Looks like the Rover has attracted a bidder on eBay, so if everything goes according to Hoyle, the car should have a new owner soon. There is still a day or two left in the auction, which can be found here.
Category: Past Indiscretions (Page 8 of 25)
Valuable, if hard, lessons learned
For the time being, I’m going to finish the GT as originally planned and put it into “daily” service. However, I do need to lose a car, and the SD1 should probably go. I wanted to drive one for awhile, and can definitely see the appeal, but the GT is more my speed. The Rover has been in daily service all winter and has proven itself to be a very nice machine. (I can never get over the tight turning circle for a relatively large car…I think you could put my Ford truck on full lock and easily drive the Rover around inside the circling Ford without any danger of hitting it.)
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UPDATE: The stupid thing is NOT fixed. Grrr. Next step…but back to the original post:
The Triumph 955i’s misfire has been cured with the swap in of a new coil pack. This is just a bit distressing as the bike has less than 3000 miles on it, you’d think the life span would be measured in tens of thousands of miles…but maybe just shy of a decade is the other expiration date. Trying to figure out which cylinder was misfiring was a puzzle–the ODB reader thought the bike was running just fine even when it clearly wasn’t. A friend reminded me I had an infrared thermometer, and the solution was at my fingertips.
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I have the leaky stuff with wheels on back on the newly-finished side of the shop building (aka “Rusty Keep”). I’m also fixing a minor paint flaw on the roof of the GT. There must have been a bit of contamination on the metal when it was sprayed. In all, a spot about the size of a pencil eraser was affected, right near the back edge of the roof.
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Mark Jones of Britsport of Seattle is almost ready to paint the E-Type and sent me these photos today. I’m going to drop by the shop to peek at it on Friday. Very exciting. I guess I should get the rest of my parts out of storage!
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The problematic alternator on the SD1 finally burned out–but I found a rebuilt Range Rover alternator from the late 1980s on eBay for $80 and figured “what the heck.” It fits just fine, and while there is an extra connector on the back (I think for a tach on the RR) it seems to work fine. Sure beats $300 to have the original Motorola rebuilt. Of course, whenever you do a job like this, you run into the previous owner’s bodges…
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To start the new year, and with not much else going on, here’s a set of photos of my long-sold 1966 Coupe. I have the hankering to get one of these again but looking at current prices don’t see how that would happen without a lot of good luck. If you want to trade yours for a nicely restored ’67 MGB GT, just let me know. (I think a ‘winky face’ is supposed to follow that!)
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This shot, taken with my cruddy-in-low-light older Casio camera, was from last July en route to the All British Field Meet. I was last aboard that early ferry and so got to park back a bit from the other cars on the boat.
It’s shiny (tacky!) chrome and ridiculously over-sized…but my new air cleaner actually filters the air going into the engine on the SD1. Found on eBay for not much money, surely it reminds the thoughtful viewer of the triangular Rover badge on the front of the car. (Surely! Well, maybe I’ll try to find a Rover-viking-ship decal to decorate it.)
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It’s fairly surprising that there isn’t a contiguous pool of oil covering the floor entirely on this side of the new shop building, especially from the prodigiously leaking pair comprising the SD1 and Reg the MGB roadster. (The BSA leaks, but that doesn’t count; the GT doesn’t leak at all.)
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