January 2010

Q: What goes “rrrrrrrrCLUNKrrrrrrrrCLUNK”?

A: A 1993 Range Rover with two disintegrated plug leads.

…and a leaky steering box, a broken steering coupling, no bonnet catch, an alarm that unlocks and locks randomly, an air filter from 1993, and no heater.

Yes, I’ve got a new toy. It’s a 1993 Range Rover County LWB, and (aside from the heater) I’ve now fixed all of the above. So I’m just waiting for it to warm up a bit before I actually drive it. It’s got a 2″ OME lift kit, a spring conversion, and about three grand’s worth of stereo in it… which doesn’t *sound* $2950 better than the $50 stereo in the Sterling.. but there you go.

It’s a choice between this or a pickup of some kind – I need something *proper* for towing with.. and it was only after bringing this baby home I realised it doesn’t have a towing hitch. Whoops.

By tedlit, ago

Which yellow?

I was trying to explain the drawbacks of 1970’s automotive paint selections the other day.. your basic beige, brown, tan, chestnut and puke green.. when m’colleague quoth “surely they must’ve got *one* colour right? It wasn’t all tartan interiors and giant shirt collars, was it?”

I thought for a moment.. and came up with this:

It’s a Dolomite.. and the colour is Inca Yellow. This is also the colour my Stag is going to be when I’m done with it. Triumph had a bit of a yellow “thing” going on for most of the 1970s.. Inca, Mimosa, Saffron, Honeysuckle..  all with varying degrees of badness.

Except for Inca.

Obviously.

By tedlit, ago

Things that go CLUNK in the night

It’s amazingly hard to find a reliable Stag with a reliable Stag engine. Because the cooling system is marginal at best and the timing setup isn’t “fire and forget” like your average small block Chevy, most of them have long since died here in the sunny US.

My Stag-engined Stag ran just fine, but with criminally low oil pressure and some very ominous rumbling sounds. Last June, I stopped the (slow) restoration process to figure out what was wrong with the bottom end. Seven months later, I finally got the sump off and found both the thrust washers floating around in the oil. Obviously this wasn’t good.

Oily Goodness, yes? Note the new #3 bearing cap.. straight out of a TR7 as it happens. The actual main bearings were already +0.010″ over, and are hardly worn. The crank was (fortunately) just fine, so it was just a case of meticulously putting everything back together and crossing lots of fingers.

So today, at about 4pm, it finally coughed back into life.. only for me to see that the seven-month lay-up had dried the float chamber seals on one carb, so it spewed neat fuel into a) the engine, and b) the bonnet. Whoops. I’ll be fixing that before I take this any further, I think.

By tedlit, ago