> So what do you need to do to store a car for a prolonged
> period of time?
> Nothing. Disconnect the battery maybe. I did nothing else.
You were lucky, IMO. Maybe you can get away with that every time ... but I
have seen cars where the rings rusted to the cylinders in less than 6
months. In fact, that was one of the many things wrong with my last TR3A
when my wife bought it for me. The engine had turned, but the damage became
obvious once I pulled the head to see why it burned oil so badly ... the
rust pits were still visible in the cylinder wall and the top ring in that
cylinder was in pieces. So much for the previous owner's $1000 engine
rebuild !
Then there was a friend's freshly rebuilt (maybe 2000 miles) MGA motor that
was basically a total loss after a year of storage. He had to break the
piston to get it out of the cylinder.
Perhaps the odds of it happening are low (and certainly they depend on
climate and storage conditions), but given what a PITA it is to correct the
problem, if the odds are even 1 in 1000, I'd still want to invest a few
minutes to dump oil down the plug holes and roll the engine over.
Most of the storage instructions fall into the same category, IMO. It's not
"something bad will definitely happen if you don't to this", but rather
"Doing this will reduce the chances of something bad happening".
Randall
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