Triumph Maintenance Catch-up

The newest article on the site today is the first major work article on the Triumph Spitfire. This is the Maintenance Catch-up article. In this article we cover changing out the arious fluids in the car as well as repairing the speedometer.

Cheers!
Jody

A Triumphant Weekend (sort of)

So we had a quiet weekend in town this weekend. This means a birthday party on Saturday (which I'll get to later).

Since mum handed me the Spitfire and I had boxes of parts, it was time to start working on the "Artful Dodger" as it's been named of late. New trunnions, ball joints, sway bar end joints, and front shock absorbers later (it took all day saturday to do this) the car is driving much better now. You'd almost swear it was a different vehicle!

After all that munging, and a repeated lesson (I've learned this one before, but, you, my readers may not have) in why professionals handle coil shock combinations it's 10 times closer to roadworthiness. Today I got a new spedometer cable installed (I can sort of tell how fast we're going now) as well as the rear shocks.

This is all well and good until Mum sowed up with the emissions information (the car had failed). I took a good look and discovered that the wrong distributor is installed, the coil is original, and well, from there it goes sort of downhill. None of this is really a big deal, it's more just a matter of LBC driving.

So, while I'm continuing to fiddle with suspension bits I'll figure out the ignition bits and we'll be formally on the road with this car.

I hope everyone had a good weekend in the garage as I did! Articles on the Triumph Spitfire will appear in the next week.

Cheers!
Jody

New car! 1978 Triumph Spitfire!

So we added a new car to the family collection this weekend. My Mum is now the proud owner of a very nice 1978 Triupmh Spitfire. As a teaser you can see young master Jensen testing out the car:




To read the page about the car click here: Mum's 1978 Triumph Spitfire

Interesting car day (without turning a wrench!)

So, today's turned into a pretty interesting car day, and I didn't even turn a wrench! Spent the morning with a local Studebaker nut named Don Parkey. I met him at the All Arizona Studebaker Gathering last weekend. He had mentioned he was looking for Lark bits, and here I had a whole pile of left-overs from the abandoned Lark Wagon project.

He turned up with a trailer this morning and filled it with all sorts of Lark goodies. After that it was drinking coffee and swapping car stories as I showed him the current projects and what I'd been working on.

Later today I published to the sit a couple articles that I've been working on in the past couple weeks. The first is the sixth article on how to do a frame off restoration: Restoring the interior hard components of a vehicle (Dash, console, heater, gauges, etc).. At the same time I also uploaded the article on building up the Fuel System on the green Jensen Healey Project.

While the site was uploading I got to look at a nice Fiat 2000 that was parked outside a neighbor's house, apparently it was someone who was visiting. And, later I had a chat with my mum who's found what may be a totally cherry 1978 Triumph Spitfire for a ridiculously cheap price! She's been watching my projects for a while, and I got a lot of my "car gene" from her as well as my dad. Normally she scans the paper and calls me with cars she thinks I might like, but today it was with a car that she wanted. :)

So, tomorrow we're going to look at the Triumph. I called the guy on my mum's behalf and it sounds really good. It just needs a new soft top. In the ad was the classic mention of "extra parts", well, extra parts actually means complete parts car! (and I have a bad habit of restoring parts cars). We'll keep you updated as to any new cars that may be appearing in the stables.

Jody

2009 Kia Soul

So, the wife and I were watching TV this evening and happened across a commercial for the new 2009 Kia Soul. Now, we couldn't really see the car terribly well in the commercial, but thought it looked interesting. So, I opted to pull up the web site.

First we saw this image:

We both thought it looked pretty interesting from the front. I did think it was a little too rounded from the front, but it still looks pretty cool.

Then we saw this side view. I think the car is extremely striking from the side. I like the opposing slants on the body line.


Finally, we saw this, and we both uttered the same sound at the same time. For a car that's so pretty from the side, this rear end is nothing better than unfortunate.

And to add insult to injury, a nicely equipped one will cost you nearly 20K. eesh.