TSOA EMR...

BOB's been getting fairly typical usage recently - weekend trips out into the woods, mainly. We had a 'fun' incident the weekend before last, when an errant branch disconnected the fuel line underneath the car. Fortunately we were stopping 1km down the track anyway. Just as we pulled over the engine cut out... I thought it was something ignition related, but the stink of fuel and trickling noise gave the problem away. We didn't lose too much fuel. I guess the 30 year old fuel line clips are a bit brittle, so i've replaced some of them with cushion clamps now.

Last weekend we decided to try our first Triumph Sportscar Owners Australia (TSOA) Victoria EMR... the Sunday Early Morning Run. Having a quick checkover the car on Saturday night I noticed with some annoyance the almost complete lack of clutch fluid in the reservoir! Topped it right up and had a bit of a poke around and decided it was obviously a leaking slave cylinder seal ... but a very slow leak. It can wait.

Next morning it seems that the poking around had filled the bloody thing with air. Bleeding kit tucked away in some box somewhere or other, so a quick spanner to the nipple let some air out and the clutch was back to life. Phew ... made it to the start of the run 10 minutes late - but these things never run on time. The local Daimler club was at the same meeting point which added some confusion, but there were a lot of tasty looking Triumphs all just setting off. A kindly TR8 (4.3l) owner who was clearly hanging at the back said we could follow him - probably a bit concerned we might not be able to keep up.

So we headed off towards Ballarat on the highway behind three droptop TR8s and a Porsche 911 (?). I'm always a bit reticent about these sorts of runs, concerned that they'll be a bit tame and slow. First impressions were that speed limits were being treated with just enough respect (that's good) and we made reasonable time to the end of the highway stretch before heading north up the good roads. Lots of nice fast twisty stuff and the TR8s didn't hold us up even if they were a little slow up the hills :-)
A nice coffee stop in Daylesford was the first chance to see just how many TR4s, 6s, 7s, 8s, Stags and even a GT6 (rare in Australia) had turned up. No sidescreens to be seen. I got talking to Barry (4a), Jim (Stag) and Geoff (7 in excruciatingly bright yellow). Barry is the first person i've ever met who unwittingly bought a car with overdrive. There was an unusual wiring set up and the seller didn't even know it was installed - it was only discovered on a rebuild (which has included some nice mods too).
Forgot the camera (again!) hence the dodgy phone shots.

The rest of the drive was less exciting, just the run into a festival at Ballarat. But it was interesting to see people's reaction to the Saloon - normally a bit looked down on as they're not 'sportscars', these guys seemed happy to see it, even if it was a bit scabbier than most of the TRs (yes even the wedges were 'pretty'). The TR8 owner was impressed by its 'go' and one of the owners said it sounded wonderful. I might have a crack at some sprints or regularities in the new year to see if I can soften them further on the saloon.

... and the slave cylinder seal held out and can be changed next weekend.

Beating the RBRR Blues

I can see this is going to be a biannual pattern - "watching" the RBRR message diary and wising I was there. The build up on the Club Triumph forum is agonising, although it's nice not to have to deal with the stress. Driving around Britain in 48 hours in an old car seems like a good old-fashioned thing to do. It pulls out some survival instincts even from the most unlikely people. You spend half of the time with all your senses strained listening and looking for bits falling off your car.

So, what could I do to replace the RBRR this year? Plan A was to go to my local pub's German beer festival. It starts at midday and goes on into the wee hours. A friend from Hobart was all set to fly up and join in. But he missed his flight. So to kill a few hours I thought I'd have a bit of a check over BOB and do a few little things I haven't got around to



1) Why is it the car takes a bit longer to start than it should? I've always meant to check the starter motor wiring out... and I did today. Bloody good thing I did too!


Three wires had badly cracked insulation - difficult to spot tucked away underneath the manifold. I patched them up and now the car starts immediately. I wish I'd checked that out 3 years ago.

