Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Last Thursday my friend Tom heard of an auction down near Northfield with four ‘62 Buicks. This is one of the cars that contained the 215 cubic inch aluminum V8, which ended up in my TR6 and many other projects, including an Indy 500 car driven by Dan Gurney, plus dune buggies, airplanes, boats, you name it. Carroll Shelby considered it for the Cobra…
The real holy grail for that motor is a four-speed transmission. I’ve never seen one but once in a while the bellhousing for them turns up on eBay. I even had one but I sold it in a moment of stupidity. Hoped there was one down in Northfield but no. I’ll get one though. Watch these pages….

And don’t worry how they work.

I was editing a performance tuning book this week, which contained an interesting fact about piston speed in a running engine. Even among professional race mills, the upper limit for pistons within the cylinder is only about 5500 feet per minute, or a nudge over 60 miles per hour.

For a piece attached to a crankshaft churning thousands of revolutions a minute, that seemed pretty pokey. Yet it’s average speed and since a piston travels linearly back and forth it must come to a full stop twice each revolution. The author said he explained this to a current NASCAR star, to remain nameless, and the driver replied, “If you believe that, you’re f%#$ crazy!”

As a friend observed, “some people belong in the car, some people belong in the shop.”

Cooling is one of the many challenges confronting enthusiasts who wish to swap a bigger engine, usually a V8, into a car that originally came with something smaller. We’ve tracked that issue here with a ‘72 TR6 whose 2.5-liter straight six has been replaced with a 3.5 liter (215 cubic inch) aluminum V8. The Triumph radiator wasn’t up to the task.

Top of “new” radiator needed some anchoring. Original TR6 supports, which ran to sides of TR6 radiator, fit well connecting the grille opening (braced with a factory piece on each side) to the factory GM top-mounted radiator support.

So in went a genuine 215 radiator from a ‘62 Buick Special, re-cored for higher efficiency. The swap involved custom brackets, tricky lower radiator hose routing, different fan spacing, and then some custom bracing on the top to keep the new heat exchanger in place.

The original TR6 braces had to be bent at each end so they could angle down yet not bend their mounting points when the bolts were snugged. One is rusty. I’ll redo that, but it’s an old piece so the vintage look is OK for now.

Sunday offered up the time to secure it, fill it, and start the engine. Yeehah! She starts, she runs, the fan blows like a special-effects wind generator, and it doesn’t look too far from stock, or factory modified, which was the goal.

As you fit non-original parts, make sure you have hood clearance. We’re OK on that score too.

Little more tinkering over the next few months (or decades depending on who you talk to at this address) and she’ll be ready for the road.

Looks pretty good except for the bleached-out photo (shot it too dark).

You might think, seven years into the 21st Century, that every square mile of the United States has been explored, its treasures unearthed. You’re wrong.

Tom Cotter, modern Meriwether Lewis, will tell you from decades of experience that treasure lies within 20 minutes of just about every home in the country. Dear to any lover of gears and wheels, leather and chrome, the soft chuff and the raspy growl of a running piston engine, that treasure is cars. Old cars. Yesterday’s hauler of people and goods, fast or slow, opulent or plain—one of thousands, one of a dozen, one of three or two or one left in the world.

For forty years, Tom has scanned his surroundings like a tracker or a scout, passing no building, no field, no grove of trees or stretch of hedge without assessing whether it might conceal some fugitive from automotive history. That passion has sparked a series of books—“barn-find” books—chronicling discoveries of wonderful machines sitting idly by, hidden from view by walls so close and familiar to local car enthusiasts they could sketch them from memory, clueless what marvel dear to their hearts lies just on the other side.

I had the good fortune to edit Tom’s The Cobra in the Barn and The Hemi in the Barn and to write up a half-dozen stories for the first book. I reached Tom on Friday afternoon in Virginia, where he had towed his classic MG Midget from his home in North Carolina for some weekend racing at Virginia International Raceway.

KP: Hi Tom. What are you racing at VIR?

TC: I’ve got my 1275(cc) Midget. I put new tires on it and was going to do the brakes but my mechanic convinced me that I didn’t want to scrub off too much speed.

KP: Nice! Well with a Midget you’re not going to get up there too fast….

TC: It’s a nice car. I wanted a “square bodied” Spridget (Austin Healey Sprite or MG Midget–nearly identical) so I put some feelers out. Someone had a Huffaker Jr.–neat car with some history. It’s a quasi-factory car; it wasn’t one of the true factory cars but it was built alongside the team cars. The guy who sold it to me has been trying to buy it back for years.

