Redlined

Late in the summer I trundled down to Rumson, New Jersey to retrieve a 1965, give or take, MGB which had been sitting in a heated garage since about 1985.

Thirty years of solitude will effect a toll on a piece of machinery, and although conditions for a long term hibernation were favorable, we still went completely thru the fuel & ignition systems as well as the brakes, which are now fully relined and rebuilt, as well rebushing the front suspension and replacing the king pins, which we do by exchanging the stub axle assemblies complete.

It’s sort of a cliche, of course, but once we got it out on the road the car felt as if it had just been put away the night before.  There are still a few floating gremlins.  What you’re reading on the tachometer isn’t engine abuse, the car was in 4th gear.  Very high tach readings are endemic to early MGB’s with electric tachometers.  When they show up we just exchange them for a rebuilt instrument.  We keep them on the shelf both as positive ground units , and also converted for negative ground.

E-type on test

Also this week your scribe had an early E-type in his service bay which by now should be familiar to regular readers of these notes.  This car still has plenty of go, it’s current malady was a lack of stop.  Fifty plus years had finally caught up with the upper (rear) master cylinder through which Castrol GT LMA brake fluid was cascading pretty freely.

We have a connundrum with cars like this.  Normally when we work with brakes and front ends and lots of other stuff, we strip and clean the component and then run it thru the bead blast cabinet and chase the results with an application of primer and paint.

Pumpkin Orange

That’s a tougher call on cars like this where our primary consideration after safety is preserving originality, which this car has in abundance.  So in this case honing and a trip thru the immersion cleaner is more than enough enough physical remediation.  You can see this brake master in the lower left center of the photo just ahead of the Clayton Dewandre servo.  This is post- rebuild, the fact identifiable by the now shiny-looking Dunlop aluminum I.D. band.

BTW:  This is the original, untouched engine in this car.  If anyone would like to whack away at the reason why the cylinder head isn’t painted gold we have a free oil filter awaiting a correct answer.

Barn clean out

Patrick and I hoe’d out the barn over the weekend and juggled a few cars around.  We’re making space for the anticipated winter influx of longer term work that always starts showing up around this time of year.  I snapped this picture as he was pulling out this fairly rare black two door XJ coupe, which is running on the battery from the green two door coupe also in the picture.

These very special fuel injected XJ’s started showing up in 1975, but not until the side windows would go up & down at 100 miles per hour, according to the Norman Dewis who was Jaguar’s chief test engineer from January 1, 1952 onwards.

If there was ever a more handsome rear profile for a big four seater, I’ve yet to see it.

Butch shows how it’s done

A number of years ago a local boy bought a last of the line 1980 MGB which needed a cooling fan motor or two, which is a simple enough job. What was a bit more complicated for the owner was replacing the coolant that the car continued to lose.  Unlike the earlier cars, the 1977 on MGB’s lack a conventional radiator cap, routine replenishment is accomplished thru the expansion tank on the right hand side of the engine bay. like the MGC which appeared ten years previously.  Complete replacement of the coolant is effected thru a fill plug on top of the thermostat, and these originally were plastic and had a nasty tendency to break and shower the hapless attendent with a tsunami of hot coolant.  It’s been years since we’ve seen one of those, but we still keep a brass plug around just in case…

Bad Cap

This is a pretty lousy way to do it because not more than a trickle gets by the thermostat, and very slowly at that.  Our approach is to undo the top hose from the thermostat housing and pivot it 90 degrees up and fill thru the hose until the trickle is coming out of the ‘stat instead of trying to get in.  Well our friend decided to drive out to the shop so we could do it for him, and as I recall he showed up on foot about an hour late for his appointment, his car having expired on the grade out from Putney.

That car got some hot, as you might imagine, hot enough to melt the oil cap and that is in fact some of it on the rocker arm which was underneath it, too.

Engine out time

It’s been a week of MGB’s, four or five of ’em depending on how you’re counting, and it’s been exceptionally busy for this late in the year.  So for a change of pace we decided to take an hour or two and haul the engine out of the MG TD MkII which the owner trailered up from Massachusetts on Monday.  While we understand it got a little low on oil, we know it doesn’t turn, which is interesting because even after its epic meltdown, the 1980 MGB engine did.

The Sunbeam Alpine on test Monday

Now about those Corrigans from last week, there were actually three:   from the top of last week’s post, a trailer loaded with the most of the weight behind the axle is going to have a tendency set up an oscillation that will whip the tow vehicle back and forth quite violently.

When this happens standing on brakes is the wrong thing to do, you need to stand on the accelerator pedal instead.  If you don’t quite grasp the concept, try repeating the exercise on a table with a piece of string.

