5th May 2015, Carburettor mounts and exhaust clonk

After the St.Roses car show I thought it was time to have a look at the rubber carburettor mountings. These are common to most TR7's and are a well known problem area. The original production items were good quality rubber and lasted for ages but modern replacement parts seem to use inferior rubber and fail quite quickly.  This can cause air leaks and poor running so needs fixing.

Rubber carb mounting on its way to failure.

(There is a similar problem with engine and gearbox mountings where the modern replacements are much too hard and cause noise transmission into the car.  I was lucky enough to be able to re-use some old stock original ones which are much nicer.)

The Triumph Dolomite Club sells some very nicely made solid aluminium mountings to replace the rubber ones and I bought a set of these together with some more replacement spark plug tubes as mentioned in a previous post.

Replacement carburettor mountings

Fitting them was not difficult but I have upset the carb balance so need to re-tune the engine !

Nice and shiny

New mounts in place

Next job on the list was to sort out an annoying clonk from the exhaust. Its a very nice fully stainless system that I got from S & S Preparations and it was touching somewhere at the rear of the car but not all of the time. All the mountings were OK so I checked all the clamps and went out on a test drive - nothing at first then lots of clonks after a few miles.  Looking again I realised that when the system gets hot it was hitting the towing eye on the rear chassis rail.   This was soon sorted out with the angle grinder and it now has plenty of clearance !

Modified towing eye.

15th April, 2015. Window winders and more tidying

I have had dealings with doors on several cars over the years and always disliked working on them and I can show you the scars to prove why.  There is never quite enough space to get your hands in and those edges always seem to be razor sharp.

The side windows on the TR7 have always rattled and the passenger window winder has got progressively worse so it was time to fix them.  A while ago I bought a complete Rimmers window overhaul kit for less than half price from a guy who was moving to New Zealand, so I had all the bits ready.  I also had the winder mechanisms from the old red car which seem to be as new so proposed to use them rather than the new Rimmers ones which I can sell later.

The rattle was easily fixed because it was just the usual problem with the felt having slipped down the guide.  I used a new felt but also added a bit of glue behind it to be sure it didn't slip again. I also followed the tips in the guide written by Mike Rotherham on the TR7/8 Forum.   

 http://www.forum.triumphtr7.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=20318

The guide was a great help in advising the sequence of how to get the winder mechanism back in and the rollers into their guides.  Even following it the expletives were frequent but it all went into place eventually and operated nicely until I found that one of the rollers (the white one) had come out of its track.  I put it back but it came out again when the window was fully down.  Bugger !!

Then I remembered some polystyrene blocks I found in the bottom of the doors in the old red car. Could there be any connection?
Bingo!
That block was there to limit how far the window can drop and prevents the roller coming out.

Old red car polystyrene block

My new version showing how it limits drop

Thinking about it since I remember that the winder mechanisms usually have a tab bent over to stop them going off the end of the teeth so I wondered if the winder mechanism I used did not have that done?  Its hard to see down inside the door and I don't want to take them apart to find out but next time I go in there we may find out.

The other problem was with the outer weather strip. The old ones have some kind of stiffener built in but new ones do not and are much more floppy.  I found it impossible to get the spring clips to work on the new one and ended up putting the old strip back on for now.

16th April - Brake Fluid Leak
I noticed was a small puddle of fluid under the car below the oil filter area. At first I thought the T piece or oil pressure gauge pipe was leaking but a quick check showed it was brake fluid. I thought that maybe I had done something wrong when I fitted new seals in the master cylinder which would be really bad news but then I noticed some fluid ON TOP of the master cylinder so it must be a reservoir seal leaking. It was a quick job to take the reservoir off, clean up the seals and refit with some red brake grease to aid the fitting. Problem solved, but it has also left the paintwork below the area damaged so it will need tidying up again.

New servo and master cylinder with leak fixed!

Spark Plug Tubes
The day before the Corinium Run I was putting together a toolkit and thought it would be a good idea to check I had the correct spark plug socket but when I tried it in the engine I found the plug tube was half full of oil and a quick check showed that three of the tubes had oil in them. 

That's oil down in there!

Evidence of previous owners attempt at sealing with silicone

You can see in the pictures that someone had previously attempted to seal the tubes using silicone and it must have worked for a while because I had not had the leak before. The rubber seals on the old tubes were rock hard and useless but I had a set of replacement tubes ready for building my new engine so these had to be called into service now. Not a difficult job but a couple of hours doing something I hadn't expected to do.

Old and new tubes for comparison