When I was 15, my dad and I bought an Austin Healey Sprite from a junkyard, which in addition to the engine under the bonnet also happened to have a complete spare engine in the passenger seat.
We made a blind guess at which engine was "better", and overhauled that one. It was a great opportunity to learn practical things about cars, but also deeper lessons in patience/gumption (Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, comes across someone who is purchasing an entire motorcycle in loose parts. "He'll know something about motorcycles before he gets those together....and that's the best way to learn, too.").
The only problem was that on reassembly, we couldn't get our newly overhauled engine to start. We tried everything we could think of. We were unfamiliar with the peculiarities of British cars of that era, and it took us more than a few hours to notice and comprehend the words conveniently printed right there on the speedometer: "Positive Earth".
We switched the battery wiring so that the positive terminal connected to the car's ground, and she fired right up....at 2 o'clock in the morning in our suburban garage. What a great memory.
We hadn't yet hooked up the exhaust, so the throaty roar of the engine awakened more than a few neighbors.
Unlike the video shown, we ended up with more than a few leftover parts.
Oh yes, the wonders of British automotive engineering. You haven't felt the joy of it until an electrical issue appears. Which is often the case. Did you ever enjoy letting out the Lucas magic smoke? Preferably from behind the dash area... :)
But I later bought a bright orange '64 Triumph Spitfire ($400!), and spent many interesting hours tweaking the engine (with its infamous twin carburetors), until an unfortunate failure in judgment occurred on the Potrero Grade.
We were able to put the engine into a close friend's Triumph, so it's possible that beautiful little temperamental engine lives on, somewhere.
At 1:56, it appears that the old motor suffered from the infamous valve-in-piston design flaw :)
If you enjoy hacking, do yourself a favor and get your hands on a small engine with a horizontal crank. They're harder to find than vertical crank motors, but much easier to run on a bench and more closely resemble a car engine. Take it apart and put it back together again. If you're not going to put the engine back in service, there is very little you can get wrong. Don't worry about torque specs or gasket quality. Just get your hands dirty! It's great fun.
I've had too many people ask me, "What's the point to an older automobile?", or lately, "Why do you like/collect those old watches?"
My answer is usually, "Yea, you're right--I should look into new stuff?"
I then ask about that old Toyota truck with the 22r engine collecting leafs on the street. "Do you want to sell?" Oh yea, if you have any old watches--I buy those too?"
Years ago I got tired of trying to explain aesthetics, or the beauty of a well designed mechanical object.
I tried to put a new stereo in a later model Ford this weekend. I told a family relative, I need to access one of the computers with a scan tool. I think I need a bi-directional scan tool--which I don't have. I put a portable radio on the passenger seat, until I figure how to change the radio?
We call them "shipping screws", because they're in there when the thing ships, but clearly aren't required for proper function.
Did the bloke in the video ever find out what the missing bits were for? Or were they dupes that he got with the replacement assembly, and he'd already got them from the original assembly (or vice versa)?
Love this car. It's beautiful and reminds me of the jaguar e-type. I wasn't even born during this time but I always appreciate a good car. Always amazes me how they were able to build all these things back when they didn't have cad software.
Something I always wonder is just how well they were able to produce symmetry in their designs, when it was all sculpted (usually out of clay) .. before CAD, it had to have been done with pure artistic sensibility, and it worked so well .. I wonder if we've lost something of the minor, subtle imperfections that are seemingly observed at a subconscious layer, and which seem to imbue a degree of affinity for those old designs...
I'd submit the answer is actually a firm "no"... it just moved into dimensions you can no longer see. Open up a modern car. See that square latch of stuck-on foil with some padding under it that looks pointless? It kills a sound that you never noticed, because the engineers already killed it for you. Noticed how the modern car runs more smoothly down the road? A lot of that comes from endless days of supercomputer simulation that told them where to place the engine mounts. Those engine mounts look displeasingly asymmetric, you say? Turns out that's a feature, not a bug! Symmetry introduces noise modes.
Yes, there are absolutely ways that modern cars shave pennies in the design... my Dad (recently retired test engineer) and I often converse about how to spend $100 more at the factory to get a much nicer car, but in ways that don't or can't affect sales, so they don't happen. But at the same time, they are marvels of engineering that simply blow away what we had 50 years ago on almost every meaningful metric. (Maybe price... for better and for worse, the legally-mandated minimal safe car is pretty expensive nowadays... they'd love to offer you something cheaper but it can't pass safety tests.)
I was a car nut long before I became a computer guy...I vaguely recollect something about this. I believe they would have created a series of cardboard templates, mirror images for left and right, about one inch apart along the length of the contour, front to back. And then carved the clay to match the templates. Hope this verbal description is clear enough.
When I was 15, my dad and I bought an Austin Healey Sprite from a junkyard, which in addition to the engine under the bonnet also happened to have a complete spare engine in the passenger seat.
We made a blind guess at which engine was "better", and overhauled that one. It was a great opportunity to learn practical things about cars, but also deeper lessons in patience/gumption (Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, comes across someone who is purchasing an entire motorcycle in loose parts. "He'll know something about motorcycles before he gets those together....and that's the best way to learn, too.").
The only problem was that on reassembly, we couldn't get our newly overhauled engine to start. We tried everything we could think of. We were unfamiliar with the peculiarities of British cars of that era, and it took us more than a few hours to notice and comprehend the words conveniently printed right there on the speedometer: "Positive Earth".
We switched the battery wiring so that the positive terminal connected to the car's ground, and she fired right up....at 2 o'clock in the morning in our suburban garage. What a great memory.
We hadn't yet hooked up the exhaust, so the throaty roar of the engine awakened more than a few neighbors.
Unlike the video shown, we ended up with more than a few leftover parts.
The little 4-cylinder ran just fine without them.