Visit to Dave’s Place
Last week, I took the Triumph up to Henderson where my new friend, Dave, has a garage. He specializes in Triumphs and is generally viewed as the specialist in central North Carolina. My goal was to have him spend a couple hours looking over the car to inspect it, identify any things that may need to be addressed, and help me build out a prioritized list of projects. I already have a running project list with about a dozen items on it, but I knew a skilled eye would likely find new ones.
I contacted Dave before we headed out for our fall vacation and was very excited when he got back to me. I already realize how important this step is in taking over the maintenance of the GT6 and understanding what needs to be done and where I should focus, especially given the difference in approach between my dad for the past 37 years (focused mostly on mechanical problems, keeping car running) and me (includes restoration, originality).
He explained to me that his customers tend to run a wide range of willingness to be involved with their own project cars — some want him to do all the work, whereas others want to learn and do as much of it as they can — we knew I was somewhere in the middle, and he said he likes to teach, so we started looking the car over together. It would be hard to explain how much I learned over the next two eight hours.
By the time I left that evening, he had fixed six or seven of the items on my list, and we had prioritized several new ones. Here is what we went through:
- Fix driver’s door alignment — complete
- Inspect car for overheating — complete, not an issue
- Replace heater switch, validate operates properly — nearly complete, just need to confirm cable holds
- Inspect/fix fan motor or switch — complete, not an issue
- Troubleshoot headlight switch (in dash) — complete, but found new issue (short that affects dash lights)
- Troubleshoot headlight selector (on steering column) — complete, replaced with new switch, found new issue (pull to flash not working properly)
- Fix leak from back hatch — on hold
- Fix windshield washer control and replace water bottle — broke control further during testing, will need to replace, then get new bottle
- Fix interior light — complete (wires work, bought used light dome, need to clean/repair before installing)
- Replace windshield wiper control — on hold, this is entirely cosmetic
- Brake lights don’t go out when brake pedal released — complete
- Gas mixture is too rich — complete
The whole list has been updated with new items and can be found here.
There are a couple more pressing issues that we’ll address next time we get together — replacing deteriorated motor mounts and a rubber knuckle in the steering linkage that is rather deteriorated and create a good bit of play in the steering wheel. While I’m there, we’re going to need to pull the dash apart to fix the washer control and troubleshoot a short in the headlight switch that causes the dash lights to not come on, so we’ll probably add a coat of polyurethane to it and convert the dash light bulbs to LED bulbs.
