Ian Perry

Many thanks all. Lots of food for thought. I did notice the awkward angle of the top outlet on the "Upgraded 2 Row" radiator, which is a pity as otherwise it doesn't look too bad. For the time being, I've perforce refitted the no.1 radiator with the manky fins, as at least it holds water! The inside of the engine isn't too bad, the coolant coming out when I took no.1 off this morning (in order to fit no.3, until I found the leak) is pretty clean despite having been there for a year or so. And the coolant seems to circulate ok through everywhere. I'm not planning touring in Spain, in fact the car's main planned use this year will be RBRR, with plenty of running in cool night air 🙂 So, notwithstanding the change in cooling performance, I may well look into the 205 or Skoda options just for ease and sensible pricing. I'll have a look for anyone local who could recondition it, but not aware of any at the moment. Thanks again everyone!

HI and thanks, Clive and Tim Tim - on reflection, that makes a lot of sense and would get my vote. Clive - please don't take it as a grumble from me, as it's not meant in that way. I do understand and sympathise with the view of not wanting to reinstate "dead" sections. I'll just have to get into the habit of looking specifically at the "unread" section 🙂

Just to say... for what little my opinion is worth, I like the look of it and much respect and gratitude to those who're working obviously hard to get it right. No particular niggles for me as yet, though I am one who would quite like to see a little bit more sub-division of the 'technical' bit. While not suggesting a return to 60+ separate sections, it might be worth breaking out into groups, such as the following? "Big6 saloons and Stag" "Small chassis cars" "Toledo/Dolomite family" "TRs" That aside, all great stuff so far!

Hi all, HELP! I have a steadily growing collection of second-hand radiators and starting to get a trifle fed up. I currently have three OEM ones; one of which has a water-tight core but the fins are disappearing like ice in the sun, another has a decent core but rotten side plates (awaiting repair), and the third (finally received yesterday after a four month wait due to Covid) looks good but has a hole in it! So, what to do? I am told cooling on the 1500 is a bit marginal, so is it worth (on an otherwise standard engine) upgrading? Do I go for yet another used OEM radiator, a re-manufactured standard one, or something like this (3 Row Aluminium Radiator For 1979 1980 Triumph Spitfire 1.5L Manual | eBay which hopefully is a library pic as the connections are all wrong) or something like this (Upgraded 2 Row Core Racing Radiator For Triumph Spitfire MK3 MK4 1500 1964-1980 9140992388722 | eBay - which at least looks like it might fit...) Does anyone have any experience of these aluminium jobs, are they any good? As always money is an issue, if I spend any more money on this I might have to start selling daughters or carving off body parts... VMTIA

And another update, in case anyone really is that interested :-) Seats - it now has some! Last autumn I managed to pick up a pair of period after-market (not prominently branded) bucket seats with head restraints, which actually fit really nicely. I modified the Spitfire seat mounts/runners, welding two lengths of right angle on and the seats bolt onto the top surface of the angle. I deliberately lined the seats up slightly off-line - the back is tighter against the centre tunnel, so that the seats clear the inside edge of the rollover bar, and the driver's feet actually point in vaguely the direction of the pedals! It's not enough of a twist - I hope - to be uncomfortable though. The driving position feels OK to me, but the acid test will be a longer test than just sitting in there.  Headlights - The original metal bowls were a bit tatty and the 'nuts' for the adjusters had disintegrated, so I bought a pair of aftermarket plastic bowls - mistake. They went in OK, but the chrome rings were a heck of a fight and the whole thing didn't line up nicely with the alloy cowls, so in the end I found some nuts to fir the adjuster screws, and broke out the welder. It's all assembled nicely and I put relays in at the same time (mounted on the side of the N/S alloy air 'scoop' panel in front of the radiator).  Paint - it has some! although the headlights episode means there's some touching up to do now :-(  It isn't white any more...

All useful to know! The Spitz has halogen conversion reflector/lens units (can't recall if they are even E-marked, TBH, they aren't prominently 'branded' - they aren't obviously HELLA or Wipac for example), and I've just put in relays in any case to reduce the load on the switchgear, but have wondered about fitting LEDs. I have heard that aftermarket LED 'bulbs' are unsatisfactory as the light source is bigger than the filament in a halogen bulb, so the reflector and lens simply don't work properly and you get an awful beam pattern. I've seen 7" aftermarket complete units for sale - aimed principally at the Land Rover market, I guess - which would probably fit the car... albeit they might look a bit odd. Curious to know whether they are any good, though?