KP: What kind of horsepower are you getting out of it?

TC: About 140. We’re stressing them to such a level. Eight-thousand RPMS. You wait till a car’s 40 years old, then ask for 3 times the power. We blow head gaskets. If a hairline crack develops in the crankshaft it can explode pieces through the side of the block.

KP: You’ve become the barn-find king with Cobra in the Barn and Hemi in the Barn. How did that all get started?

TC: It’s just something I’ve done since I was 12 or 13 years old. I’d be on the school bus and I’d see old cars. When I got home I’d go back on my bike and check them out. When I was 14 years old I found a ’40 Ford convertible behind Charley’s Welding Shop. Lumpy on Leave it to Beaver had a 1940 convertible. I bought it for twenty-five bucks. I worked on it over the summer with some friends, sanding, cleaning it up. I sold the side mirror for seventy-five bucks. When I was 15 I found a ’39 Ford Woody wagon next to a barn. It was $300. I didn’t have $300 and neither did my parents. I borrowed the money from a neighbor and then did yard work for her all summer–mowing the lawn, picking up. I sold that car but I found it years later and bought it back. I have it now.

KP: Wow. A lot of nice memories with that one.

TC: We’d go on vacation in Vermont (I’m from Long Island). I’d hitchhike around looking for old cars, peering behind barns. It’s organic to my being. In high school, if we had a day off, I’d go to the eastern end of Long Island looking for cars. I’m 53 now–this has been a part of me for 40 years. Every wedding, funeral, business trip I go to, my head is going left, right, left, right. If there are old cars to be found, I’ll find them. The barn finds, that’s where the good cars are now. If they’ve been outside, cars from the ’30s and ’40s are really bad now.

KP: So you’ve got an eye for the sort of buildings where these cars end up?

TC: If it’s got a fender, a driveshaft, a rear end sitting outside…somebody at some point worked with cars. If there’s grass growing up in front of the doors, any cars inside aren’t being used. There could be an antique or classic in there. People like me can’t help looking. I met a guy who was a blimp pilot. He flew over a field and saw a barn that had fallen down. He could see some cars. He brought the blimp down and thought he could see a Sunbeam and a Midget. He remembered the spot and drove back. He asked the farmer about the cars and the farmer said, “how could you know about them?” Turns out it was a Tiger and a Sprite. He bought both of them.

KP: You’ve collected a lot of stories over the years. When people start trading tales, what’s one of your favorites?

TC: My favorite barn-find story of all time is in Cobra in the Barn. It’s a 1932 Ford Roadster pickup. A kid saw it when he was 12 years old in 1949. It belonged to a farmer. He asked about buying it and the farmer said no. He went back every year, every couple years. The farmer would remember him and they’d talk. He kept going back. One day the farmer didn’t answer the door. His son did. The son said his father had died. “He told me you’d come back,” the son said. “He wants you to have it.” The “kid” who never gave up was now 64 years old. He waited 52 years to get that truck. A ’32 Roadster Pickup is one of the rarest Fords of all time. People all over the world have been trying to buy it from him. He’ll never sell it. He waited more than half his life for that truck.

KP: What’s next?

TC: I have enough stories for half of the next book. That won’t be for a couple years. I want to start collecting motorcycle stories. I’d like to get the word out. There’s a lot of amazing bikes out there and I want to hear what they are and where people found them.

KP: I’ll tell people they can send them to me, if they want to. [Seriously, readers–If you have a good story about a rare or classic motorcycle that you or someone you know discovered, let me know. I’ll pass word to Tom and if it’s something he’s interested in, he’ll be in touch.]

TC: The Saratoga Auto Museum in New York put in a barn-find exhibit in July. My ’39 Woody is in it and my Shelby GT500. They have Rolls Royces and some other fancy cars too, some restored, some as is. They have a contest. Tell them your barn-find story and they’ll pick the best one. The winner gets an autographed copy of Cobra in the Barn and Hemi in the Barn and the story will be included in the next book.

KP: I’m looking forward to it. And the motorcycle book too. Thanks for sharing some thoughts and stories, and have fun racing at VIR.

TC: You know it. Take care.

[Tom emailed to say he and his Midget finished 3rd in the Sportscar Vintage Racing Association meet at VIR after starting on the pole.]

On our last episode of It’s Not Done Yet?!, the V8-in-a-TR6 project was in want of a lower radiator hose–the prior stock radiator setup proving too small to cool a 3.5-liter (215 c.i.) V8 when it was designed for a 2.5-liter six. Having sourced a genuine 215 V8 radiator and had it rebuilt with a more efficient core, our next challenge was securing it in the engine bay.

