A couple of days ago at work I put the RBRR RNLI collection box in the kitchen on the microwave. I then sent an email around telling everyone it was there and what they were expected to do with it.

Later that day one of the directors said “that guy on the boat looks scary, I think I’d take my chances with the sea!”. Then yesterday morning when I went to make a cup of coffee someone had put a little speech bubble on the box.. see picture left :)

 Besides the comic efforts from colleagues I’m pleased to see that it has a few quid in it already. All I have to do now is keep plugging it until October, and make sure no one uses it for milk money.

I’ve not written a post since September it seems! Terrible! Probably because I’ve not really been thinking about Triumphs much for the last 3 months or so, life, work, etc etc etc. This is why the Stoneleigh show is so great, it’s at JUST the right time to get the year kicked off, so after travelling up there with James C in his Saloon and walking around getting inspired, chatting to friends and spying things to add to the mental shopping list, I managed to catch Dave Picton just before he left and booked an MOT for today. I know that many of you drive your Triumphs all through the year, but for one reason and another, mine sat doing nothing since October so when I tried to start it and take it to Dave’s this morning it span over fine but wouldn’t fire. In the end - on Dave’s advice - I changed the plugs and used a good quantity of Easy Start  stuff while Nikki sat inside turning the key and booting the throttle which worked a treat!

By this time I was about 2 hours late for the MOT, so I kicked Nikki out at home and motored over to Pictons with the engine sounding terrible and feeling all gutless. It turned out that I’d left a plug lead off in my haste to leave! fool! The car got a ticket, although the MOT man did apparently ask where the horn was (oops, the wire fell off on the 10CR). So yea, wohoo! Now it’s drivable (legally) I can get to sorting out all the things that need to be done before our trip to Le Mans Classic (via 4 other countries) in July and the RBRR in October.

After I left Dave’s I went over to James’ for lunch (Chicken stir-fry followed by Scones and jam, cheers!), and then sat aboard while he took the Saloon for an tune-up: This consisted of blatting about roads in Epping Forrest then pulling into lay-bys and tweaking the carbs. A good day by all accounts. I tried to end it by washing the GT but I gave up after I saw that the roof that I’d just dowsed with water had become a sheet of ice! At only 6pm! Oops.

I haven’t really mentioned the Club Triumph 10 Countries Run and how it went on here yet, too much to write, but I thought I’d post something about a broken rocker that caused a bit of last minute minor panic.

A couple of weeks before the 10CR Nikki and I were in Cornwall and a friend of a friend mechanic noticed what looked like the beginnings of HG failure on the front edge of the GT’s head/block. As I didn’t fancy the idea of HG Failure half way up a mountain in Italy, and couldn’t afford to pay someone to replace it for me, I did it myself a week later. Roy Lacey, good fellow that he is, managed to get me a nice copper Payen gasket cheap as chips, and the replacement went pretty well if you ignore the fact that I managed to completely fill the bores and lots of other oil ways with coolant!

Once the gasket was replaced, and after a drive to Somerset and back to bed it in (about 300 miles), I re-torqued the head the Weds night before the 10CR. As this involved taking the rocker gear off again, when it came to setting the rocker gaps again I must have been rushing and managed to snap a rocker! If you look at the photo you can see it snapped by my pulling too hard on the adjuster lock nut. This was at about 6:30pm so I reckon it was VERY lucky that Dale was still at his workshop which happens to be about a mile away. He had just the thing, a tube of new-old-stock left-hand rockers - and ONLY left-hand ones - so thats more than lucky! As soon as Dale saw my broken one he said “that’s been messed about with”, and he’s right, if you compare my one (see photo again) and a stock one you’ll see that loads of material has been shaved off in several different areas, which probably explains the breakage! Nice to find out these little things that make the car ’special’, and I think next time I have the rocker gear off I’m going to get a machine shop to match the ‘new’ rocker to the old lightened ones.

Panic over, I returned home with the new rocker and Roy and I rebuilt the rocker shaft in 10 minutes and refitted it. Then to the pub for some dinner and a few pints with the ladies. The next morning, a few hours before the start of the event Roy re-set the rocker gaps. He did it because I clearly couldn’t be trusted! Thanks Roy!