Time for another update - in the faint hope someone else is still interested!   It moves! In a fit of energy, hope and insanity I finally got the car off the axle stands and down onto some wheels (a set of Dolomite wheels with OK-ish tyres, the Spitz tyres will get cleaned up and new rubber put on before they go on the car). I then started it, ran it out of the workshop and turned it round in the yard, before driving back in to park back in its next but facing the other way. I would have gone further - at least up the lane to where it joins the public road and back - but the front end is only very loosely dropped in, and there are no headlights, seats or belts at the moment...   Discretion is definitely the better part of valour! But the clutch take-up is smooth and there were no immediate nasty noises from the gearbox or diff.   Still waiting for Anthony to find his way back to the workshop (crashing back into Tier 3 means it'll be a while) so we can play with seating positions, but I suspect the answer is to put the driver's seat on runners and simply mount the passenger seat on the floor as far back as possible. Also trying to tidy the bodywork up a bit while I'm about it...

This morning... Driving through town, slightly misty but traffic was bunched up of course, so no visibility issues. Yet loads of cars had their fog lights on. When I got out of town, into a rural area of west Berkshire, there was patchy fog (sometimes quite heavy with visibility down to about 40m in places), but about 25% of the cars going the other way had no lights on at all! 🤪🙄

Hi, quick question, are Herald 13/60 and Spitfire (later Spit4 onwards) radiators interchangeable? The part numbers are different, but (knowing Triumph) that doesn't mean they aren't :-)  Many thanks!

PS - I'm also working on a prototype 'targa' roof for the Spitfire, based on a ratty steel hardtop I used to help hold the car together when I was doing the sills (it was largely successful in that role, until I discovered how much rot there was in the screen pillars too - o mie stelle - i migliori piani di topi e uomini! ) 

Hi Tim, and thank you - yes, Anthony and I were dancing round the workshop to the tune of the OHV Chunter! The rollover bar is in, the seats are sitting there loose at present but hopefully Anthony will come over at some point soon and we'll work out how much I need to shorten him to fit in. Jobs left - the main one is to get the front end fitted - the original is rotten in the area of the "shelf" that mounts the OS hinge bar, and I picked up a NOS GRP bonnet for a song, so you can see where this is going! One of the other guys in the workshop is a GRP man (he works on small aircraft and gliders for a living) and I'll recruit him to help me fettle this. Then a few minor jobs to get the car on the road, like rewiring the headlights through relays, and fitting a replacement radiator that actually has fins attached to the tubes. The OEM gearbox is just a 4-speeder, but I picked up a "kit" last year of an OD gearbox, prop, rear GB mount and speedo drive. So once the car is actually running, we'll look at fitting/testing the OD box. I want to get the car on the road first so at least we can start to drive it... Re the weekend - yes, it's been a funny year all round. I'm a cricket club fixture secretary, so I spent the winter/spring crafting an exciting fixture list, lots of clubs we haven't played before, only to see it all collapse like a card house in a hurricane. I stacked shelves at night at Tesco for 4 months backfilling for sick/isolating staff, was properly mashed by a lorry, various family issues (don't get me started on daughters...). But the postponement of the RBRR, while terribly frustrating for everyone, has also opened up the possibility of our getting past Shap Fell next year!

Latest news - I've bought and will be fitting (hopefully tomorrow) a replacement rollover bar that is wider (the initial rollover bar is indented to clear the soft top, but the car won't for the time being be running a soft top so that's not really necessary). Initial trial fitting shows that the seats - any seats - will go back further and should be enough to achieve a comfortable driving position for the lanky one (Anthony) and also the shortar$e (me). Thanks for the thought, Michael, I don't know what we'll actually settle on (pun ) but if we do end up with a reclining seat, I'm hopeful that it'll now go back far enough to allow some sleeping :-)    In other news, we got the engine running last weekend! It sounds amazingly healthy, with good oil pressure and no nasty noises vibrations - and the carbs even seem to be close to set up!   

