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.
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