The Lighter Side

[The Lighter Side of Motoring]

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That's not a leak... My car is just marking its territory!

-- Greg Petrolati

Defining a Gearhead

Do your best trousers get oil and grease on them?
Have you ever bought a tool because it looked cool and never used it?
Have you ever bought any special tools, unique to one model?
Is there, somewhere in your garage, a piece of steel pipe that you have, on one or more occasion, used for extra leverage?
Do you worry that you will develop mesothelioma from working on asbestos brake shoes/pads?
Do you spend more time listening to the car noises than the radio?
Do you spend more time listening to the car noises than your partner?
Have you ever used the domestic oven to heat gearbox or crankcases in order to remove or fit bearings?
How many containers half full of unidentifiable petrochemical products are there around your home right now?
Do you possess a set of Whitworth spanners? (Score double for sockets)

-- Donald Mackie

What is shipwright's disease ...

In LBC terms it goes something like this:

The glovebox light is out, I'll just replace the bulb, but look, the contacts are a bit corroded, so I better put in a new socket. To do that I have to pull out the glovebox itself, and look here! The heater is leaking. I'll just pull off the leaking hose and whoops! The core is rusted. Off with the dashboard, out with the heater core, and oh my, there's rot in the firewall. IN the engine compartment, I take out the battery to see the rot, and I can't weld the patch on it without taking out the engine, so out with the hoist. While the engine's out I might as well rebuild it, and the transmission and clutch. And I noticed that the shocks are shot, so off with them, and the suspension bushings have seen better days, but look! The spring tower's cracked, so I have to weld it, but I can't get at it without removing the body, so....

...so replacing the glovebox bulb led to a frame-up restoration.

Some of you may think I'm making this up. I made up only the specific details of this case.

... and where do I go to catch it?

You're in the right place. [The Triumph mailing list]

-- Berry Kercheval
(resolutely resisting polishing the brake lines or I'll never make the DBTBD run.)

[Kas Kastner]

I know it's not in the book, if I put all in the book it would have been called the L.A. Phone Directory.

-- Kas Kastner Triumph Competition Preparation Manual

The radiator cap solution...

The discussion of radiator caps reminds me of an old car I once had. You know the kind, ratty and raggidy, driven when I was a poor college student. I was having trouble with something I couldn't readily identify myself, so I took it into the shop.

The mechanic looked at it a couple of minutes and said, "What you really need is the radiator cap solution."

"Oh," I said, trying not to sound too confused. "Do you mean the radiator cap isn't holding enough pressure?"

"Thats part of the problem" he said. "You need to lift the radiator cap and drive another car under it. Then the next day you can replace the radiator cap, and it should solve your problem."

-- LLoyd -ahh, the good old days-

Triumph Heritage

From Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen, an Opera in Five Acts with the text an anonymous adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream the following little ditty:

Hark, how the echoing air, a Triumph sings,
And all around pleased, Cupids clap their wings.

I'd call that a pretty fair description of the wonderful sounds we all enjoy on a quiet sunny afternoon when all those SU/Stromberg, Lucas, and Stanpart pieces are working together in harmony. I wonder if Shakespeare's was Red or British Racing Green?

-- Gordon Buck

Rust protection

If you check the original owner's manual for any british car it says, usually on page 14, the following:

Rust proofing is not required due to the unique British Car Dynamic Oil Spray System (BCDOSS) with which your vehicle is equipped. Also note there are no required winterization precautions as the car will spend its winters being in a constant state of repair.

... you could look it up ;-)

-- Mike Himelfarb

You know you've owned a Jaguar too long when...

You always park downhill.
The guy at the parts house is listed as a dependent on your income tax form.
You get in a car and are surprised when all of the instruments work.
You tell your wife that you were out until 3AM because the car broke down ... and she believes you.
The family is no longer upset in having to share the dinner table with a bunch of SU parts.
You don't trust anyone named Lucas.
When your generator dies, you just pull another out of your Lucas pile of bits.
You wash your hands before working in the engine compartment.
You'd rather give the family pit bull a bath than tune your SU carburettors again.
You allow four hours for a trip, 3 for repairs and 1 for driving.
You can unstick a jammed starter in the dark, in the rain, in 5 minutes and don't think it's a big deal.
There's no oil on the garage floor so you know the car's completely empty.
Your car makes a funny sound and you immediately know what's wrong, how much it will cost, and what tools you will need to repair it.

