Mjit

Always worth measuring the front spring lengths/counting coils/damper spring pan->spring top distance too. Always possible to have mixed parts on a car after 40+years of previous owners 'careful maintenance'.

Crank-triggered, full mappable ignition will be the best option - though also the most effort and cost. It takes all the wear and inherent inaccuracy of the distributor out of the equation and makes an amazing difference to your car - to the point John at JY Classics thought I'd swapped the engine in my Spitfire 1300->1500 the first time he drove it post swap. You can keep the mechanical tacho too if you want, just having the old dizzy sat there doing nothing more than turning the cable. 123, especially mappable is next best/next most expensive. Much easier to fit than MegaJolt, etc but less accurate than those systems. Next up are the more expensive systems like Lumenition Optronic, where you counter a lot of distributor wear but are still stuck with mechanical control over the advance, which even at its best is "about right". Given the price of these I'd probably splash the extra bit of cash on a 123. End of the line are the range of 'points replacement' systems, which basically swap seemingly constantly adjusting the points for replacing them when the die. Some complain they don't last very long - but if we say they are £20 that's probably 6 you can buy for the cost of a Lumenition/10 for a 123/20 for a Trigger-Wheels.com Triumph kit...

I always go the the biggest one I can get, on the grounds neither having more oil or a greater filter surface area can be bad things.

Think I always use Mondeo ones on my 2500S - just make sure you get the big one, not the small one. Just popped out to look and of course Sod's Law that the part number's facing the road not up into the engine bag. Oh and of course I just HAD to throw out the small one I'd bought in errorjust before Christmas...having sat on the kitchen counter for 2+ years😩

Just the now standard, rather boring 8min Saturday monring drive to the supermarket and back in the 2000. Just realised the Spitfire hasn't been out the garage since July!

Cool. Might give some interesting LED headlight options for the big saloon, as 5.75" a common motorcycle size...

Don't you lose some of the car dipping functionality using motorcycle headlights? I seem to remember reading that motorcycle headlights just dip in the vertical plane, while cars dip vertically and also towards the pavement side (i.e. more of an "L" shaped dip than a simple up/down).

The issue with the Triumph system is that adding/removing shims will effect the whole suspension geometry, so it's a real fiddle to adjust everything correctly. Say you add a shim to the rear of the left suspension tower that's going to (if my brains working correctly to picture in 3 dimension) rotate the suspension around the lower trunnion in a clockwise direction while also pushing the rearout laterally relative to the front. As a result you'll end up with increased toe in (which you can adjust back out with the track rod end), an increased camber angle, and an increased castor angle. In a perfect world adding/removing shims in pairs should just change the camber angle...but the Triumph (or almost any other production car) suspension isn't perfect so that will also make smaller changes to castor and toe. In short it's: Check. Adjust. Repeat over and over again until everything's as close to perfect as possible (or you get bored).

If you end up keeping the current style fusebox rather than cutting off the old connectors/crimping on the new ones you can just release the old ones from the old fusebox and slot them into the new one.

Maybe if you have one of those fugly convertable Range Rovers. In a Spitfire if someone caughs out the window of your average SUV they'll be spraying germs at just about the right height to clear the door glass and land right on the Spitfire's occupants I did enjoy diligently following the Windermere ferry's Covid rules in my Spitfire back in the summer though. Drive on to ferry with the top down, clock the "Please close your windows" sign and wind up my driver's door window. To be extra safe I didn't even crack it open to pay the toll...just passed the money through the huge hole above my head.

I'm reasonably sure I'm not making it up. I'll check the spare loom I have in a box in the garage when I get a chance

Fitting the REAR loom on a Spitfire is easier than that (at least on a MkIV/1500). The rear loom runs from D/S light cluster across to P/S cluster, then into the P/S rear wing, via the night dimming relay, to a connector behind the P/S rear wheel trim panel inside the cockpit. From that point forward you're technically in the separate main loom. If you're actually replacing the whole loom then forward from the connector it's out through a hole in the bottom of the B post by the seat belt floor mounting and along the little channel in the floor pressing under the passenger seat, through a cut-out in the cross member just in front of the passenger seat and...somehow across the passenger footwell and up the side of the footwell ahead of the door to the fusebox (Though I can't for the life or me picture if it goes up the door edge of the footwell or the bulkhead one. I think it follows a wiggly diagonal channel and up at the bulkhead).

I'm in the process of trying to update the fan in my Mk IV Spitfire - so far that's only gotten as far as buying a couple of cheap possibles off of eBay and deciding it's too cold in the garage (though a lot warmer today so might venture out this weekend). Will try to post something if I make any progress...

