if you click on the picture for a really close look you can see it must have been the Devil’s work to grind it, probably because of the neatly spigoted into the rear counterweight immediately ahead of it..

Hello Spitfire

So let’s back up to  XPAG wrist pin clamp bolts  for a moment.  These are not accessable with a normal socket wrench.  There is a factory tool for the job (18G 327) which I’ve never seen, but a cut-down 3.8″ drive socket suffices pretty well.  we actually have two, a 5/16″ BSF socket to take the old ones out, and a 13mm socket to put the new replacement bolts in.  In the first photo above we have the piston clamped in the vice using a pair of aluminum spacers which hold the pin tightly without damaging the piston.

What we now know is last week’s con-rod bearing meltdown was probably a serendiptous event because the clamp bolts wern’t even tightened past about 15 foot pounds of torque out of the recommended 33 ft lbs. and when these let go the results are frequently catastrophic.

In other news, Butch got a move on today with the long dormant Spitfire 1500 which is recently arrived from Texas for some reconditioning.

A final once-over

A favored MG trivia question is to name a seven letter work with all five vowels in it.  The answer is 1949 MG TC in the Sequoia Cream Livery like this one here, on its way back to Virginia soon after a 25 year sojurn in New England.  The current property of a retired member of the teaching faculty of Harvard University, it’s headed to the greater Washington D.C. area.  Butch is seen here giving it a final once-over before Mike Savage trailers it down there next week.

Wipe Out

Tracing an engine failure back to its route cause is always an interesting investigation.  The owner of a well presented MG TD MK II (TDC is the proper nomenclature, I believe) contacted us after the engine seized while his wife was driving the car, the failure believed to have been caused by inattention to the oil pressure gauge, what a pity with a relatively low number of hours on it after a rebuild by a well known “T” series specialist in Redding, Connecticut.  As you’ll notice, the number one connecting rod bearing and crank journal are pretty well wiped out.  The others didn’t fare well, either.

Exculpatory Evidence

But sometimes things are not the way they seem, and this the mains exonerate the lady. This is great stuff because the main bearings are in fine shape with no evidence of impaired lubrication due to lack of oil.  What we have is a fundamental mistake on the part of the installer, failure to ensure the crankshaft was properly cleaned before installation.  During the teardown we noticed that while the crankshaft was marked .010″/.010″ indicating main & rod journal size, the less badly damaged con-rod bearings were marked, and in fact measured up, as standard, evidence of a welded-up crankshaft which was not adequately cleaned after repairing.

Not “T” series

The damage appears to have been fairly catastrophic to the rod journals, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen it, as a similar failure occurred on the Sequioa Cream TC when we replaced the crankshaft with a new one a number of years ago.  At that time replacement VP 252 rod bearings were still available in Vandervell VP2 trimetal material, and they were a good deal more durable. The standard bearing of the day was a white metal  VP 383, which was a good engine bearing in a time when one of the tasks of  engine bearings was to safely embed small pieces of debris that could damage a crankshaft journal.  When a similar post-installation washout occurred with the yellow TC the engine also ground to a halt (no pun intended)  because there was no imbedability with VP 2.  Unlike this one, however, the crank journals were nitrided and what looked awful polished right off, and a new set of VP 252s installed with no change in operating clearance.  Rest assured we never repeated that mistake.