2) Carb needles. I'd been recommended some different profile needles. Here's the chart I knocked up via James Carruther's SU Needle Compare-o-rama.

I was running on the BFG needles (the orange line on the chart) and finding things a bit lumpy. So I ordered some BFZ (the green line)... whacked them in this afternoon.

Instant improvement - smoother idle, better driving at low rpm and more refined acceleration. It used to "wharrrrrp" from 3k rpm up, but now it just pulls straight through to 6k with very little fuss. I must say it's a lot less hassle changing SU needles than the late 1.5 inch Strombergs I had on the GT6. Didn't even need to adjust the idle.



It's not easy for me to really try the car out where we live - it's a long way to the nearest fast road... so tomorrow's Sunday trip to the hills will be extra fun. I get to try out the needles on the fast road and the bushes on the dirt roads. Let's hope the rest of the day at the beer festival doesn't give me too much of a hangover!

Bum Steer

Basically the passenger side rear tyre wears out quicker than it should, the car sits a bit wonky to that side, the springs bend in that direction, and there's a wicked oversteer in hard right hand corners which just lets go on dirt roads (Dave Sideways would pee his pants) ... there's only one thing left to change at the backend, or maybe two.

• New springs front and back - check


• Good dampers all round - check


• Polybushed rear end - check


• New driveshafts (Tri-Dats) - check


• Diff. mounting checked - check

So, I pulled my old sub-frame mounts off for a look-see and they're not perfect, and one is definitely worse than the other.

The reconditioned ones are considerably better looking!

Before I put them on I had to get the tape measure out, take a deep breath, cross my fingers, pray to the East (or North North West?) and hope that I'd not been driving around in a twisted orange monster for the last few years. The measurements said it was ok ... but I'm not convinced by the accuracy, so I chucked the new ones on, went for a quick test-drive (including sliding around a roundabout in 1st gear a few times). A few more drives to settle things down and I'll take another deep breath and some more measurements. Fingers crossed.

Oh, those crazy Aussies!

I used to think that the Aussie sense of humour was 'drizabone', and that this meant I was surrounding by sublime intentional wordplay and ironic references. But after a while I realised it's not an automatic cultural inheritance. There are those who get the jokes and those who are the jokes.

An embodiment of this is the road signs. There are some good intentional pisstakes, like this one from the south west coast of Victoria, spotted a couple of years ago:





Then there are the ones that I'd love to think are intentional, but somehow reckon just weren't really thought out...



Like this one in Landsborough, Queensland:





Or this in South Australia:



A common tactic is to use road signs to get you to stop and buy a coffee in out of the way towns ... but sometimes they employ some wit to get you to pull over (not sure what's so wrong with Galahs by the way):







They can get be a bit stern about it, too:

They can't think up their own names, though - lots of settlements are named after places in The Old Country.

They're all budding Cub Scouts, really - Be Prepared and all that (sorry for reposting this one):

New Brakes!

Check these out!

A bit lightweight for BOB of course... but it is time for some new brake shoes on the rear, so I got some of these ready to go. If it ever stops raining for long enough to get the wheels off I might get them fitted.

Big flat and dry

... that's South Australia apparently.

Actually there turned out to be a lot more to it.

We had terrible problems with the car, innumerable breakdowns and ended up sleeping in the car in the desert out of mobile range for a week waiting for someone to come by who could help us.

No, not really. We had a great time, BOB behaved immaculately, embarrassed lots of moderns and returned a reasonable 28mpg most of the time, despite being full to the gunwales.

We dropped in on Nick (G-Man on the CT forum) in Adelaide for a night, drank his beer, talked Triumphs and drank more of his beer. Nick's Saloon was having Pi surgery the day we visited and his Mk2 GT6 was hitched up for a bit of rear end attention as you can see.

He started it up for me anyway - sounded fantastic. This car features the coolest James Bond kill switch I've ever heard of... but I'll keep it secret I think.