The heated garage might save you from this but, having driven a Spitfire as a daily driver you might want to take the hard top OFF if daytime temps. are sub-zero. I well remember a winter spent with twice daily (no garage) drives that went: Scrape ice of outside of glass. Sit on cold, hard seat and scrape ice of inside of glass. Start driving with heater on, waiting for the heat to come. Brief window of comfort and visibility when it does and the warm air blows up the screen absorbing the moisture. Cold, hard seat transforms into still cold but softer, wetter seat as bum-heat melts the water that's been absorbed into the seat foam and frozen. Top of head starts to get cold and wet as the moisture absorbed and pushed up the screen by the demister that then condensed on the cold steel of the hardtop and had frozen starts to thaw out and drip. Park car outside, either at home or at work and let nature re-freeze everything that had thawed. Repeat. It IS fun to find a nice side, empty piece of snow covered road and provoke the rear end into breaking away (at low speeds) though

Which car? Simple on at least later Spitfire's and I'd guess GT6s as the 'upper' mounting should be there on the rear wheel arch, even if the hole hasn't been cut through the piece of vinyl that covers it. If again a Spitfire/GT6 but missing the hole/re-enforcement plate/captive nut on the outside of the wheel arch they aren't expensive and easy to get hold of. Or are you looking to replace lap belts with new lap belts? In that case they normally use the same mountings, just the 2 in the floor of the car - no shoulder belt to no need for the rear wheel arch attachment.

I'd say taking it out is just as easy. Disconnect from 1 carb/2 throttle bodies on a PI. Twist knob and pull. Keep pulling. Re-insert by pushing, running the inner cable(s) through a blob of grease on a rag. From memory it can take a bit of wiggling/end tidying-up to get them to start going back in but easy once they have started. Biggest thing to watch is if it's a PI you have 2 cables off the one switch and they are different lengths, so you need to get the correct cable back into the correct outer.

Anyone do one with the choke warning light switch?

I've used my-tyres.co.uk a couple of times in the past and not had any issues with them/found them cheaper than blackcircles. If you're looking at top brands then I found my Spitfire just ate Pirellis on the front wheels, was fine on Michelins and I'm more than happy with it on it's current Uniroyal Rainexperts. If you're looking at budget brands then Google is your friend as you can usually find out who they are owned by or actually make the tyres. On our cars an old Bridgestone design/compound branded Firestone is still going to be a couple of decades more advanced than the car they are being fitted to!

In approx. 1980? Sounds almost identical to the incident I was thinking of, although I remember it as going up Countisbury. I do remember lots of muttering, mumbling, and amusement from my dad and uncle who were both keen caravanners and would probably have stopped to help if we weren't walking up the hill as families, with myself and 2 others having the easy crushability of childhood.

You need to try towing a caravan up Porlock/Lynton/Lynmouth. Won't go well for you but will provide great entertainment for everyone else.

I find my string-backs come in very handy on those crisp, clear, top-down winters days

Boot: Because, in a world full of gas struts on other boot lids, there a finite number of times you can bump the standard boot lid with a bag/elbow/shoulder while loading the boot and have the boot lid crack you on the back of the head. Bonnet: Because I've broken down on the motorway and, to put it mildly, the standard support gives zero confidence of keeping the bonnet attached to the car, let alone upright when an HGV passes you at 56MPH. Because you can open it single handed without worrying about the twisting you get when just supported at the hinges.

Never understood why people mess around with the red wires - just reach in and pull the black one off, job done. The earth is just there to complete the relay's trigger circuit so no earth means the trigger circuit can't complete when you switch the lights on, so the dimming side of the relay never activates. Simples.

From the engineering PoV two are better as you're evenly loading and supporting the bootlid - but there are no mountings on either the D/S of the boot lid or car body so the welder and rattle cans are probably going to have to come out. Next best would be a single, centrally mounted strut - but that clearly has some downsides WRT loading and unloading the boot. Last on the list comes a single, side strut - but you can add one as a bolt-on upgrade.

Unless you're on a tight budget I'd say you want to be replacing both the shaft and all the rockers, though you might be able to get away with inspecting and just replacing some of the rockers. There's some clear wear damage on the inner surface of the broken rocker, which will almost certainly mean matching wear/damage to the shaft where that rocker sits so it's probably scrap -> ~£18. The sort of damage looks, as other have said like a lack of lubrication. Now it COULD have just been a blocked supply to that 1 rocker, but if there's been crud building up int he oilways that got to that rocker to block it... Crud is rarely that targetted. Plus there's 40 years of general wear and tear in there too. The springs and spacers should be fine, so it's just rockers you should need -> £6/each, £72 for a set.