Stock radiator, left. Buick 215 V8 radiator, rebuilt, right.

I’d done enough measuring to know that it would go in there, but not in the stock location, where the original sat between two steel box members and bolted to them via side-mounted brackets. The “new” radiator would have to sit further forward, ahead of the steel box sections in question. This meant new upper and lower radiator hoses and more fan spacing to keep it close behind the radiator for effective cooling.

Old radiator sat between box sections. New one sits ahead of them. Its bracket uses same bolt hole.

To keep things moving, I had some 4-1/2 inch studs machined to accommodate 3-1/2 inches of fan spacers (with a half inch of threads on each end to anchor into the water-pump flange on one end and hold four nuts and lockwashers to secure the fan clutch on the other). This wide spacing was to allow a little more room for the lower radiator hose, which, if run underneath the front cross-member, would need to make a tight “S” turn to get back up to the radiator outlet tube.

Old hose ran under front crossmember. New outlet tube emerges several inches higher.

With the old radiator, the lower hose needed to go under the front cross-member because of how low the outlet tube sat. The 215 radiator, in its forward location, has a higher outlet tube by maybe 4 inches–hence the assumed need for a wicked “S” bend in the lower hose. Probably should have pulled the alternator before making that assessment. With that hunk of metal out of the way, it became apparent that maybe the lower hose could, as commenter Gary J. had proposed, sneak between the steering rack and front crossmember for more direct routing. Using the now-too-short top radiator hose for a trial confirmed that that gap is adequate and almost perfectly aligned with the outlet tube of the new radiator.

Aha. New hose can run between steering rack and crossmember.

Contemplating S-bend in lower radiator hose, I spaced fan out 3-1/2 inches….

Now the radiator could go back toward the firewall as far as the space allowed, increasing hood clearance, reducing required fan spacing and making for a better looking layout. But … my custom machined 4-1/2 studs were too long for that. Fortunately, my shop like everyone else’s includes a hack saw, permanent marker, and clamping instruments.

…but with more direct hose routing, 2-1/2 inches will do. But I need another 1/16th inch because 2-inch spacer had shallow hole for water-pump shaft.

The new radiator routing freed up one inch, which meant removing the 1-inch spacer from the lineup and sawing about an inch off the four fan studs.

New stud length about an inch shorter. I took most of that off the water-pump-flange end so that the back of the stud is flush to the back of the flange.

Yet these older fan spacers often have a curious attribute: the hole into which the water pump shaft fits isn’t drilled to the same internal diameter over the hole’s full length. Such is the case with my 2-inch spacer. Enough of the hole was proper diameter to allow it to slide nearly all the way flush against the half-inch spacer (whose hole goes all the way through) and then the water pump pulley. But the hole then has a step where it narrows about a 64th of an inch. Even though that variation is small, the spacer would not slide past the step (fan spacers fit with close tolerance to the water pump shaft to avoid wobble). The result was a gap a hair under 1/16 inch between the 2-inch spacer as stopped by the “step” and where it needed to be to hold the 1/2-inch spacer and water-pump pulley snug to the water-pump flange.

Draw two disks on sheet aluminum.

I thought about just cranking the fan-clutch mounting nuts down hard and hoping the force would crush or smear the step back the required distance. The end of the water-pump shaft is beveled, however, meaning that the force against the step would push outward against the spacer rather than directly back against the step. I didn’t want to crack my 2-inch spacer, which I had driven a half hour each way to retrieve from a mid-’60s sedan at Sonny’s Salvage.

Clamp 1-inch spacer to two thin disks as template.

So… back down to the basement to fabricate something to fill 1/16 of an inch. Could have used four washers, but hey, why take a hack-looking shortcut now? Instead, I traced the fan spacer onto some sheet aluminum and cut out two disks with tin snips. Then, using the 1-inch spacer as a guide, I drilled four holes for the mounting studs and a center hole for the water-pump shaft. Took a little filing on the center hole and around the circumference to make it all clean and proper, but it worked.

Drill…

With a 1/2-inch and a 2-inch factory ’60s-era GM spacer, plus my two thin homemade disks, everything that spins to cool bolts snugly into place. If I can get upper and lower universal radiator hoses in the length I need, we are in business with a running V8 TR6.

…and file.

Spacers good to go. (Shown six pictures up fitted with 2-inch and 1/2-inch spacers on water-pump shaft.)