Healey Sports Cars

Better picture of upper shock mount and upper control arm mounts we made.
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I don't have good photos of the front caliper mounts. CAD renderings here, maybe Steve can take a few. These are radial mount calipers so the mounts are simple, just angled brackets to line up to the ears on the Healey spindles.
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/30/2024 02:20PM by 3000bn7.

I found a bunch more photos on my phone from texts that came from Steve. Here is a better shot of the rear end than what I posted earlier.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/30/2024 02:25PM by 3000bn7.

This shows the rack and pinion from an MGB that we shortened both the rack section and the steering shaft. This is a new rack which I noticed has a smaller pinion gear then the originals. If it turns out to not feel good, we can always mod a used rack. This shows just the housing shortened, we cut and slid a tube over the existing tube with the holes to be able to plug weld it.
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We also needed to lengthen the tie rods, this shows an added section we made that got welded to the existing tie rod.
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This shows a mockup of the rack position. There is a flat plate the we tacked in place to get the final width of the rack. The goal is the have the upper and lower inner control arm mounts in line with the inner tie rod joint at the end of the rack. As the rack moves, that does change, so like everything in life it is a compromise to a small extent. This is to minimize bump steer, an effect that causes a toe change as the suspension travels.
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A not so great quality picture of the bump steer checking setup.
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Also not so great, shown the final rack mounted. Mounts are hard to see from this angle.
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Best picture I have of the finished rack install. You can just see the lower U joint.
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This shows the upper steering shaft. This is from a TR3 which presented a few issues for the steering wheel, more to come on that.
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We had a steering wheel hub that we wanted to mod to use an E-Type wheel. I was having a hard time getting them to mate and an original E-Type wheel probably should not be cut up. I cut the spokes and turned the OD and stopped there about 5 years ago.
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These next 2 are current, just taken, our welding friend helped to convert wheel center to adapt to a better wheel for the Healey.
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For now this will work well. I still want to make the trafficator work. Since we have a hollow upper shaft we can run the wires through the U-Joint and wrap them to allow them to go with the steering rotation. We need to add a deco piece to the center, maybe an old shift knob logo piece. Steve put the horn and blinkers on manual switches for now.
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2024 11:53AM by 3000bn7.

The 1967 289 engine getting a 'rebuild'. It was blue but we decided it should be black as it would have been earlier. It ran very well when we first bought the car so it should run much stronger now! The Erson chrome valve covers are OK but we have some nice aluminum Ford Racing items that should look better.
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A bit of Ford geekout here. This Rotunda engine crane was bought from a local Ford dealer that was closing in about 1980. We split the cost, I think it was $275. Rotunda was the tool division of Ford that sold to dealers. Fun to use it on Ford projects. The first pictures in this thread show the car in that dealership building when it was rented by Steve in later years. He found records in the attic of cars bought by his grandparents.
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/22/2024 05:23PM by 3000bn7.

The driveshaft tunnel had been hacked pretty badly so we ordered a new one from Norman Nock's company. It requires mods for a 2 seater. This shows the old tunnel cut out and the driveshaft and new emergency brake cables. The emergency brake uses small drum brake shoes inside the brake discs.
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We decided to use a dual circuit brake master cylinder. Shooting from the hip a bit on the bore size since the Wilwoods are not offered in too many bore IDs.
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We took a stab at changing the motion ratio of the brake pedal to compensate for the larger bore of the master cylinder.
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Another effort by the mad TIG welder, Chris. We were gifted an aluminum fuel tank that had the pickup damaged in an odd way. Chris fixed the problem and then welded a block that can mate to the fuel system through the trunk wall. This car has a mechanical fuel pump so it is pretty simple from here on.
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They drilled into the pickup for some reason without realizing it was angled, so they drilled through the tube and it was sucking air.
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/04/2024 09:31AM by 3000bn7.

Project is coming along great. I grew up in Middleborough and a guy during the '70s put a 289 2bbl and C4 into a BJ8. He won many a street race and inspired me to do my Nasty Boy in later years.

Thanks for following along. All the cars we knew in younger days were very stock. I think we had heard of a Healey with a Chevy V8 in Easthampton but never saw it!

These show the cooling system, we used a dual pass radiator with 2 fans. Fits pretty well and should work well. I hate the fan noise from a stock [Healey] fan so this should be nice. I have one of the later fiberglass fans in a BJ7 and it is much quieter.
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This is a bit off-track but I wanted to give a shout-out to Chris, our buddy who helps so much with welding. The guy is really talented and committed. He builds these incredible cars, works hard and is raising a family! The link below goes to a video showing his recent build.

[www.google.com]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/17/2024 09:46AM by 3000bn7.

The exhaust that came on the car was pretty weak but we are putting it back on to be able to run it and do other debugging. Headers look to be homemade which is pretty 'period' cool. I like the small dia primaries because the ports are tiny on the stock iron 289 heads. They got beat up a bit over time and distorted during some repair attempts and welding practice on our side. The flanges should be able to be straightened and used short term.

I only have a picture of the RH side header and no pictures of the piping. I need to get some, it is pretty funny. There is an almost 90 deg bend below the collector on one side. It ran well and sounded great though!

If you look at one of the steering posts you can see the top of the LH header installed.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/25/2024 11:30AM by 3000bn7.