Last week a guy at work told me about a “Group 44 TR” he’d seen the night before in his local T.K.Maxx. He said “I wasn’t sure you’d want it so I didn’t buy it, it was only a fiver”. OF COURSE I wanted it! Since getting into Triumphs I’ve had a very minor obsession with all things Group44…  Anyway I thought he’d forgotten about it, but yesterday evening on the way home he dropped in and bought “The last one”, and I arrived this morning to find it sitting on my desk. Lovely jubly!

Here’s a few photos. It all seems pretty accurate, although I’m guessing this model is based on an early version because its sporting a red stripe not the famous green, plus it doesn’t have the front spoiler that is seen in many photos of the later incarnations. The box it came in dates it at 1969, and Group44 were racing these until the mid 70s. I like the ‘Bob Tullius’ detail on the middle photo. Quite suprising to find this in T.K.Maxx I reckon, maybe ‘Solido’ models had a surplus, or maybe they’ve gone bust!

The Starter: The weekend before last was supposed to be spent tarting about with the GT6 to make it nice and comfortable and friendly to drive down to Cornwall for a week with the misses.  That would include refitting the boot boards and carpets, tuning the carbs and having a general clean up, doing some rewiring etc. That was kiboshed about an hour after I started work when the solenoid blew/broke, resulting in a constantly engaged starter and mangled pinion spring. Lovely.  Tim Bancroft kindly offered to try and fetch me a new starter and solenoid while he was up at Canleys the following morning, but unfortunately they had neither in stock! Thankfully James Carruthershad both a newish starter and a brand new spitfire solenoid he could sell me, so after picking them up on Saturday night by sunday lunchtime I was back to where I’d left of Friday night. I had time that afternoon to re-fit the boot boards and then had to go out.

Cornwall: So Tuesday night after work we drove down to mothers place near Bath in a highly (un)tuned car! We got there, but it wasn’t the gentlest of journeys. The next morning I balanced the carbs out a bit, and set the idle a bit better and we continued for a further 200 odd miles down to lands-end. Once we were there I did a bit more carb fiddling and thought it was running ok. There was however a terribly rich smell of petrol, and on Saturday I spent a bit of time trying to see what it was at my aunt’s place in St.Ives. Her next-door neighbour kindly provided a really good Snap-On timing light which revealed that the timing was set at about 30 degrees BTDC! He couldn’t see how it even ran as well as it did like that. We returned that to about 15BTDC at 1000rpm, but I still need to check what that figure should be. After that I leaned out the carbs and reset the choke and went for a drive along the coast. The difference was amazing, so much more power and pull up hills etc, and less of a smell, although its still there. When I got back the next-door neighbour noticed that the head gasket is blowing a little tiny bit from one of the front corners! crap… I can’t afford that before the 10CR so I’ll just hope it holds out…
From there we drove 100 ish miles back to Exeter to stay with some friends, and GT ran nicely!

Economy: On Sunday as we left Exeter I filled up with 30 litres of V-Power (GT LOVES V-Power), and when we got home that was just about gone. So by my calculations (well google maps) that’s 203 miles… so that makes the journey 30MPG! no way… and I was foot to the floor most of the way home. On the RBRR we got 25MPG, so it seems that removing a carb and fixing the timing was worth it, literally!

I’ve had a Silva C58 car compass sat in the drawer for about a year, meaning to fit it when I had a spare half an hour. Several guys in the club have these fitted directly to the dashboard, but I didn’t fancy the idea of making 3 holes in the dash, especially if the compass ever breaks or gets removed. Where I wanted to put the compass was exactly where the Ash Tray was so seeing that I don’t smoke I thought the tray might as well be converted to hold the Silva - Here’ how:

Here’s the Original ashtray. I don’t know if this goes for everyone, but in my car the tray fits in very tight, so will provide a sold mounting basis. I prised it out gently with a screwdriver taking care not to bend the esges upwards. If this fails it could be tapped up from underneath.

The one weak point in the tray is the lid. I did think about just screwing the compass mount to the lid, a 5 min job, but even though it snaps shut, it’s not rigid enough to hold the compass solidly. So I drilled out the 2 little rivets that hinge the lid, and also the riveted in spring (not shown).