-- George Cohn and others

Alternative to the Dremel Tool...

In February in Wesley Chapel, Fla., Joseph C. Aaron, 20, was hit in the leg with pieces of the bullet he fired at the exhaust pipe of his car. While repairing the car, he had needed to bore a hole in the pipe and, when he could not find a drill, tried to shoot a hole in it.

[Tampa Tribune, 2-17-95] Rob Chiles

10 Best Tools of All Time

Forget the Snap-On Tools truck; its never been there when you need it. Besides there are only 10 things in this world you need to fix any car, any place, any time.

Duct Tape Not just a tool, a veritable Swiss Army knife in stickum and plastic. It's safety wire, body material, radiator hose, upholstery, insulation, tow rope, and more - in an easy to carry package. Sure, there's prejudice surrounding duct tape in concours competitions, but in the real world, everything from LeMans-winning Porsches to Atlas rockets use it by the yard. The only thing that can get you out of more scrapes is a quarter and a phone booth.
Vice Grips Equally adept as a wrench, hammer, pliers, baling wire twister, breaker-off of frozen bolts and wiggle-it-til-it-falls-off tool. The heavy artillery of your tool box, vice grips are the only tool designed expressly to fix things screwed up beyond repair.
Spray Lubricants A considerably cheaper alternative to new doors, alternator, and other squeaky items. Slicker than pig phlegm, repeated soakings will allow the main hull bolts of the Andrea Doria to be removed by hand. Strangely enough, an integral part of these sprays is the infamous Little Red Tube that flies out of the nozzle if you look at it cross eyed (one of the 10 _worst_ tools of all time).
Margarine Tubs with Clear Lids If you spend all your time under the hood looking for a frendle pin that caromed off the pertal valve when you knocked both off the air cleaner, it's because you eat butter. Real mechanics consume pounds of tasteless vegetable oil replicas just so they can use the empty tubs for parts containers afterward. (Some of course chuck the butter-colored goo altogether or use it to repack wheel bearings.) Unlike air cleaners and radiator lips, margarine tubs aren't connected by a time/space wormhole to the Parallel Universe of Lost Frendle Pins.
Big Rock at the Side of the Road Block up a tire. Smack corroded battery terminals. Pound out a dent. Bop noisy know-it-all types on the noodle. Scientists have yet to develop a hammer that packs the raw banging power of granite or limestone. This is the only tool with which a "Made in Malaysia" emblem is not synonymous with the user's maiming.
Plastic Zip Ties After 20 years of lashing down stray hose and wiring with old bread ties, some genius brought a slightly slicked-up version to the auto parts market. Fifteen zip ties can transform a hulking mass of amateur- quality wiring from a working model of the Brazilian Rain Forest into something remotely resembling a wiring harness. Of course it works both ways. When buying a used car, subtract $100 for each zip tie under the hood.
Ridiculously Large Craftsman Screwdriver Let's admit it. There's nothing better for prying, chiseling, lifting, breaking, splitting or mutilating than a huge flatbladed screwdriver, particularly when wielded with gusto and a big hammer. This is also the tool of choice for all filters so insanely located that they can only be removed by driving a stake in one side and out the other. If you break the screwdriver--and you will just like Dad and your shop teacher said--who cares, it has a lifetime guarantee.
Baling Wire Commonly known as MG muffler brackets, baling wire holds anything that's too hot for tape or ties. Like duct tape, it's not recommended for concours contenders, since it works so well you'll never need to replace it with the right thing again. Baling wire is a sentimental favorite in some circles, particularly with the MG, Triumph, and flathead Ford set.
Bonking Stick This monstrous tuning fork with devilish pointy ends is technically known as a tie-rod separator, but how often do you separate tie-rod ends? Once every decade if you're lucky. Other than medieval combat, its real use is the all-purpose application of undue force, not unlike that of the huge flat-bladed screwdriver. Nature doesn't know the bent metal panel or frozen exhaust pipe that can stand up to a good bonking stick. (Can also be use to separate tie-rod ends in a pinch, of course, but does a lousy job of it).
A Quarter and a Phone Booth See tip #1 above.

