Nick Jones

Me too..... in fact if someone wants to offer me that eBay price they can have my Mk1 grill and I’ll make a mesh one 🙂

How much??!!!!! Having a laugh. Nick

Failed to stop in time possibly.......?

I use a 1/2" open end spanner sat vertically in the ring gear at the top. Its jaws drop neatly into the teeth and its shoulder wedges perfectly under the top-most bellhousing stud. Then just flip to do up again. That's the chunks you found. Don't worry about it! A piece of wooden dowel of roughly those dimensions works fine. It's only to keep the rollers in place as you say. I'd do it anyway. You know where they all are that way! DO NOT junk your old layshaft unless it's actually really knackered. If it's just burnished (marks you can see but not feel) or even just slightly pitted, it will still be better that the rubbish available today - and you can spin it through 180º (rotationally) so the high loads are taken on the opposite side. If it is properly knackered then chopping it off short makes the perfect tool. I have one in my special tools drawer. How much wiggle is there on the tip of the input shaft? This gives clues about the state of the mainshaft tip bearing. Nice work on the clutch slave btw - that's a trick I use on stubborn brake calipers. Nick

As Colin says, the lower one with captive nut is one of the fuel tank mounts. The upper one is a clipping point for the side trim panel. This may be different on a Mk3 compared to a round-tail due to the side-mounted fuel filler. My Mk3 does not have the equivalent on the right side. What it does have is a support for the boot floor boards attached, spot welded to the wheel tub and to another bracket further back. There is an equivalent boot floor bracket on the other side but it doesn't attach to the wheel tub. Nick

Basically yes. They have holes drilled in different places for different badges and the grill aperture on a Mk2 has a vertical support strip across the middle which will need to be removed. Nick

Mangey old deposits of brake fluid dissolve in fresher brake fluid or warm water. I prefer to avoid using anything mineral oil based with brake parts as the EPDM rubber used for the seals really doesn’t like mineral oil. Nick

Yep, Mann 714/2 is the pick of the bunch. You can get them MUCH cheaper than that. Got 4 for that price from ECP on one of their deals. Have them on Vitesse, GT6 & Spit (with adapter) Nick

Think it can be seen on google satellite photo, on a farm. Been there a while by the looks - someone has stopped paying the rent! from what can be seen in the pics it looks to be a reasonable car. If the farmer scraps it he's a total idiot, more money to be had than that! Nick

Pete and I agreeing! 😳

Hmmmm.... teeth are probably from one of the reverse gears. Not necessarily a show stopper. If reverse works now without odd noises and without jumping out, it’ll be fine. Circlip looks like the one under third gear. Looking inside 6 cylinder gearboxes tends to lead to disappointment in my experience..... always busted..... only the degree of busted varies.

700 miles in a weekend...... is nothing 😊 I think my record is 3,200 miles in 5 days.... (2009 10 Countries). Several other similar continental missions of similar length and duration. Round Britain - 2000 miles in 48 hours. An all night scatter rally - 960 miles in 26 hours..... That's in a Mk2 Vitesse rotoflex. Standard spring & telescopic dampers. Ride is a bit abrupt, but the seating position is excellent. As your comment about the wheels hitting the wheel arches also suggests, I suspect there is something wrong with yours. Not least because you should be finding the bump stops before the wheel arches unless you have a non-standard wheels/tyres. Nick

Functionally I don't think it matters. Mine is plumbed the same way as the OPs, though it differs in other ways. It's fed from the tapping at the rear of the head, with a decent valve fitted at that point (like TR6) and is the only thing connected to the return pipe as my injection manifold has no waterway. Heater now works better than ever before - though that's not saying much. Nick

Pretty sure mine have some rippling in that area though much less pronounced that pictured. From a Mk 1 2L that I’ve had since 1988. No reason to think they are not Triumph. I’d be amazed if they have ever been available from anywhere other than the factory. Nick

The fittings are 25 years old but the hose itself is not..... Nick

Pretty sure Paul's are the same as mine....... ....... and so are my GT6 ones. Interesting to note Paul has the braided hoses with non-crimped ends as I do. I've been told they are not road legal, but no MoT man has commented in 25+ years. The brackets at both ends often need a bit of tweaking to get the best run, but those new ones need some serious remodelling! Nick

Loathe powder coating. Always fails in the end and flakes off - but only after fostering particularly malignant rust under it first. Etch prime, zinc primer then paint for me. Nick

I spent many miserable hours scraping bituminous “underseal” off the inside of my GT6 bonnet. The ancestry of the person who thought it a good idea to spray it on was questioned often ..... and always found wanting. Really wanted to give him a good slapping! What I learned: Power tools just smear it around. Best done with scrapers or even screwdrivers. It comes off much easier in really cold weather as it’s brittle and you get bigger flakes. (Not best news at this point in the year ) With the headlight bowls out you can actually reach nearly everything. If you’ve got long arms, reasonably supple joints and moderately severe OCD driving you on. White spirit dissolves any residue. Nick

What does the gasket look like? Especially the narrow areas between cylinders 1 & 2 and 3 & 4? Seem to be some marks in the bores? Nick

Guaranteed to get Doug out of his box. 🙂Every time. Easy to lock the wheels isn’t necessarily a good thing when there’s no ABS. I have both. GT6 with a Powerstop servo on all four wheels. Vitesse with M1144 pads and 0.625 M/C. Prefer the Vitesse. GT6 brakes have a slightly non-linear action. Nick

You could also use it as an extra breather take-off point. Nick

As said above, with that parts combination, compression is fine, just fluid loss/mixing as the fire-rings don’t compress enough to allow the rest of the gasket to seal. Really sounds like recessed-block-with-flat-gasket-failure mode to me. Though as the correct, tabbed gaskets are being used the gasket quality has to be questioned. Also the amount of clamp being applied, whether through nuts bottoming, duff torque wrench or whatever. Any head damage or block damage sufficient to to cause compression loss on all cylinders after a few minutes unloaded running should be visible to the naked eye..... Nick

recessed block looks like this Flat ones don't have the machined recesses around the cylinders. One other thing to check..... do the threads on the studs extend below the top surface of the head. That is, can you be sure that when you tighten the nuts, they are clamping the head and not bottoming on the stud? The nuts should have hardened washers under them (ordinary bolt shop ones won't do - they crush) or use flanged nuts from Minispares, which are excellent and hold the torque reliably.

'78 Spit block should have fire-rings....... IF it's the original block...... The manner of failure sounds more like the opposite way round - non-fire-ring gasket being used on a fire-ring block. When you put a fire-ring gasket on a flat block you either get water pouring out the side as you are filling the system or it does it pretty much as soon as the engine warms up and the system pressurises, but the engine keeps running and compression is fine. I have heard (from Chris Witor) of similar issues with recent Payen fire-ring gaskets (AK280) for the 6 cylinder engines because the fire-rings are not correctly formed. He thinks there is a tooling problem. Not previously heard of this extending to 4 cylinder though? Nick

Why? No power benefit to this. OEMs do it for emissions, especially during warm up. Best power comes from injecting further back as fuel vaporises more fully. Top pic is interesting Marcus, likely prototype as you say. Never seen that pic before - thanks for posting ☺️