BOB is now pulling like a train which is handy for overtaking road trains, actually:


Not all of our trip involved driving in BOB, though. We met up with the in-laws for a week, and ventured north into the dirt roads of the desert in their well-kitted out Navarra. Jacques let me have a few drives... good fun on some of the gnarlier roads.


A useful car to have when you've got road signs like this:



We did get off-road a bit in BOB when we were on our own, though... there were just a couple of bottom-scrapes, and some big mud splashes! I can think of a few Triumph owners who'd be devestated to see an engine bay looking like this.

That's it for now ... I'll put a bit more in to The Editor and see if it crops up in Club Torque at some point down the track.

BOB Rocket

BOB went in for its op. a couple of weeks ago now. The MK1 Pi engine was installed along with a recon. box and o/d and carbs were tweaked to account for the new set-up (BFGs for now).

When I picked the car up I was rather astonished by the lumpiness of the cam. I expected a bit of snorting, but it was shaking like a junky and barking like a dog. It wasn't just loud it was positively antisocial. I took it down to an exhaust place recommended by the engine builder (Graham Westwell) to have a resonator fitted (with a 25% parts discount) and some better brackets fitted, and was very happy with the result. A little less harsh, but plenty of presence.

Graham offered a 5,000km warranty on the engine if I adhere to his running in recommendations so I thought I better stick to that. We took BOB for a good run around the eastern side of the state over the next weekend, putting down 1200km whilst staying below 3,000rpm and seeing more amazing parts of Tassie... which is just as well as we're moving to Melbourne soon.

I was amazed that the fuel consumption stayed so reasonable, 28mpg on fairly mixed speeds - and the plugs were perfect.

The car has since been back to Graham to have the oil changed, head retorqued, tappets reset, cooling system flushed and coolant added, etc. It's even better now, getting smoother all the time. We can go up to 4,000rpm now ... and between 3-4k there's an incredible added "Whhhhaaaaaaaaaarp" noise. Ok the idle is still lumpy, but it's rarely ever going to idle if I can help it. There's shed loads of torque so 1st gear is virtually redundant, but it spins up nice and fast too ... I have to keep reigning myself in - can't wait to let it rip.

I picked up a replacement central console the other day off a mate (Russell), and fitted it. The old one had got brittle and cracked as they do, but Russell has a stack of perfect ones, including a very unusual one made of a thick firm plastic with a vinyl covering... sounds shonky I know, but the moulding was perfect and it fits perfectly too and looks exactly like the original. It really looks like it's factory made but Russell says he's never come across one before. Weird.

In a couple of weeks' time we're heading off on a big drive around South Australia via Melbourne. BOB's more fun than ever so I'm looking forward to putting down some k's. Should be great.

Engine Rebuild Update

So, the camshaft's back from its regrind at Wade Cams of Victoria to 444C 105 degrees... and a load of other impressive sounding numbers which give it TR5 characteristics apparently. Refaced cam followers and a regrind cost a total of $181 ... 85 quid or thereabouts.

It certainly looks better, anyway.

I took it up to the guy who's building the engine and he rubbed his hands with glea. All the engine parts are with the machine shop to do their bits, and new old stock vandervell bearings have only to wait a few more days before they're put to work. It's shaping up that I'll be able to drop the car in and pick it up a few days later without even missing a weekend's driving... fingers crossed.

Transplant time

We're planning a trip over to South Australia for most of July, so I thought it might be a good idea to get BOB checked out. I put it into a mechanic I trust asking him to have a look at a few things that were bugging me (noisy tappets, rear brakes, etc).

It's thirty years old this year, and has turned 125,000 km on the clock, so perhaps I shouldn't be that surprised to get a less than glowing report on BOB's health. It turned out that compression on one cylinder was worryingly low, and was pointing to problems with piston rings. Given the age of the engine it seemed best to take the plunge and get the whole thing rebuilt, and throw in a reconditioned gearbox for good measure.