-- Origin regretfully unknown

Peter Egan's Tool Dictionary

HAMMER: Originally employed as a weapon of war, the hammer nowadays is used as a kind of divining rod to locate expensive car parts not far from the object we are trying to hit.
MECHANIC'S KNIFE: Used to open and slice through the contents of cardboard cartons delivered to your front door; works particularly well on boxes containing convertible tops or tonneau covers.
ELECTRIC HAND DRILL: Normally used for spinning steel Pop rivets in their holes until you die of old age, but it also works great for drilling rollbar mounting holes in the floor of a sports car just above the brake line that goes to the rear axle.
PLIERS: Used to round off bolt heads.
HACKSAW: One of a family of cutting tools built on the Ouija board principle. It transforms human energy into a crooked, unpredictable motion, and the more you attempt to influence its course, the more dismal your future becomes.
VISE-GRIPS: Used to round off bolt heads. If nothing else is available, they can also be used to transfer intense welding heat to the palm of your hand.
OXYACETYLENE TORCH: Used almost entirely for lighting those stale garage cigarettes you keep hidden in the back of the Whitworth socket drawer (What wife would think to look in there?) because you can never remember to buy lighter fluid for the Zippo lighter you got from the PX at Fort Campbell.
ZIPPO LIGHTER: See oxyacetelene torch.
WHITWORTH SOCKETS: Once used for working on older British cars an motorcycles, they are now used mainly for hiding six-month old Salems from the sort of person who would throw them away for no good reason.
DRILL PRESS: A tall upright machine useful for suddenly snatching flat metal bar stock out of your hands so that it smacks you in the chest and flings your beer across the room, splattering it against the Snap-On Tool Calender over the bench grinder.
WIRE WHEEL: Cleans rust off old bolts and then throws them somewhere under the workbench with the speed of light. Also removes fingerprint whorls and hard-earned guitar callouses in about the time it takes you to say, "Django Reinhardt."
HYDRAULIC FLOOR JACK: Used for lowering a Mustang to the ground after you have installed a set of Ford Motorsports lowered road springs, trapping the jack handle firmly under the front air dam.
EIGHT-FOOT LONG DOUGLAS FIR 2X4: Used for levering a car upward off a hydraulic jack.
TWEEZERS: A tool for removing wood splinters.
PHONE: Tool for calling your neighbor Chris to see if he has another hydraulic floor jack.
SNAP-ON GASKET SCRAPER: Theoretically useful as a sandwich tool for spreading mayonnaise; used mainly for getting dog-doo off your boot.
E-Z OUT BOLT AND STUD EXTRACTOR: A tool that snaps off in bolt holes and is ten times harder than any known drill bit.
TIMING LIGHT: A stroboscopic instrument for illuminating grease buildup on crankshaft pulleys.
TWO-TON HYDRAULIC ENGINE HOIST: A handy tool for testing the tensile strength of ground straps and hydraulic clutch lines you may have forgotten to disconnect.
CRAFTSMAN 1/2 x 16-INCH SCREWDRIVER: A large motor mount prying tool that inexplicably has an accurately machined screwdriver tip on the end without the handle.
BATTERY ELECTROLYTE TESTER: A handy tool for transferring sulfuric acid from a car battery to the inside of your toolbox after determining that your battery is dead as a doornail, just as you thought.
AVIATION METAL SNIPS: See hacksaw.
TROUBLE LIGHT: The mechanic's own tanning booth. Sometimes called a drop light, it is a good source of vitamin D, "the sunshine vitamin," which is not otherwise found under cars at night. Health benefits aside, its main purpose is to consume 40-watt light bulbs at about the same rate that 105-mm howitzer shells might be used during, say, the first few hours of the Battle of the Bulge. More often dark than light, its name is somewhat misleading.
PHILLIPS SCREWDRIVER: Normally used to stab the lids of old-style paper-and-tin oil cans and splash oil on your shirt; can also be used, as the name implies, to round-out Phillips screw heads.
AIR COMPRESSOR: A machine that takes energy produced in a coal-burning power plant 200 miles away and transforms it into compressed air that travels by hose to a Chicago Pneumatic impact wrench that grips rusty suspension bolts last tightened 40 years ago by someone in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, and rounds them off.

