Friday 21 August 2015

20th August 2015, MOT

Just back from the garage with a nice new MOT certificate so good to go for another year.  No real issues with the car, the tester just made a couple of observations.

1. The mixture is very slightly rich so the SU's just want to be adjusted up a flat or two.

2. The driver side front wheel bearing has a little too much free play but not enough to fail.

Back home and legal for another year.

The all-important proof!
Item 1. may well be down to when I changed the carb mountings and replaced them with aluminium ones.  I wanted to let it all settle down and will now see if I can set them up properly.

Item 2. I have been looking for the cause of a slight flutter on the brake pedal and found the drivers side has about 10 thou run-out in the disc so need to take that apart and clean it all up anyway so can fix the free play as part of the job.

Sunday 16 August 2015

10th August 2015, More front suspension stuff.

When I was doing the subframe I thought the bottom arm ball joints didn't look too good so decided it would be worth having a good look at them after the Cotswold Show. It would also be a good opportunity to do the anti-roll bar as well.   This was another little job which turned out to be a good idea but getting them off proved to be hard work.  The two bolts that secure the steering arm to the bottoms of the struts were VERY tight and it took an 18" breaker bar with as much force as I could put on it to move them. They were hard work all the way to the end, one flat at a time. This was caused by the shoulder of the bolts being very tight, almost seized, where they go through the steering arms. Needless to say they went back nicely cleaned up and with plenty of copper grease!!

Next thing being difficult was the bottom ball joints where they fit into the struts. These had old style castellated nuts which were an odd non metric size with split pins.  One of the nuts refused to budge until I used a chisel start it but they finally came apart.  You can see from the picture the ball joints with the dried up grease that they definitely needed doing but had not developed enough play to give them away yet.

These have seen better days.
With the anti-roll bar off I found the ends inside the bushes where it goes though the bottom arms was also badly rusted and it had actually reduced the diameter quite noticeably so that bar went into the scrap bin as well.

"New" and nicely painted bottom arms and anti-roll bar went back on with the almost new polybushes I had saved from my old car.  I had the usual battle to get the bottom arms lined up in the subframe but a handy 2" ratchet strap pulled them in and sorted that problem.

With the front all back together a brief road test felt good so I called in at the local KwikFit depot to get the tracking alignment checked.  I thought it was off a little as the steering wheel was now slightly off-centre when driving in a straight line. KwikFit have a brand new very expensive specialised ramp system with a sender unit that fits on each wheel and links to a computerised display. All fantastic stuff but you have to tell it what kind of car its testing and the TR7 did not appear on its menu.  There is also no kind of manual option.  I spent about 10 minutes with the operator looking though all the makes and we eventually found Triumph cars listed under Rover and sure enough found the TR7 listed there. Only minor adjustment was required but they struggled to find a spanner to fit the TR7 steering arm nuts which proved to be a non metric size. No surprise there then!


Sunday 2 August 2015

1st August 2015, Gloucestershire Vintage & Country Extravaganza

The Gloucestershire Vintage & Country Show is advertised as Britain's second largest steam fair after the very famous one in Dorset. After spending hours looking around it yesterday and still not seeing half of it I would say that is most probably true - and its less than 15 miles from my home. We had 12 cars on display from our GLAVON group of the TR Register and I must say they all looked pretty good, even my TR7 which got quite few complimentary remarks during the day.

My TR7 is right in the middle of our club display

 Just to give you an idea of the scale of the show, I counted around 100 stationery engines all chugging away and about 100 vintage tractors, then there were the old buses and the lorries and the steam engines etc etc etc. Then there was a guy was asking you to bet on ferret racing and more stalls trying to sell us stuff than we could count.  It just went on and on.  Must go again next year and be prepared for some serious browsing!

Nice old Marshall tractor.
Wonderful steam roller.




Lovely row of Bedford buses
RA Lister sheep shear set, made here in Dursley.

RA Lister stationery engine

Superb radio controlled model tank - it almost ran over me!

This guy dropped in as well.