Hi Guest!
Hey - did you know if you click on the title of a thread it will take you to the first unread post since you last visited that thread?
but were afraid to ask: 
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smilie in place of the real @
Pretty Please - add it to our Events forum(s) and add to the calendar! >> 
Cheers from Cincinnati, OH folks!
I have a special fondness for old british sports cars, having grown up riding around in the back of my mom's '64 Austin Healey BJ7 in the 80's as a kid. Dad had a pair of Sunbeam Tigers, a MkII and a MKI, which were always in some state of restoration and I had never seen on the rode till my dad retired a few years ago and finally got to work on fixing the MKI. He sold that MKII to buy my step mom a 62 corvette... which is a shame, but it is what it is I suppose. Plus all the stories from my old man of all sorts of triumphs he had bought, sold and wrecked over the years that I never saw.
I spent a good amount of my teenage years wrenching on that BJ7 with my dad, as we only drove it in the summer, and something would inevitably break during the winter and it would become non-functional come spring time. A couple decades later with that Healey sitting mostly un-used due to divorces and gremlins in the fuel system, and a general need for some serious fixing, I started into wrenching on it again to get it back on the road for my mom, only to be greeted with a series of "oh my..." moments while dismantling it. What was a planned summer project turned into a "junk it or restore the whole thing" moment. 12 years later, and I'm still wrenching away for a few hours one night a week. I don't have any current photos of the car, because I've been awful at remembering to take pictures while I'm taking it apart. Yes, it'll come back to bite me, I'm sure. This is a photo from about 2 years ago after all of the extensive frame and body repair work when we just finished painting the unibody construction:
No it's not an original color anymore, but I told my mom she could have any color she wanted, and she asked for a dark blue metallic. It was never going to be a concourse car, so might as well have some fun with it. I've got all the suspension, rear end, fuel system, and brake system completely rebuilt and installed at this point. Engine's been rebuilt for 7 years, sitting on a stand in the corner of the garage. When I finish re-wrapping and repairing the electrical harness, I'll get that motor and transmission dropped back in.
I'm finally taking my old man's advice and signing up for some British car forums, because I know I'm going to need some help figuring out how to put everything else back into the car that I never took pictures of when I took it apart. I have copies of the original service manuals, but as a mechanical engineer, I can only facepalm when I read through them and they give not particularly detailed explanations or diagrams on how to take the things apart and then putting them back together usually gets boiled down to a sentence that says "put it back together the opposite of how you took it apart..." which never works. Maybe it's because I'm not working on it my shed, while wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe...
Oh... and because I need some parts, and some stuff on Moss is just highway robbery prices that I can't afford. Off to the classifieds section!
-Andy
I have a special fondness for old british sports cars, having grown up riding around in the back of my mom's '64 Austin Healey BJ7 in the 80's as a kid. Dad had a pair of Sunbeam Tigers, a MkII and a MKI, which were always in some state of restoration and I had never seen on the rode till my dad retired a few years ago and finally got to work on fixing the MKI. He sold that MKII to buy my step mom a 62 corvette... which is a shame, but it is what it is I suppose. Plus all the stories from my old man of all sorts of triumphs he had bought, sold and wrecked over the years that I never saw.
I spent a good amount of my teenage years wrenching on that BJ7 with my dad, as we only drove it in the summer, and something would inevitably break during the winter and it would become non-functional come spring time. A couple decades later with that Healey sitting mostly un-used due to divorces and gremlins in the fuel system, and a general need for some serious fixing, I started into wrenching on it again to get it back on the road for my mom, only to be greeted with a series of "oh my..." moments while dismantling it. What was a planned summer project turned into a "junk it or restore the whole thing" moment. 12 years later, and I'm still wrenching away for a few hours one night a week. I don't have any current photos of the car, because I've been awful at remembering to take pictures while I'm taking it apart. Yes, it'll come back to bite me, I'm sure. This is a photo from about 2 years ago after all of the extensive frame and body repair work when we just finished painting the unibody construction:
No it's not an original color anymore, but I told my mom she could have any color she wanted, and she asked for a dark blue metallic. It was never going to be a concourse car, so might as well have some fun with it. I've got all the suspension, rear end, fuel system, and brake system completely rebuilt and installed at this point. Engine's been rebuilt for 7 years, sitting on a stand in the corner of the garage. When I finish re-wrapping and repairing the electrical harness, I'll get that motor and transmission dropped back in.
I'm finally taking my old man's advice and signing up for some British car forums, because I know I'm going to need some help figuring out how to put everything else back into the car that I never took pictures of when I took it apart. I have copies of the original service manuals, but as a mechanical engineer, I can only facepalm when I read through them and they give not particularly detailed explanations or diagrams on how to take the things apart and then putting them back together usually gets boiled down to a sentence that says "put it back together the opposite of how you took it apart..." which never works. Maybe it's because I'm not working on it my shed, while wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe...
Oh... and because I need some parts, and some stuff on Moss is just highway robbery prices that I can't afford. Off to the classifieds section!
-Andy
