2011, Brakes and Wheels

So its 2011.  There is the new project parked in the garage and my original "everyday" TR7 is parked outside under a nice cover. Not ideal but its only a temporary arrangement isn't it ?
I wasn't quite ready to really start work on the project but had started to strip stuff off and get rid of some of the scrap items like the ruined carpets etc.

In the meantime I regarded the "everyday" car as a kind of test bed for stuff I planned to use on the new one and one of the first things that came along was a set of 4 pot brakes.  They were advertised on Ebay starting at £50 but with no pictures and a vague description..  When I contacted the bloke I found he was not very helpful but said he had taken them off a TR7 rally car and they were complete and ready to bolt straight on.  What to do?
I thought £50 was worth a gamble,  so I placed a bid and was amazed to find out a couple of days later they were mine!
Turns out it was the small Rimmers upgrade kit using Princess 4 pot callipers and vented discs of 244mm diameter and 20mm thick. It would have cost at least £250 to buy so that was a good deal and they went onto the car.

Princess 4-pots fitted

 

The handbrake on my everyday TR7 had always been poor so I decided it was worth having it apart to sort out.   The rear brakes have a self-adjuster mechanism but it hardly ever works properly and that was also going to mess up the handbrake operation.  I had a new kit to replace all the adjuster mechanism in stock (another Ebay purchase) so this was the time to use it.

Standard wheels on a TR7 are 13" diameter and many TR7 brake upgrades need bigger wheels to fit them inside, so when a new set of 14" x 6" Minilite style turned up at a very good price they went into stock as well.  The wheels needed taper fitting nuts so I had to get some of those to match.

New "Minilite" style wheels fitted

 Replacement wheels are a bit of a concern on TR7's.  The standard wheels are hub-centric meaning that they are a close fit on the boss in the centre of the hub to give them their accurate location.  The wheelnuts do not locate the wheels they just hold them on the hub.
Most replacement wheels are located by the studs and can sometimes cause vibration problems if the wheels are not centred accurately.  Time would tell if mine were OK..

2011, LED dash bulbs, new propshaft

2011 was going to be a pottering about year and when my Mum died in the summer it made everything else pretty well unimportant.  She lived in Stroud at the family home of almost 50 years and it turned out we had accumulated an amazing amount of "stuff" which needed sorting out. Not a job you want to do.
I also had lots of my old car stuff stored in her garage which would have to move. I found things I had long forgotten about.

.............................................................................................................................

Earlier in the year however, I had decided that I wanted to improve the dash lighting. There had been a lot of talk on the forums about LED bulbs so I thought they would be worth a try.  Its an easy job but you have to take the instrument cluster out which isn't.

I actually looked at the workshop manual to find some of the screws that hold the dash together and to be honest it was not too difficult in the end.  Fiddly and frustrating yes,  but not too difficult. The standard bulbs are pretty small and the LED ones are even smaller so you might need your specs on for this job.

Result is much better instrument lighting at night and highly recommended if you are considering it.

...........................................................................................................................

Driving the car about I found that a previously small vibration had started to get more noticeable. I had a spare propshaft on the new car so tried swapping that but it didn't make it much better. Swapping one old propshaft with another old propshaft was never really going to prove anything so I bit the bullet and got a new one from James Paddock Ltd.  They were cheaper than the usual TR7 sources so I guess they had some stock they wanted to shift - lucky for me.