Triumph

Day 3 - Yup, busted diff mount and don’t forget your chores.

And so it begins…

So, as part of my new Triumph purchase I’ve made an internal commitment to myself that I will ALWAYS put the house and my wife and all that ‘real-life’ stuff first. These cars can eat up not only your bank account but your relationships and lifestyles along with them!

Towards that I have a list of things to finish up before I am even allowing myself to do an initial assessment including running new gas lines for a gas dryer, crown mouldings in the office, hanging pictures etc etc etc. Lots of fun stuff in and of itself but with that TR6 sitting next to me while I cut crown moulding.. well, I find it motivating to move even quicker then I normally would

Day 2 and a real inspection

Enough about me, lets talk TR6. Last night (Day 2!) I moved the TR6 into the driveway so that I could wrangle my new Dryer into place and connect the gas line (failed to connect, damn fittings are the wrong size). I also used the opportunity to further clean the garage up and get things properly situated. Bonus! Getting rid of my electric dryer freed up a 220V outlet. The wiring will need to be upgraded to support a 4 prong outlet and more juice but its a good infrastructure if I need to do any welding. Hooray!

Once I was done I hopped into the TR6 to pull it into the garage and found myself pulling it OUT OF THE DRIVEWAY. It was like some Star Trek tractor beam grabbed me and forced me to drive around the block.. But the car seemed hesitant, not very forceful and generally not right.

Busted differential mount and always check the e-brake

Somewhere along this drive I notice that everytime I shift I hear a loud ‘THUNK!’ from beneath the passenger side of the rear axle.. Crap! Its either a bad U-Joint, something in the suspension or, more then likely, a broken/worn diff-mount. Not a huge issue, this is standard kit with the TR6, the diff-mount was a horrible design to start with and never could handle the 6-pack very well.

Hey, if thats the only welding this baby needs then I am in a good spot.

Since the car is not running that well I get home and park it. Then I realize, THE E-BRAKE WAS ON THE ENTIRE TIME! Well, that’ll kill your performance..

Lessons? Turn off the e-brake and hurry up with the house stuff, I have a lot of inspection to do so I can assess the deeper state of this beast.

Day Summary

I did get my seatbelt adjusted properly. This car has the old style 3 point static belts so they are some effort to get situated. I was amazed though, the belts have their original plastic cover over the bolts in the rear. Incredible! This car is so complete it amazes me.

Did a bit of surface inspection and noted the following things:

• My wiper motor moves to much in its rubber mount so the blades never retract back to their resting position when you use it. If you manually hold the motor in place its fine. FIX: Bid on a new bracket on ebay for $5.

• Looks like there is some light surface rust a few places when you look real closely. FIX: Sand and primer, save the car!

• I need a new hood and they cost a lot of money. Yuck but i knew that was on the agenda

• We may be able to salvage the front valence and spoiler but I won’t know until I get them off the car.

• Rear IRS mounts to frame look nice and solid from here but we really need to get it on jack stands to find the truth.

• Need a hard-top here in Half Moon Bay given that we get approx 3.5 days of summer annually, trolling on ebay actively.

• I still can’t get that damn soft-top to extend all the way to the windshielf lock points. Either the top is so shrunken that it can’t extend or there is a deeper configuration issue.

Well, thats that, hopefully in a week or so I’ll get to start digging in more and really finding out what this beast will cost to restore. The big dilemma now is Restore to original or Autocross?

Ack, choices..