Dateline: January 1969-Richard Nixon was sworn in as President and NASA chose Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to make the first land ing on the moon. In the UK, Ford unveiled its new sports saloon the Capri, and the QE2 luxury ocean liner was stuck in hatbot because of trouble with her turbines! Yassir Arafat…
On the subject of HIF4 carburetor conversions to late MGBs, if you cut the insulator blocks in half to clear the brake power booster, you will find that you also have to cut two notches in the heat shield to compensate for the movement of the throttle shaft. The insulator blocks have a thickness of 1…
I have driven my 1966 TR4A for many years with nothing but the bare minimum in maintenance. Recently, I decided to park it for a couple of months and commence on some repairs I had been putting off. First choice was the horn, which had not worked In several years! With an inexpensive voltmeter, it…
Here’s a time-saving and cheap idea that is sure to help out any British car owner when working in his/her garage. Simply save an egg carton and use it as a separator/part holder to hold small parts and keep them organized. There is no cheaper container with as many compartments! Also I use a soft-bristled…
Are you having trouble installing your new seat diaphragm to an assembled seat? Try this: modify a large (preferably old) screwdriver by cutting a slot in the blade to accept the diaphragm hook. This is then used to force the side hooks into place. On my TR6, it was preferable to turn the front and back…
Our cars constantly “talk” to us, but we don’t always listen very well. New cars have very soft voices, and even when they are in great pain they prefer to talk through their computers to a diagnostic computer in a shop. Not so with our older British sports cars—they bellow and roar enough when everything…
I admit to being a scrounger, cheapskate, skinflint, and hand-me-down king! I have shelves of worn out Triumph parts I just can’t throw away. Anyone out there need a TR3 brake caliper with a ruined hydraulic fixture, drilled out by a ham-fisted mechanic? Or a worn out water pump, or…the list goes on. In the…
They say cars are “just machines.” They say that automobiles don’t have personalities. We tend to agree, but with a disclaimer. Not that we think cars are a lifeform, have souls, or something like that. We do believe that some cars elicit feelings that are more than mechanical. It is hard to explain the passion…
After installing the new clutch that I purchased from Moss Motors it was time to slide the gearbox back in. While trying to line up the nose of the gearbox to go into the clutch it became apparent that the rear of the gearbox would not drop down due to the front of the drive shaft. …
My first sports car was a 1963 Triumph TR-4 bought used in 1964 shortly after I graduated from college and got a job. It was the first in a long series of British and German sports cars I have owned, but it was always my favorite. Thirty-seven years later I retired and began restoring British…