Peter Egan [Road & Track]

UK English Motor Racing Glossary

Autocross in the UK is racing on a circuit marked out in a field. It starts off grass, but usually either gets worn away or churned up into mud.
Rallycross is a snootier version of the same thing, for FIA rally cars, such as Metro 6R4s, Ford RS200 (sacriledge) etc.
Motocross is the same thing on bikes.
Banger racing is the same thing for real old wrecks (Mayflowers, A30s, 100Es etc - no, I jest) fitted with crude cages for "protection".
Trials (or mud-plugging) is not a speed event, but a contest to see how far you can get up a muddy hill course.
Not to be confused with a hill climb, which is a sprint (ie, timed, not racing) up a paved hill (eg, Shelsley, Prescott,Doune etc), in anything up to and including F1 cars. Usually <2 miles in length. Your Pikes Peak is similar, but is far longer and unsurfaced, so would suit a European rally car (I think a Group B Peugeot holds the record?)
A sprint is the same as a hill climb, but around a circuit. Again, timed, not racing.
A pursuit sprint is one where cars are sent off at intervals and may end up racing, but the time is what counts.
A handicap (usually just Vintage Sports Car Club) is a race, where the slowest cars start off first, the object being for them all to cross the line at the same time!
A driving test is a sprint around obstacles marked out in a car park etc, including virtual garages.
Stock car racing is the same as banger racing when it takes place in a Speedway or greyhound stadium.
Greyhound is a type of dog, not a bus. Hey, how about bus racing?
Speedway is bike racing between danish teenagers on small dirt ovals in East Anglia. The bikes are specially built to travel sideways (often with old J.A.P. engines)
A corner is a turn.
A race track or circuit is a road course. There are no banked ovals in the UK - the last one was Brooklands.
A road course is racing on public highway - this only occurs on the Isle of Man, where an extremely dangerous series of bike races takes place every year.
A header is a shot from the head by a player in football.
Football is Association Football, footy, footer or soccer.
A muffler is a woolen scarf to keep you warm in winter.
A glass-pack is a presentation set of six Crystal d'Arques whisky tumblers given to you by your aunt Megan at Christmas.
Tech is short for Technical College, which have all become Universities now. We have the wonderfully-named Scrutineering, carried out by the Scrutineer, or Scrute.

-- Paul Garside

Lucas Aphorisms

Lucas - Prince of Darkness
Lucas - inventor of the first intermittant wiper.
The three position Lucas switch - Dim, Flicker, and Off.
Or what about the other 3 settings: Smoke, Smoulder and Burn?
The British drink warm beer because they have Lucas refrigerators.
I have had a Lucas Pacemaker for years and never had any trou...
How to make AIDS disappear? Give it a Lucas parts number.
Lucas systems actually uses AC current; it just has a random frequency that's all.
It is not true that Lucas, in 1947, tried to get Parliament to repeal Ohm's law. They withdrew their efforts when they met too much resistance.
QA called and told the engineer they had trouble with his design shorting out so he made the wires longer.
Recently, Lucas won out over Bosch to supply the electrical for the new Volkswagens. So, now the cars from the Black Forest will come with electrics supplied by the Lord of Darkness -- how appropriate!
Alexander Graham Bell invented the Telephone.
Thomas Edison invented the Light Bulb.
Joseph Lucas invented the Short Circuit.
Recommended procedure before taking on repair of Lucas equipment: Check the position of the stars, kill a chicken, and walk 3 time sunwise around your car chanting Oh, mighty Prince protect your unworthy servant...
Appropriate LBC license plate:

Joseph Lucas

MTBF 1HR

Prince of Darkness

-- Collected from LBC folklore

Bumper sticker

All parts falling off of this car are
of the highest quality British manufacture.

Five surgeons taking a coffee break

1st surgeon says: Accountants are the best to operate on because when you open them up, everything inside is numbered.

2nd surgeon says: Nah, librarians are the best. Everything inside them is in alphabetical order.

3rd surgeon says: Try electricians, man! Everything inside THEM is color coded.

4th surgeon says: I prefer lawyers. They're heartless, spineless, gutless and their heads and their butts are interchangeable.

To which the 5th surgeon, who has been quietly listening to the conversation, says: I like British car restorers... they always understand when you have a few parts left over at the end.

Naps

Frequent naps prevent old age, especially if taken while driving.