leaky

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

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

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