tedlit

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

Proof that it’s not just me.

This is what we caught my dad doing a few years ago:

That’s right, it’s a Morris Minor.. after a fairly thorough restoration job. He’s  still got one sitting in that garage somewhere.. and that’s to say nothing of the procession of BMW 1800’s, 2002’s, 2500’s, Triumph Dolomites, Minis, Vitesses and a Vauxhall Cavalier (yes, really) that have passed through the hands over the years. The Dolomites in particular were a favourite of mine.. even though he preferred the BMW 2002 (a TII, don’t you know). The Mini was the most hair-raising (J-reg, with a hole in the floor large enough to qualify it as a Flintstones Car replica).

Fun times.

By tedlit, ago

The Triumph Stag. What did it ever do?

So I have a bit of a thing for Triumph Stags. When I was but a small boy, cars I drew looked like one of two things.. a Mini, or a Stag. This is unfortunate, because a Stag is just about the least reliable British car it’s possible to own. Granted, most of the problems are now well-known and can be sorted.. but this has its consequences.

Firstly, Triumph only sold 2500 Stags in the US between 1970 and 1973. In my estimation, maybe half of these are left.. and of those, maybe half have had the engine switched because the original melted/combusted/exploded. As it left the factory, the Stag has eight of the most fragile cylinders ever put under a bonnet.

The other side-effect of the Stag’s well-known reliability problems is this:

I currently have three Stags. The above two came from a guy who also had three.. but he restored one, decided it was too much effort, and sold the other two to me. The one on the left has been Frankensteined with a 283 Chevy engine, and obviously has been outside for long time.. even though there’s no rust whatsoever *inside*. It also – after some coaxing – runs and drives (unfortunately it doesn’t stop yet).

The one on the trailer is a very early 1970 – in fact, it’s about ten cars earlier than the earliest US-spec “normal production” Stags known to the registry. Unfortunately, despite good bodywork, most of this car is in bits in my garage.  It did come with two engines though – a Capri v6, and the Stag v8 (suspiciously missing one timing cover).

Hmm.

By tedlit, ago

Separated at birth?

The Rover SD1 and Rover 800 “fastback”. Granted, mine are ten years apart.. but production of them was only separated by a couple of years. Everything I’ve read suggests it’s a “complete coincidence” that the 800 looks just like an SD1 from the side.. but the SD1 was an amazingly popular car for how unreliable it was, so it’s not a surprise that a little influence crept in, I suppose.

The silver 800 is a 1991 827SLi.. one of the last 50 or so imported into the US. It’s got the end-of-shape body kit (most of which is still attached) and some other very bizarre options – like rear window blinds and one more window demister than you actually need. It’s also got 250k miles on it and the tappets rattle like anything when it’s cold.

By tedlit, ago

Proper Minis are very expensive here.

…and no-one quite knows why. A decent 1970/1990 Mini will set you back a clear ten grand, which is ridiculous considering that you could buy ten of ’em in the UK for that. That’s why there’s a huge trade in importing them.. especially from Holland/France into (cough) Canada.

It’s now to the point where a BMW Mini actually costs less than a much, much older proper one.. which says a great deal for the lack of charm exhibited by the later Minis – and the phenomenal sales of “100% BMW Free” bumper stickers.

By tedlit, ago

Frankenmanifold

So I currently have three Stags, all in various states of running. I have a Saffron Yellow 1972 that’s waiting for me to figure out how to get the front crossmember out.. I have a black (originally green) 1972 that’s engine-less.. and a black 1973 that’s got a 283 Chevrolet engine in it. It runs, but it needs some serious attention before it’s actually going to go anywhere.. but it does get a prize for “best custom exhaust EVER”:

I mean… look at it. Each downpipe has at least four joins in it, and it’s a 4-into-2-into-1 combination. It must’ve taken the poor guy that built this months to put it together.

He obviously got bored though.. because the custom exhaust just “ends” round about the rear subframe. I s’pose that was one join too many…

By tedlit, ago

The car that started it…

….was a 1976 Triumph 2500S. It became mine in late 1997. After passing it at the scrapyard every day, Kim finally got tired of my constant griping about it and “part exchanged” one of our other slowly-rotting cars for it. So, in late December, it made the two-mile journey to our Kent house – under its own power, no less.

Given that this was the first of my “proper” cars, it was pretty much inevitable that it followed us to the US. Actually, it came first – in May 2004 – making the ferry journey via the Panama Canal to Seattle in about six weeks. So it’s buy CBD products a well-travelled car…

By tedlit, ago

Rover’s second attempt

…at conquering the US – the Rover P6. Rover sold the P4/P5 in the US in limited quantities. Neither sold particularly well, mainly because it took an eternity for the P5B to make it to the US, and the P5 3-litre was painfully slow – especially with all that emissions junk stuck on it.

So, in 1969, the US got a “federalised” (read: “crippled”) version of the P6 2-litre.. and in 1970 the P6 3500s v8 finally made it over here. This is mine:

They sold pretty well.. and were very well-reviewed.. but despite the fact that the Rover v8 is fundamentally bombproof, it was good old British reliability that killed Rover off again in 1971.

The US-spec P6 v8’s were amazingly well-eqipped – A/C, electric windows, full leather interior, and Icelert (yes, really) as standard.  My P6 sat outside for a good seven years before I got it.. but fortunately the interior’s not too bad and those aluminium body panels really do help cars survive that little bit longer in the Northwest!

By tedlit, ago

Why does no-one like the SD1?

I mean.. look at it.

Yes, it does look a bit like a cross between a Ferrari Daytona kit car and an Austin Maxi.. but it’s *soooo* comfortable.. and people really don’t expect a rusting British car to have a proper v8 in it. They also don’t expect the fact that it’s actually pretty reliable.

They were only sold in the US for one year – and depending on who you believe, there were somewhere between 500 and 700 imported in total.. most of which were automatics. Almost all of the “remaining” SD1s in the US were cannibalised for their engine and injection system, mainly because it fits perfectly in various MGs and Triumphs. I estimate there are maybe 40-50 left, and who knows how many of those are actually in running order.

Mine is a “late” 1980 – it was one of the very last imported – and is Richelieu Red, and came with a 5-speed manual ‘box, air conditioning, and a fitted sunroof. It’s in dire need of a paint job.. which is why it’s my winter project for 2009!

By tedlit, ago