I've spent enough time reading about other people's rebuilds to be a bit daunted by the whole thing. I've had lots of nice ideas about how to upgrade things for a little more power, but wasn't really intending on doing it for a while - and then to spend a bit of time, research it and collect the right parts. But we don't have time for that if we want to take BOB around SA in 6 week's time. So the 2.7 pi with roller rockers, top notch exhaust manifold, blah de blah will have to wait for now... I'm only going for the easy and cheaper stuff, based around a Mk1 Pi block and head.

The engine was sourced from another Hobart Triumph guy - Glen Johnson - who had it spare. He'd been told it had done minimal kms since a rebuild before he took it out of a wreck, but he'd never opened it up to see what it was like inside. Seeing as it was a Mk1 block and head I was hoping it would pop in with a new headgasket and save me a small fortune. Head off revealed the "recent rebuild" was done by somebody who probably shouldn't have bothered. Glazed bores, heavily carbonised valves and pistons, some weird applications of araldite, damaged cam lobes and unfortunately not the most desirable crank.

Cam Lobes





I'd been agonising about what to go for in the new engine, but this kind of helped me decide priorities. The machine shop can give everything a good clean up, the cam reground (TR5 spec.) unleaded head conversion, bores honed, flywheel lightened. I would have like to have for balanced everything, too, but the budget will ony go so far.

We're still using BOB in the meantime (in fact I'm tempted to thrash the arse of the current engine before it comes out ... just to make sure). There's some great big Yankee ship in town (hello sailors!) at the moment, the USS Tarawa, so we had a peak from a good vantage point today - appropriately enough at the Hobart Cenotaph. According to the local rag "The 250m vessel carries 35 aircraft including AV-8B Harrier jets and Cobra, Hueys, Super Stallion and Sea Knight helicopters" ... and 3,000 American sailors, heaven forbid.

Targa Tasmania 2008

As usual i'm way behind and blogging stuff that happened last weekend. Tasmania's annual tarmac rally event came and went and we managed to catch one of the 39 stages. The rally takes the form of a five-day long tour around the State, with special stages interspersed along the way - some around the little towns and others in the sticks, but all on public roads. Although it's an amateur rally, some of the competitors are known faces. This year we had a few of the Australian Rally Championship fellas, and a certain Alister McRae (who took first place in the showroom FWD category).

The final stage of the week was in Hobart, but I wanted to try and avoid the scrum in town, and it was only a demonstration stage anyway. I fancied a whopping 47km stage three hours north of Hobart, which would have included some seriously fast sections and open views, but it would have been too much effort to make it. Instead we went to see stage 37 at Tarraleah. This stage snaked down a steep-sided forested valley past two hydro power stations, then back up the other side of the valley - a total of around 8km.

As I discovered when I picked up my programme for the event this year's field of ~300 entries had but two Triumph entries; a TR3a and Mk2 GT6. Well, by the final day it seemed that the TR had given up the ghost, but I had discovered that the GT6 was actually being driven by a UK Daily Telegraph writer and getting a bit of its own coverage back home.

We settled in at what seemed like a good spectator's corner and made cups of tea whilst the officials closed and cleared the road, then tried to get the best shots we could as a wide variety of cars of all shapes and sizes came carreering into the sharp bend we were watching - there must have been something wrong with the pace notes as more than a few locked up and struggled to negotiate things correctly.

One soon learns that one is not a sports photographer in these situations!!!



I've always had a soft spot for the Renault Spider

Peter Hall was giving it his all, although my Triumph contacts on the mainland said he'd had a diff. sent down in the week...

The race is run in reverse order, so once the slower, more interesting cars had gone and we began to get bored with a relentless stream of Evos, 911 GTs and Subarus we headed back to our own little rally car (!) and joined the Targa convoy to head to the New Norfolk lunch stop. This meant that we had half an hour or so behind a Porker GT3 and some Evos through the winding roads, which was a good laugh despite the relatively gentle pace.

