Hello All ! I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas & a
Happy & safe New Year ! I realize many of you won't
read this 'till next year but it's a bit slow around
here so I thought I'd pen a bit about my LBC Christmas
activities.
#1- Recently my younger sister's boyfriend took notice
of how much fun my brother & I have with our Sprites,
and decided to get one himself. What he failed to
notice was the amount of fiddling about we do with them
as well. So of course when his car recently "started
loosing power real quickly & hammering (!) real bad",
I got a call from my sister to "Please help him fix his
car as he's borrowing mine all the time". Perfect
Christmas gift for someone you don't know what to get.
Over Thanksgiving I had the oppourtunity to look
it over, and although suspecting to see a rod hanging
out the side, all looked fine. (Well, okay, as fine as
a 1098/smoothcase looks in a MKIV Sprite :-|) Running a
compression check however yielded 10 psi on 1 & 2.
Hoping for a blown head gasket we pulled the head (in
35 minutes, no less !), and sure enough there was quite
a bit o' gasket missing. I took the head back to San
Jose to clean it up, etc. & get the parts.
So the boyfriend got a head gasket set &
associated labor to install it for Christmas. The
Saturday after we tackled it & it went in as smooth as
butter. We roughly checked the head for straightness,
cleaned it up a bit & stuck it together. Torqued it all
down, adjusted the valves, and Voila ! 150 psi on both
1 & 2 ! The car started right up & ran better that it
ever has. Boyfriend happy. Sister gets car back, sister
happy.
#2- My older brother took the prize for Daren's
favorite Christmas gift: A wonderful little book called
"Total tuning for the classic MG Midget A-H Sprite", by
Daniel Stapelton. Now I have Spridget books, but this
one takes the cake. 190 photographs of highly modified
Spridgets, and enough techno-talk to make to overwhelm
the most anal-retentive person you know. Additionally
it lists several pages of suppliers, modifiers, and
clubs. Unfortunately the majority of these are in the
U.K., and similarly the book is not readily available
in the U.S. yet. Apparently my brother special ordered
it from the U.K. from one of the book listings he
received with Classic Car magazine. Oh well.
All for now, & Happy Holidays to all-
Daren
|