Hi Pete, and thank you very much for such a positive response! :-) I am perfectly happy with the idea of different seats for each side of the car (in my old road-rallying days, it was quite common to see cars with different seats for driver and navigator, and indeed some itinerant navigators would take their own preferred seat with them from car to car!!). The problem is in finding a suitable seat for the passenger/co-driver/navigator!! I can't see how ANY seat will recline - or really go back far enough - with the rollover bar in place. A wider bar would help and might even be possible, as (short term at least**) it won't have a soft-top, so no need to have a bar that makes room for the mechanism. So if I can find a suitable bar and fit that instead, then apply some abuse to the OEM passenger seat to get the recline mechanism to work...  (** for the time being it has a Targa top made from a manky steel hardtop, so no need/desire for a soft-top) ..

Update... (just in case anyone really is interested!) I picked up a couple of (thankfully cheap) MX5 Mk1 tombstone seats, with a view to either doing a Frankenstein with an "adjustable head restraint" back, or simply butchering the backrest to feed the belts through. And yes, they are too high, so I'm leaning more towards the comment from Tim in January about sitting "on" rather than "in" the car. There's also the problem that with a rollover bar in place, the seats don't really recline either! The bar is shaped to clear the soft-top and that means it encroaches heavily into the space for the seat to recline into.  Then someone offered me a pair of rather retro style bucket seats which are slim enough to fit, sit quite low and look IMO perfectly acceptable in the car. The lack of any option to recline is a bit of a disappointment - but to be fair even the original seats are restricted by the rollover bar anyway. The other issue is leg-room, none of my growing collection of seats will go back very far - again due to the rollover bar. But TBH I am reluctant to take that out...

Seconded (thirded or whatever) I'm another deliberate NON-user of Faceplant - indeed a very reluctant and very limited user of social media in the round - mainly for privacy and professional reasons. I do feel a lot of sympathy for Paul H's perspective - but at the same time I feel a lot of loyalty to CT having been a member intermittently since the 1990s. On the 2018 RBRR the participants' SM group was hosted on a platform called Messenger or something like that? which neither I nor my co-driver could join, again for professional reasons. We did feel a bit disconnected from the event as a result - we became more completely disconnected when the no.3 conrod let go, mind. Later when I wanted to spectate/cheer on survivors as they passed close by home, I had to get my then GF to go on Faceplant to get up to date news on what was going on. So I'd prefer to see better functionality on this website, which I feel also better represents the 'heart' of club and should be the first port of call for club communications. On-event communications (including interactively between participants) could perhaps better use WhatsApp which doesn't have the same security issues as the previous platform.

Mildly amusingly, the co-driver's seat from my rally/hillclimb car (a MG ZR) fits surprisingly well. I wonder...  

Thanks Rob. We're all different! The seats I have are not in a usable condition - and I can't get at all comfortable in them, either for driving or sleeping, which gives me little confidence that a better condition pair of OEM seats would be any better. Anthony is also a couple of inches taller than me, so the height issue will only be worse for him. Hence looking elsewhere for options. And sadly I don't have a 2500S in my back pocket, either - more's the pity!

MX5 seats, I meant... 

Ref my last, and breathing some life back into this topic (I blew at a massive heap of dust in the corner of the workshop and found a Spitfire under it)... I've found some pics of the seats I had bought wayyy back when, will try to attach when I finish blethering. I have a pair of original seats now, though they're in very poor condition with rust in the frames, sagging foam and split vinyl. Having fitted one in the car, I'm not impressed as the backrest is very short and the head-restraint is level with my shoulder-blades (I'm only 5'9" by the way) so not ideal. I also find myself sitting quite high up even so, my head is at the windscreen top rail level. I was planning to put 3-point harnesses in, and these seats/head restraints are not compatible - I would prefer something that gives an aperture between the backrest and head restraint to feed the harnesses through. And finally the recline mechanism is seized, which makes them pretty pointless for the RBRR.. So. help, please! I would consider after-market bucket seats as I mentioned further up the thread, but we'll need something capable of being slept in for the RBRR. So, if not the MR2 seats, what? 