The lunch stop was great, too. All the cars lined up waiting for their off, drivers and co-drivers having a relaxed chat, knowing that there were only a couple of stages left in the week. New Norfolk looked rather different to usual!

We cruised back to Hobart, and I noted the momentous occasion of overtaking Alister McRae (ok it was on a dual carriageway).

In the evening we popped down to the casino down the road from our place to see the finish line and all the cars parked up. It was dark unfortunately, so the photos are pretty ordinary, but there was a real buzz around. I was hoping to catch up with Peter Hall to see how he'd found Tassie. Ella and her sister compiled a catalogue of cars they would happily own, a selection of which are below:

This Volvo would have to win the 'noise of the day' award in my opinion and it was being driven very hard indeed.

Anyone for a Jowett?

Well, Ella is well and truly hooked now and would love to give the Targa a go one day. Of course I would, but could I ever see myself getting enough time and money to do it? Who knows...

Clutching Sexist Australians

Strange title ... sort of relevant?

I got the clutch problem sorted out in the end. A couple of hundred bucks got me a brand new replacement master cylinder. It's a modern one off the shelf rather than a NOS Stanpart job. A bit of modification to the bulkhead a customised pushrod and a couple of hours labour, and voila! So cheap, but that's Tassie! I'll stick some photos up when I get to it. It mates up to the hose I had made up for $100... so all up $300 (about 140 GBP)

Not long after I started work at a consulting engineering firm I noticed this book on a colleague's shelf. It wasn't the fascinating subject that drew my attention, nor the comparatively quiet Sydney Harbour Bridge of 1970, but the car on the spine! Brrmm brmmm - it's a Mk1 2000


They were pretty popular out here clearly, as this 'Wheels' magazine article from September 1968 explains ... and with such great style, too. "Reverse is safely out of the way of the other four, too - a consoling thought for husbands whose wives might be driving the car in their absence" - you couldn't say that today ... could you? Note that it calls the Mk1 of 1968 the Mk2 due to the slight changes that were made to the model. Confusing.

Clutching at hoses

The overdrive turned out to be an easy fix - just a connector that had broken. So I replaced that and all is well again.

I popped up to a hydraulic hose place - Enzed - on saturday morning and had a braided hose made up to replace the old plastic one I've been having issues with. First I'd had a read of Dave Powell's lengthy musings on the subject of hoses and fittings (thrilling stuff... must see if I can get membership of the Joint Industry Committee). That gave me enough info. to be dangerous, but I didn't actually need any of it - the guy at the shop just took a look at the current set-up and 5 mins later handed me the right stuff, all connectors, elbow joint, etc, for $100 ... a bit pricey for a clutch hose, but it should be good. If this doesn't solve my problems I'll be moving on to a new master cylinder.

Then I took a trip up to a Alladin's Cave to get a replacement fixed fan - decided I'm tempting fate too much with the electric - and a driver's side parcel tray. Took the time to get some photos of BOB next to Russell's matching 'S' ... spot (and stripe) the differences. Actually Russell's is considerably tidier.


Meanwhile, the Mk1 I've been thinking about is coming along nicely - with lots of attention being lavished. It looks better with Mk1 wheels on now, still needs some trim and the nose badge, plus repainted roof and touch-up.



Went out with a friend with a DV Camcorder the other week ... messed about taking some shots on some hilly roads. I spliced in an appearance from Juan in the car as he smashed the camera into his eye on a corner! Looks a bit slow, but it's interesting to see (and hear) your own car from outside. The back end is jacked up pretty high when the car's got no weight in the boot and it's diving into the corner (with Witor 160lb front springs). Sounds pretty nice though. Unfortunately this video got totally over-compressed so it's not very clear... never mind.