A new ‘lid’ (not an opening one) needed to be made so I decided to use some copper clad glass fibre board (as used for PCB’s and available at any electronics store, single or double sided). It’s very rigid and easy to work with, and although it’s not cheap in comparison to plastic sheeting, it will only cost a quid or so for this much.

To get the board to the right size I measured it, scored the board with a Stanley knife, then ’snapped’ it in the workmate. The board was then quickly filed to the correct size and the corners radiused. Being Glass Fibre the file just cuts through it in seconds producing a lot of dust, so I suppose that the health conscious fellow might want to wear a dust mask. The bracket was then taped to the board and drilled in place with clearance holes for an M3 machine screw.

When it came to screwing the bracket to the board I wanted it to be removable - relatively easily - and also reusable, so self-tappers were out. Instead I keyed the copper surface around the holes and used some metal-fixing epoxy to glue a couple of  M3 nuts in place. It’s important to do this WITH the machine screws in place, and also to make sure the screw rotates freely after about 10 mins just before the epoxy has gone off.

The board was a good fit… but not perfect, so I used some PVA (the waterproof sort) along the edges. This was an after thought, so you might notice that in the photos below it’s not been applied yet. The PVA dries clear and after 24 hours its very hard so can be sanded back to a smooth surface. A better, but messier choice of adhesive would be some sort of two-part epoxy. I was just being lazy using PVA.

And here is the bracket screwed on, and the compass reattached. One thing that isn’t shown in these photos (although you can see it in the ‘glue’ photo) is the hole for the wires that I drilled in the bracket base. When the wires are fed down this hole  they can be brought out the base of the ashtray again through the old spring rivet holes, nice and neat like! So that’s it.. not terribly difficult and probably not even worth photographing. When I get a moment I’ll take a shot of it after it was sprayed black and put back in the car. Please leave a comment if this nearly bored you to death!

After a very informative thread last month on the Club Triumph forum I decided to loose one of my 3 carbs. The car came with 3 CD150’s bolted to some custom steel manifolds, but certain erudite club members persuaded me that 3 SU or Stromberg carbs on a 6 pot system was never going to perform properly.
So… the suggestion was to switch back to the standard manifold (sourced by Moordale - cheers!) and then - if neccesary - change the needles. So last week I bolted the ‘new’ setup in place. I had to use some odd shaft couplings I got sent as a sample a while back, but they seem to be doing the trick for now. The carbs are not tuned yet at all since they were rebuilt, I’ve only set the throttle stops and choke up enough so that it starts and runs. I’m quite pleased to have the original manifold in place actually as it means that the proper heater pipes and routing can be used again - up until now it was using some copper pipe and lots of hose and clips!

Even in its poor state of tune, the car and I went for some blasting about Potters Bar on the weekend - I tell you it makes me GRIN like a fool every moment I’m driving it! When I got back to the house Nikki observed, as she has before: “I wish I could make you smile like that”!

This was sent to me by my Mum recently. She spotted it in some magazine and promptly cut it out and posted it. Click on the link/image to read the letter that accompanied the photo. Imagine if we could still do this on such a small place. I guess with the huge increase in the amount of cars about and planes in the air, the environmental impact and fuel costs, its never going to be an option again. It would add an interesting and quite exciting angle to events like the 10CR if we all got flown to the continent (and as I hate flying it’d probably mean that I flatly refused to do the event!)

I had a bit of a shed ’sort out’ today. It was like my own little Krypton Factor task, trying to fit more into a space than it can possibly hold, and i fear that the next person to open the shed door (probably Nikki) will be set upon by a host of tools, plant pots and spares!

Anyway my main reason for attacking the junk was to retrieve the GT6 passenger seat - replaced with James C’s recliner for the RBRR - and also some new engine valances and cold air pipes which need refitting before the 10CR. No sooner had I chucked the seat on the grass than Sushi claimed it for her afternoon nap.

As mentioned before the carbs are in a state - mainly problems with the linkages - so last night I went and took them off. After a strip down its become apparent that one of the floats is pierced (it has petrol in it still!) and also one of the threaded holes in the main body is stripped. Here they are (left) after a good clean (in biological washing powder). I’ll order up some new screws and gaskets from Canleys asap. The links are very loose and worn, so I need to think about how to replace whats there with something a bit more solid….