Blog

WHAT we’re doing, and HOW we’re doing it!

April 28, 2025

Floor mounted handbrake handles (TR2-TR4) and the holes they pass through don’t always play nice with new replacement floor pans. The holes come per-punched in the TR2-3B pans, but as can be seen here they may need a little trimming for full movement of the handle. It’s not a big deal here because we encounter the problem all the time, but for someone doing their first sidescreen car it is usually a head scratcher when the handbrake cannot be adjusted to catch and release properly. For the TR4 cars, which use the same floor pan as a TR4A-TR6, those cars have a handbrake lever mounted on the driveshaft tunnel so the replacement pans do not have any hole for a floor mounted handle. Our experience pays off once again here, and we have a template in the metal shop so that new TR4 pans (right siide only) can be modified with a precisely located hole BEFORE the pan is installed, and also having the proper shape makes sure we don’t need to waste time trimming the hole later for full travel of the lever.

April 21, 2025

Installing new fuel and brake lines for maintenance and or repair can be done on a fully assembled car, but it can also be a royal PITA! During reassembly of a complete frame- up restoration, it’s usually regarded as one of those few remaining “loose-ends” left toward the end of the process, but again with body and engine/gearbox and most of the major components already in-place, it reverts back to one of those PITA tasks. We prefer to get after the “plumbing” early in the reassembly process while the body, engine, gearbox and exhaust are not in the way. Unfettered access speeds up the whole process, and saves our clients $ while helping us to do a cleaner and neater job of installation. Over the 20+ years we have been restoring and repairing the Triumph TR2-TR6 line EXCLUSIVELY, we’ve acquired, identified, labeled, and stored perfect examples of every single steel line (pipe) used on these cars from TS1LO through the very last TR6. At one time we had a somewhat local Columbus, OH company bending these for us on a CNC bender, but a change of company ownership and the resulting failure of quality and service meant that we had to bring the fabrication of each line back into our own shop. By purchasing just about every tubing flaring and bending tool known (short of the CNC machines), and referring to our huge collection of original patterns, the lines produced and installed here are virtually indistinguishable from the OEM Triumph lines.

April 14, 2025

Rust happens in mysterious places, usually down “low” where water naturally flows, but it can also occur higher up if there’s a way for the moisture to become trapped. It doesn’t really matter to us, we’ll just make the patch panel(s) to fit the area(s) which need to be replaced. In this instance, we suppose that some mud or old undercoating created a pocket which held a rain/snow/salt mix up against the steel fender lip for a very long number of years, slowly eating away at what had once been fine British steel! Once we had removed all of the old rusty metal, and trimmed back to full thickness where we’d have something substantial to weld to, a new patch was fabricated which matched the opening precisely. We always fit the patch all around with no overlaps, then hold it in place with an assortment of special clamps and super strong magnets before the first arc is struck to begin the TIG welding process. Once the new patch has been completely welded into place, weld beads are dressed down with an assortment of grinders until we’re left with an invisible repair. Perfect fitting patches and butt welded edges are the only way to perform a lasting repair, because the old way of patching over a hole with overlapping patches only creates new pockets to hold moisture and start the rusting process all over again.

April 7, 2025

Head studs are one of those things which can sometimes be easily removed, and then there are other times (60/40) when they’ll kick your butt! Many folks will leave them in place when “rebuilding” an engine, but they quickly get in the way when you’re handling the bare block (eg. to clean it) or to run a cylinder hone down through glazed cylinders. If the block goes to the machine shop for boring or decking, the machine shop will add an extra charge to remove any studs still remaining. Most home mechanics and even a few “professionals” will lock two nuts together at the top, and if they’re lucky they can back the stud out of the hole. But with studs this large, and the tendency for long studs to flex a bit due to the distance between the two nuts at top and the frozen threads down-in the block, this is another 60/40 proposition. We always replace old (and probably stretched) studs with new high-strength ARP studs, so they always have to come out. With that in mind, it wasn’t difficult to justify the purchase of a proper stud remover to remove head studs, as well as the smaller studs used in our Triumphs. By gripping down close to the threads you need to loosen and remove, all of the torque from a long breaker bar is transmitted to the area which needs the force. Just by having this little gem in the toolbox, our success rate for head stud removal is up around 99.9%.