• Hi Guest!
    You can help ensure that British Car Forum (BCF) continues to provide a great place to engage in the British car hobby! If you find BCF a beneficial community, please consider supporting our efforts with a subscription.
    There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Subscribers don't see this gawd-aweful banner
Tips
Tips

TR2/3/3A Taking engine out, etc.

Share this page

J

JAJohn

Member
Country flag
Offline
I need advice from people who have removed an engine from a TR3. I have removed everything, apron, radiator, etc., starter, wires, tubes, etc., BUT the four bolts between transmission and drive shaft. They won't budge. What size are they? They seem slightly smaller than 9/16". Some British size? Is there a special tool to loosen?
Also, when the engine's out, how difficult to replace brake, fuel lines? The car sat in a garage since 1973.
Thanks for advice.
 
They are 9/16". Note that you need to have a wrench on both ends --nut and bolt head. If to hard to come off then previous owner may have used some locktite. I suggest that you find a box end wrench that you can fit a small pipe over to increase your leverage. You did not list the tranny mounting bolts found forward of the rear end of the tranny. Have you removed the tranny tunnel from inside the car? You will need to do that to access the tranny mounting bolts. You did not mention the clutch slave cylinder hose that also needs to be removed.
Of course if you only want the engine out then you can leave the tranny in place and just remove the engine. You will need to support the tranny from underneath once the tranny is lose of the engine.
Note that most all of the bolts and nuts on a TR3 are inch not metric or whitworth.
 
charleyf said:
They are 9/16"... Note that most all of the bolts and nuts on a TR3 are inch not metric or whitworth.
Click to expand...

But those bolts could have been replaced with something non-original so use whatever gets a tight fit on them.

Is it possible to get an impact wrench on them with a long extension running along the side of the propshaft (wrench would be back near the diff)? That is how I have removed the flange nut but of course I was able to get the propshaft out of the way.
 
“Note that most all of the bolts and nuts on a TR3 are inch not metric or whitworth.”

New guy here. This quote explains a LOT! I’ve been banging a 11mm on all day wondering why it fits so tight!
Who would have thought?
 
I also learned the hard way. When I got my second TR3 ( I never had any money for tools with the first one) I went out and bought a set of metric wrenches. I used them for at least a year until somebody enlightened me.
 
There are a few BA bolts on the TR3. 2BA and 4BA is all I seem to remember. That is a bolt size used by Auto electrical companies.

The rest of them are SAE.

David
 
I’m sure this has been hashed over thru the years but WHY is the hardware NOT metric??
This doesn’t quite make sense to me.
Was the nut and bolt factory destroyed in the war?? Was it cheaper to buy SAE from the States?
Does anyone know?
I’m just curious really.

Thanks, Joe
 
These vehicles were made in England who only used Imperial mesurments which includes SAE and whitworth ,feet and inches and miles the same as the USA and at the time Australia and some of us older folk have never got past it. I know how big a 2x4 is but if it is referred to in metric I have to convert it back to feet and inches to work out how big it is.

Graham
 
The French triumphed the metric system. Our TR's are pre-French revolution. Not really...England and the US were just 2 of the holdouts.
 
Since 1973 wow these cars are everywhere, I love it. I found one that had been off the road since 1975 and taken apart in 1975, but the guy wanted too much. Anyways, the story I always got about why the bolts are in inches was the English wanted the American market, so it was done that way. Graham lives there and I would listen to his story.
 
Feet and inches is the Imperial (ie British) system of measurement. That's why these cars are not metric.
 
The only reliable method I've come up with, after several unreliable attempts, is using 9/16" box wrenches on the bolts and nuts - an open end wrench easily slips, and also easily deforms the heads of both of them.
 
It wasn't much before our cars were built that everything in England used BSF- and BA-standard hardware, a derivative of the much older Whitworth standard. The use of UNC/UNF hardware was progressive back then.

As for the crazy stuff that goes down, look no farther than my 1952 MG TD. It was mostly BSF, which was expected, but the engine used a lot of 8x1 mm hardware (it was designed in France) with BSF heads. Try getting those at your local Home Depot! 1.25 mm pitch is much more common for 8mm screws. The 8x1s stripped very easily, and I had to do a lot of thread repair. Of course, by now virtually all of those screws have been replaced by ordinary 8x1 mm metric ones.
 
Back in 1955 I purchased a set of Whitworth wrenches including something called 1/2 Whitworth ( huge size) and something called cryptically OBA. I still have them. Why I don't know. I wrote a story many years ago where I referred to these wrenches as 'Holdovers from the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution foisted off on us gullible Yanks". Metric & American a-l-m-o-s-t fit -but take it from me, you'll wind up with a skinned knuckle or worse.
 
At one time there were separate spanners sizes for BSW and BSF but at some point they changed the head size slightly so the spanner could fit 2 different bolts. That is why you get spanners marked 1/2"BSW 9/16" BSF
OBA is the largest thread size in the BA range which goes to 16BA Tapping drill Number 73 or 0.60 mm. A very small thread size

David
BSF BSW.jpg
 
Jedi: Thanks for your comments on my engine removal. Everything is off, except for the four bolts holding the drive shaft to the transmission. I was told the transmission is from a TR4, and was installed when the car was running, back in the 1970's.
The tunnel was one of the first things to come out. No floors in the car now, either. Clutch slave, starter, carbs, exhaust manifold long ago removed. Never had bolts to the motor mounts, but it wasn't running when I bought it so that hasn't been an issue.
 
Back
Top