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Voltmeter on the battery. Before starting, you should see 12V or thereabouts. Once running, that should begin to rise, and after a bit of time it should settle around 13.5 to 13.8V (how long that takes depends how well charged the battery is). Put on some electrical loads (headlights) with the engine speed about 1500RPM and the voltage shouldn't dip. If it behaves like that, the alternator is good.

It depends how long it's parked for. I've certainly had tyres that acquired a very definite and quite persistent "flat spot" after being parked for longer than I'd intended. However, the extra 10psi does significantly reduce the effect (which mostly happens if the tyre is allowed to go flat, or at least soft).

No, as others have said, the logic is that pressure and voltage are much easier to measure than flow and current, and are useful enough. My three all have alternators. The Vitesse has an ammeter (fitted by a previous owner) which is a great worry gauge as it swings across wildly when you flash the headlights. The other two have voltmeters (although one of those has randomly decided to show 17V whenever it's powered) for the convenience. They tell you if the alternator / dynamo has failed - not as quickly as the ammeter but the difference is less than the likely interval between you glancing at it.

Ordinary blue stuff. My radiator leaks slightly so there's no point using anything expensive.

I run all mine on E10 regularly and have not had any problems.

My brother's old Mk2 also had a bent engine front plate, as a result of a major shunt (the chassis was also buckled). In his case, we got away with fitting the engine mount behind the upright on that side, leaving the other one in the correct position in front of the upright. I see from your photo that you've already done that, though? I'm not sure how feasible it would be to straighten it in situ. It will take a really big wallop to make any difference, and you don't have anything forcing it to bend at the right point. When the damage was done, the block acted like a bender plate. Trying to undo that while fitted is likely to break the gasket seal at best.

Also remember that the handbrake linkage geometry changes with suspension movement, so you really need to adjust it with the car resting on the wheels (which is obviously impossible) or at least with the weight taken under the vertical links, not the chassis.

I think US market Stags and (possibly) TR7s had it as an option. TR8s may have had it as standard?

It makes a difference to SWMBO's Yaris, but that's probably not as poorly sealed as the average Triumph.

Beware use of heat gun near any glass! Localised heating puts a lot of stress in there and can crack (or shatter) your windscreen.

left side of the block, low down, close to the distributor pedestal and oil filter. It's a big long hex that sticks out.

The obvious candidates for clutch-related ping noises would all cause immediate failure, surely? I'm with sulzerman - check your fluid. I've had that on my GT6 - a very small leak means it's fine at the start of the 12-car navigational rally but gives up completely about half way through.

Well, unless you're going to go the Marcus way and fit a pressurised oil reservoir to prime the system before cranking. Most of us consider that overkill.

Not really. The advice to keep revs moderate and load low is, as johny says, part of the "drive off and warm up on the move" advice. It's all about what you do in general from start+10seconds until it's warm. The Triumph six "death rattle" happens during that first ten seconds. However, the point about slow tickover delaying the oil pressure build up is entirely fair. The bearings are not working any harder at 1500RPM idle than they are at 750RPM idle, but the oil pump is doing its job much better.

I've rebuilt a couple of the glass bowl types in my time. As Wagger says, you wreck the old valves in removing them but there's no need to damage any bits you're not replacing anyway.

I found this photo: I had reinforced the bit under the overrider cut-out, largely because my rusty steel valance had actually folded at that point on removal. There's also a mod you can see to the lower right, which was needed to clear the Vitesse radiator. I then fitted it by the brackets behind the overriders, bolted the four bits of the fitting kit to the chassis, then glued and clamped them to the valance in situ. Once dry, I took it back off the car and fibreglassed over the ends of the fitting plates. You can see them in that photo - the upright for the chassis and the end plate that Colin didn't seem able to find.

If you go to the Canley page (for the Vitesse) and click on item 6 (the valance) you'll get a list of part numbers. From the third one down you have "fitting kit" FVFK1 (the bits you need to glue to the valance) and some brackets VBx, which are the bits to attach the parts of FVFK1 to the chassis.

I recently fitted a GRP front valance to a Mk1 Vitesse. It's a 13/60 part (the originals were very similar) and needed a bit of modification to clear the Vitesse's radiator. It's also a very poor fit generally. I could take some photos if you're interested? I assume you have the "fitting kit" (a bunch of steel plates that need to be glued in place)?

The swing spring has significantly less roll resistance than the fixed one, so the factory also beefed up the front anti-roll bar to compensate for that. It's not strictly necessary - the car will handle fine with the thinner one, you just get more body roll.

Ooops, typo, methinks. The swing SPRING was the response (well, after the much more expensive Rotoflex setup)

No, it's usually fine. This is partly because the summer setting is normally slightly rich, and the engines are quite tolerant. It's more important to get it right for emissions reasons. Also, in winter, the engine probably doesn't get as hot, and most of the "weak mixture" problems are caused when things get hot.

Possibly worth noting that air is very compressible, where liquid fuel isn't. The consequence of this is that a short stroke on an empty pump gives a very much smaller pressure drop than it does on a full one. It may be that the cam lobe's short stroke is actually not creating quite enough pressure drop across the pump's inlet valve to open it, or enough to overcome the lift against gravity from the tank. Because the hand primer gives a longer stroke, the air in the pump is expanded more and the pressure therefore drops further, giving a much higher delta pressure to push fuel from the tank into the pump.

Something like that. There's normally a part-cap (just the outer ring bit, like a fancy jar whose name refuses to come out of hiding in the back of what passes for my brain) securing the plastic extension to the cast reservoir where it's pushed in.

Yes, this difference in mixture with ambient air temperature was the reason they fitted waxstat jets to the later carbs. If only they'd worked reliably.

How long did you crank for? As Doug says, it can take a minute or so to get the pump filled and the carb floats up to a worthwhile level when relying on the relatively short stroke of the cam drive at cranking speeds. Your manual priming lever draws a lot more fuel per stroke than the engine does, which makes sense when you remember that the engine (once running) is pulling tens of strokes per second, against your manual one per few seconds. The other issue (which my GT6 has) is that any defect in the pump (mine has a poor thread on the top cover bolt so doesn't seal too well when dry) will adversely affect the short cam-driven strokes much more than the long manual prime.