Triumph Sports Cars

Always been considering a Rover 4.0 or 4.6 for my TR7 but I'm pretty sure its out the window now! Great work and many thanks for posting your progress! Any work lately? :)

Thanks!
Gerry C
80 TR7
80 TR7 shell & boxes O parts

No, Gerry, the TR7 is at Jim's shop in Florence, Ky, which is about 200 miles from me, so I have to plan weekends to work on it when I can schedule the time.It also gives me time to save up $$ and collect parts in the downtime. It is stored in a barn on his property in the interim.

Bumping my thread... no new work yet, but we have scheduled to work on it the weekend of May 16-18. Jim is also planning to tinker on the chump car that weekend and rumor has it he may be able to fire up his 340.....

Dan wanted to invite anyone who would like to come but did not want to be presumptuous. No problem, y'all are hereby invited. (Now we get to see if anyone other than the regulars show up, he, he. Betcha not.)

I had my calendar messed up, but Steve comes in on Thursday afternoon. We plan a trip to the Pick-n-pull, most likely Friday, to get an S-10 engine and bellhousing and if I can find it, a Mitsubishi 4G53 for the forklift. Hear that Dan? If you want to pull a Mu-tang axle you might want to be here for that.

Jim

Progress on the conversion this weekend. We dropped the engine and transmission back out of the car and reinforced the engine mounts Jim designed and built last time. Steve Degroat and i cut reinforcing pieces and Jim welded them. Then I painted it and we put the engine back on the cradle. We unbolted the transmission to install the flywheel, clutch, htob, etc. We had to chase parts all over Florence, but finally found the pilot bearing we needed. Advance Auto Parts ordered it Saturday afternoon and we got it yesterday morning.

If you use a W-58 transmission, be sure to install the bearing flush with the pilot hole in the crankshaft. The input shaft is kind of short.

Also, beware of adapters made by a company called Subversive. The aluminum adapter that I got with the transmission did not allow the pilot shaft to line up. Luckily, I was at the right place! Jim used his MAD SKILLS at machining , chucked the transmission into his lathe and adapted the adapter to work with the transmission and bell housing.

On Saturday, we went to the pull-a-part and got parts to install the transmission on the MG chump car. Steve and Dave (Jim's older son) spent some time lightening the race car, then we put the engine and transmission in place with no mounts.

I'm confused.

If the pilot shaft didn't line up, I'd expect the bolt holes to be off. How does putting it into the lathe fix that? I can see skimming material off the outside or even the face, but I don't see how it can be used to adjust the alignment.

Pls elaborate.

M.

The hole in the bell was indexed and found to be centered. An offset was cut on the adapter plate using the lathe. The offset was 1/8" and fit into the hole in the bell, creating alignment. From there, only one bolt would line up with the original holes, and we put it in tight and re-drilled all the other holes. Most were about a half hole off one way or another. We went to 1/2" bolt with nuts (what Jim had on hand).

Ya gotta admire the external cubicle thinking!
"Jim just chucked the transmission in his lathe" and machined it to center.
Now that's something you don't see every day.
I like it!
Cheers
Fred

Ok, I'll bite, what rpm did the transmission, "shift" at ??

It never did shift, since it was locked in to the chuck, but those helicoils were rough on the tooling.

I think maybe we upshifted the lathe to 94 rpm at one point?

We did have to shift the old bolt holes in that adapter plate, about 1/4" to 1/2" in all different directions.

Jim and I have plans to work on my TR7 project some more on the weekend of August 8th. Anyone interested is welcome to come and help with it, and also work on the v6 MGB chump car.

Steve got to Jim's on Thursday I think. I got there Friday evening and they had been making progress on the chump car. We continued on it Friday night, as Jim designed and fabricated engine mounts, with help and encouragement from Steve and me.
On Saturday, after a pick-n-pull run for drive shafts and to look at electric fans, we put the TR7 on the lift and spent the day working on the front of the engine, removing the guts from the hydraulic fan pump, replacing idlers, etc to finally install the serpentine belt. The universal radiator like the one in the Roadmaster required a little modification. I should have taken pictures of that. Jim removed the filler and welded that hole up, but added a port to connect the stock TR7 surge tank. The radiator and AC condenser are going to be moved forward a few inches to accommodate a Caravan fan. Original TR7 electric fans are not going to be used.
At the junkyard I got a drive shaft from a Tacoma I think. Jim cut it to length and I will be taking it to a drive shaft shop to get the correct mounting flange for the TR7 differential.
Steve and I bled the brakes, so I didn't run it into the wall when we coasted it into the barn. The last couple of weekends we worked on it, the handbrake was slightly insufficient to stop it from bumping the wall in the barn that Edith is letting me keep it in temporarily. No damage, but they love to give me grief about it. Ha Ha!

Thinking about Labor Day weekend as a possible date for another work weekend. Jim is checking his calendar.

No can do Labor Day weekend. Will be celebrating Piper's 14th birthday at the lake.

Labor Day is a no go. Calendar conflicts prevail.

I am planning to go to Jim's place this coming weekend and work on the car again. I am planning to stay until Tuesday (Veteran's Day) and maybe get the engine running. We need to install the radiator and the drive shaft, finish plumbing the HTOB, then work on wiring. There is work to be done on the chump car too

Fun weekend at Jim's place with Steve DeGroat, Carl Floyd, Jim and his boys Dave and Matt, and me working on the MG chump car and my 1UZ conversion.
Good progress made and a lot of fun hanging out.

We finished the installation of the Summit aluminum radiator that Jim modified last summer, along with the Caravan fan.


Original TR7 radiator mounts were utilized for the fan on the top. A custom bracket you cannot see holds the radiator with a high density plastic piece in the upper channel. There are rubber donuts on the TR7 mounts atop the fan.

Bottom view shows the lower radiator mount in place. This is the original TR7 radiator mount, modified with the same plastic in the radiator channel and tabs welded on to hold the bottom of the fan. The entire assembly was moved forward a few inches. Since the frame channels curve and narrow, the the bracket ends were cut off and offset pieces were welded in. There is still plenty of clearance, as you can see in the pictures.



After discussing options, I decided to use Megasquirt to control the engine functions, so we stripped the engine down. The SC400 throttle body has two throttles...I don't know why. I have another with only one throttle and we plan to use it.

Here is a view of the bracket during the test fitting, before it was modified. It was held in place by some long bolts at this point, You can see the white plastic through the hole. The fan was taped in place.

We also fitted the drive shaft. It is a modified Toyota Tacoma drive shaft The drive shaft shop in Nitro, WV put the fitting on that was supposed to fit the TR7 axle, but the holes had to be re-drilled.. You can see the really cool transmission mount Jim made previously.


In this picture, Jim is tacking the radiator bracket. We took it off for welding.



And of course we had to keep up with BritishV8.

Here is the other throttle body:

This engine has a water pipe that runs through the valley under the intake and hooks into a heater hose. Both heater hose connections on the 1uz were sticking straight up, in the way of the bonnet latch and the fresh air vent. We moved them. We cut the pipe before the bend up, and the other nipple was on an aluminum manifold. Jim cut it off and modified it to go straight to the connection.