May 2001

The little things are the ones that get you. While this may not be a truism in life, it is in auto restoration. My Tiger looks great, if I do say so myself, and I get lots of comments on how "perfect" it is. But if they only knew! No matter how hard one (at least I) tried and no matter how careful one is, there are the "mess ups". Here is a brief recap of those little things that got me.

Having had the problem of radiator hoses sticking to the radiator inlet and outlet, I cleverly put a small amount of lubricant on them to ease disassembly. Bad idea! Having returned from my first drive in the freshly assembled car back in 1994, the upper radiator hose blew off, soaking the engine, the car and the wall in coolant. Luckily not me. What a mess.

After the cleanup, subsequent drives produced a large puff of smoke from the left side of the engine (not the exhaust, but the engine) on acceleration … not on steady driving or on deceleration. After lots of testing and head scratching, I found that because I had a later 302 block, it had a dipstick hole in the drivers side of the block and it had not been plugged when the dipstick was moved to the front passenger's side. It was completely blocked from view by the headers. When I would accelerate, oil would slosh out the hole and onto the headers! A small threaded pipe plug and I was back to smokeless driving.

If you have a new aftermarket wiring harness, check it out carefully to be sure it is wired like the original. Even though mine seemed to have all the right wires in all the correct colors coming out in all the right places, it was not correct internally. To save costs, I guess, the manufacturer had decided to not run two brown wires over to the positive terminal on the solenoid, instead shortcutting one directly from the voltage regulator to the fuse box. What this caused was an erroneous ammeter reading. I have subsequently fixed it and have all the electrics running through the ammeter for an accurate reading.

The car had never cranked as fast as I thought it should, given that everything was new. And I had had a problem on two occasions with melted insulation on the ground wire connected to the generator. I beefed up the gauge of this wire and all was okay for a while. But it happened again! The problem (as diagnosed by Tiger Tom) was a poorly connected ground strap from the engine to the frame under the car. Even though everything was new, it was not making good connections and the cranking current was forced to look for other paths…like the ground wire for the generator.
I also learned that the windshield wiper motor can be wired so that it has a high, low and off and be wired incorrectly. The symptom was that the motor got real hot with the wipers off! Correctly connecting the wires at the switch fixed that one.

The old 302 motor is (finally) out of the car and parts are getting cleaned and painted and swapped to the 347 motor. Scraping gasket material off sure is fun. I am taking this occasion to refresh all the seals in the brake and clutch systems too. The 5-speed gets mated to the new motor today. Hopefully by my next column, I can report on the first drive. By the way, have I mentioned that the 302 is for sale to a good home ….. or a bad one…cheap?

There are a bunch of Sunbeam and other British car events coming up. Be there!