oil_on_the_carpet

Thats a blast from the past! http://www.srsengineeringsutton.co.uk

Just up the A34.  Been in business forever and do good work http://www.oselli.com/service/engineering/balancing

Early PI's had them too. For some reason they often go for daft money on fleabay

Head gaskets blowing is almost certainly down to using an inferior quality gasket and not correctly torquing - and retorqueing the head.

Still got a load of them. Best fire extinguisher medium ever invented. Instant knock down on any fuel fire.

No one is saying that. Perhaps we should strip out those seat belts that crept into our cars since the 50's and 60's too? After all, nothing but a firm grip on the wheel or a lap belt was good enough in the 'good old days', why fit those silly inertial reel 3 point belts now? Should we go back to the halcyon days of non gripping crossply tyres too? After all, they were a new fangled and expensive 'safer' option only on the higher performing cars from the mind 60's. Why anyone with an older car should fit such safer tyres is beyond me when crossplys were good enough back when it was built. Oh that's right, we have vasty more traffic on the roads, the vehicles around us are almost invariably far bigger and heavier than us now, and unleaded petrol thanks to the increasing ethanol content is a rather more difficult stuff to extinguish than leaded stuff. An inertia switch one an electric fuel pump is cheap and unobtrusive primary safety. The fact they didn't routinely fit them in the past is utterly irrelevant as the technology didn't exist to build cheap and totally reliable ones for mass usage in the past.

and there are no electric items under the bonnet that could be sparking and ignite the spelling petrol? there is a very good reason your race car has to have an easily accessible battery cut off switch.

With any electric fuel pump, not fitting an inertia switch is stupid unless you really fancy the thought of your fuel pump pumping gallons of petrol over your hot engine after a crash.

All much of a muchness. http://chinn.blogspot.co.uk/2005_12_01_archive.html http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_sop=15&_nkw=fuel+inertia+switch&_frs=1

Leylands dirty little secret, a 'factory exchange' engine could have been rebuilt by 'Honest Daves' Motor Engineering under contract, and some of the 'factory exchange' engines were production line rejects just fixed up.

In real terms there is little in it between the two engines.

Back in the day, I'd have blanked off part of the radiator with tinfoil by this part of the year.

Coolex RS2000 rad is close in size http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/FORD.....H-MADE-/400817072992

I got a quote at the NEC for a rad for the Vitesse, all alloy, high capacity core, 40% more cooling surface, £145. Another way to shed heat is an oil cooler, 30% of your engines heat goes in to the oil. Take it out of the oil, and the cooling system has less work to do.

If it's overheating, an electric fan won't fix the underlying problem. Recore the radiator, they're invariably furred up after nearly 50 years. Make sure the baffles are in place on the radiator. Triumph sold GT6's and TR6's in huge numbers into the American market where the ambient is often near 100 and it wasn't a problem.