Mounting extra lights anywhere, you really want a top mount to secure them and ensure they don't wobble. For lights mounted onto the bonnet itself, I would seriously consider making a small "cowl" out of about 1.2mm steel that would enclose the whole light unit on each side, in which case you could use round headlamp main beam units (like the inner pair on a Vitesse or 2000/2500) instead of 'spot lamps' per se. The cowl would then disperse the loads over a significant area and you might not need any further reinforcement. The whole thing could even be attached using half a dozen Dzus fasteners (those little flush screw fasteners that lock on a 1/4 turn) or even screws and rivet nuts, so that they could be removed again when not needed and leave very little sign of their ever having been fitted. For smaller, external spotlight units mounted in the grille, as Colin says a bar across the bonnet hinges is needed to provide the base for a couple of flat plates sticking out forwards, to mount the bottom bolt of the light. A small bracket under the top lip of the grille should then be strong enough to mount a steady bar going to the top of the light unit.      

As per title! Pair of rectangular headlamps - sealed beam or bulb type - wanted, please PM me if you have a pair sitting in the back of the shed collecting dust... (I'm in west Berkshire so obviously the north of Scotland could pose some logistic challenges - but everything's solvable in the end!) VMT Ian

Hi Michael, yes, indeed - I have loads of the correct colours for everything, which is why I'm reluctant to buy a replacement / remanufactured rear loom. The tricky bit is connecting to the front loom - if conventional bullet ends will work, that's one thing, but it would - to me at least! - look like something of a bodge compared with using the moulded rubber block. The idea of a whole new bespoke rear loom appeals, in part because I can thread it all through the passenger side floor crossmember as plain wire, and do all the tricky bits once it's 'in' the car.

PS I agree on loom tape. It requires patience and a little care (easiest with two people, but possible with one person), but is much the best solution and looks authentic too. And if you need to, you can open up and re-secure/replace using insulating tape to close it/secure it. I usually tie the loom together first with cable ties, with extra ties where there are cables branching out from the main part. The branches get bound up in loom tape first, winding up the branch towards the main loom, with the tail wound onto the loom and taped down. The cable ties come off just before the loom tape gets there, they just hold it all together until the loom tape takes over. Once the branches are covered, the main run comes down and secures the tails of all the branches as well. On occasion, you can use a sleeve or heat shrink for specific branches (the individual wires that go to the engine temperature sender and alternator exciter come to mind), but generally I wouldn't bother with it for the main run. PPS I like to use crimp connectors with separate insulating sleeves, but then adding a drop of solder into the crimped joint afterwards to 'seal the deal' - will last forever then. Good luck!

On "Project Gruyere", I took the rear loom out before starting to weld the NS floor and sills, partly due to the amount of heat and the need to replace/repair the channel in the floor crossmember where the loom goes (as per Bodders' post on 31st, the multi plug won't pass through the crossmember, so I carefully detached everything at the back and threaded it painstakingly through from the back). The other reason for taking it all out is that it's been bodged and butchered, so I am thinking that replacing it is probably the way forward. I have some experience of rewiring/making new looms having done several in the past, so am confident of doing a serviceable job of it. The rubber multi plug is a small challenge though, as it's a moulded item. I don't at this stage want to pull out the whole front loom, unless I find evidence of further butchery. My options therefore seem to be: 1 - repair the existing loom, cropping off old/broken/ruined wire and 'fishing' new wire on  (solder and heat shrink), 1A - crop the plug off the old loom and just go for a whole new loom 'fished' onto the tails, 2 - buy new old stock (or remanufactured to OEM spec if it exists) rear loom, 3 - get a new aftermarket connector and replace the existing moulded rubber plug completely as part of a new bespoke loom, 4 - use 'loose' individual bullets on a new bespoke rear loom to connect to the existing front plug. Of these, option 1 or 1A appears most plausible. In making a new rear loom I probably wouldn't bother with the seatbelt warning light switch wiring (I doubt the switch in the seat works in any case, going by the overall condition of the seat)but the rest of is certainly needs surgery looking at the bodgery going on there.

"I like to be  and make others pessimistic ....cos then when you find some really points , it makes you elated and feel great..…!" You sound like my father. The aluminium panels - on re-reading, Canleys actually recommend rivets plus Sikaflex.  But even so, the aluminium sheet is only about 1.2mm thick so can't do much structurally, particularly as a single skin.