The second Corrigan was also the third.  As pointed out in the story, the leading brake shoe in the second picture was the wrong way around, but I also identified the car as a 1963 MGB, which it can’t be, because it’s a tube type axle (you can identify that by the hub) and those didn’t start coming into serivce until the introduction of the MGB GT in 1965.

A footnote:  this is the 200th consecutive weekly edition of This Week at The Shop

The other TR7

In checking the photo archive for this week’s material I came a cross a picture from early last month of what I believe to be the other TR7 still extant in these parts.  This photo is believed to have been taken on Saturday, September 27, either on the way to, or the way back from Warren Cossitt’s Jaguar flea market at his new digs in Norwood, Massachusetts.  Norwood is also the answer to a brit-car trivia question, as Norwood was also the location of Jos. Lucas & Sons New England warehouse.

Wrong Way Corrigan

This week’s struggles have been pretty evenly divided between the marvelously challenging Sunbeam Alpine, which is now ready for a road test, if it ever stops raining, and a couple of early MGB’s, one of which hasn’t turned a wheel in over 30 years.  Pictured here is the left rear brake assembly of a 1963 MGB which is generally pretty tidy, except for the leading (rear) brake shoe which is upside down.  Also pictured is the shaft of one of the 1/4″ 28tpi brake drum hold down screws featuring a stripped Phillips head.

Off with their heads

These are easily managed by running a turning 9/32″ drill bit into them and taking off the head.  Phillips screws are to a greater or lesser degree self-centering and close observation shows this on the screw to the right of the hub.  Once the drum is off, a pair of Vice Grips should extract the rest of the screw.

Oh, and if you can find two “Corrigans” we’ll send you an oil filter for your british car, if we stock it.

Lea Francis 14 H.P. Estate

Thursday night for a change of pace I brought in the Lea Francis wagon in order to drop the sump  and have a look around.  It proved to be a temporary impossibility.  Even after taking out all of the  hardware including  the front and rear studs, the oil pan resolutely refused to budge.  In some cases the manufacturers of yore would include an extra couple of threaded holes that dead ended against the opposite flange into which you could insert “jack” bolts to force a housing apart safely.  Regrettably none exist, and because it’s an aluminum casting only limited options for the use of blunt force are available.  Because discretion is still the better part of valor I decided to let well enough alone and ponder it for the weekend

Summit Meeting

Every year we have a job that’s a straggler.  It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact cause, but it seems there’s always one we can’t quite pull the trigger on.  The Sunbeam Alpine Mk V which has  been with us for almost a year is our current poster child.  While it would be highly inaccurate to say there’s been a lull in the actionaround here, for the last two weeks Butch has been working assiduously to turn the corner with the Alpine.

A spark plug makes a good fround

It’s an undertaking which has been exacerbated by some exceptionally creative repairing by previous unknown technicians, which we suspect had taken place in somewhere in the deep South like Alabama or Mississippi.  An exceptionally wonderful example of this is the 1/2″ electrical ring terminal around #4 sparkplug.  At first we believed this was simply a convenient means of grounding some obscure electrical function, but closer examination revealed that it was actually a temperature sensor wire leading to a supplementary instrument with a Harley-Davidson legend on the face.

More creative repairing with an MGB brake cable

We strongly suspect that the same fitter-installer was likely responsible for replacing the driver’s and passenger side floors.  In the course of executing this task in an expeditious manner, the handbrake assembly, which is mounted on the driver’s side inner sill was R&TA’d  (removed & thrown away) !    A used one was sourced from the San Diego area and a suitable mounting arranged, although we were also short a brake cable.  Butch spent the better part of a day trying to make a good cable out of two used ones, finally abandoning the effort in favor of suitibly modifying a late MGB brake cable which utilizes a rod arrangement between the wheels similar to the Alpine’s.

Unusual sight amid the foliage

Oh yes, about that summit.  Just after Mike Savage delivered  the gunmetal grey E-type last week, Tom Rymes arrived with a couple of surplus Girling Mk2B brake servos, and hard on his heels was Dennis Pettit, who keeps his TR6 up here, there being no room at the Inn, aka  the Hickory Ridge House B&B in Putney, Dennis & Gillian Pettit proprietors.  So the photo is of Messrs’ Howe, Rymes, Rowbottom, Savage & Pettit.

The best of the bright red & orange foliage is pretty much gone now, however I did happen to catch a glimpse of some while headed south through Massachusetts on Interstate 91 earlier in the week.  But perhaps even rarer around here is this TR7.  In more than 25 years we’ve had a sum total of one in the shop.  This must be the other.