Triumphs

When I asked if it was for sale, he immediately said yes and I gave him a deposit toward a $1500 total price. A good friend drove me back up there (200 miles) in a pickup-trailer rig and we brought it home. At this point I need to turn back the hands of time to around 1980. I was driving A BRG TR 4 A as my daily driver, which was difficult “back in the day.” Parts were difficult to source and the roadster factory in Pennsylvania was just coming online and by online of course I don’t mean Internet. You had to get your hands on a catalog and order over the phone or by mail. Shipping was slow and relatively expensive. And there were a lot of parts that were poor quality or just not being reproduced at that time. Moss Motors had been around for a long time, but not well known to us on the East Coast as they were based in California. On my budget I could not afford to be shipping parts across the country to support what was, on my salary, a pretty frivolous endeavor. In spite of that somehow I kept the car going but was lusting after a TR 6 that my sister in law, Pam, had purchased new in 1975. She was facing problems with getting the car serviced and obtaining parts and was ready to move on to something new. I don’t recall what price we settled on but I’m sure she gave me a great family deal that was better for me than it was for her. She dearly love the car and wanted to see it go to a good home. She had purchased a vinyl covered fiberglass hard top that enabled her to use the car year round, but the Maryland road salt had taken a toll on all of the vehicle’s body cavities with which long-term TR owners are intimately familiar.

The fog of time has obscured my memory of what happened to my wonderful TR4 A, but I’m sure I sold it to finance the deal with Pam. My ownership of of the TR4A had been an exercise in maintaining a specialty car on a shoestring budget. Among other things, I learned that wire wheels splines wear out over time, with shocking results. One of the main things that stands out in my mind is that I used to ride my five and 10 year old sons around in the car sitting on the little shelf behind the seats. Different times. It’s surprising to me that I haven’t been able to find any photographs or records of my ownership of the car. Back to the TR six. I had never driven a six cylinder Triumph before I owned this mimosa yellow 75, so I had no idea what to expect in terms of performance. It seemed like I was constantly dealing with the timing or carburetors setting problem trying to get the car to the performance level that I expected. I recall that it had an issue with spitting back through the front carburetor, but nothing I did really seemed to help the problem. But I drove it. For five years, Which brings us back to the green 72 TR6 that I’d just brought home from Northern Virginia. In the process of purchasing the car, I never spoke to the girl who had owned it so I didn’t have a clear picture of why she had stopped driving it except for the fact that someone had apparently let something get sucked into the engine. So I found myself faced with a 75 that didn’t quite run right and a 72 that I couldn’t run at all. I then made a decision that has bothered me ever since- I decided to rebuild the engine from the 75 and put it in my newly acquired 72 and then at some point in the future I would repair the unknown problem it in the 72 engine and put it back in the 75. In the process of rebuilding the engine from the 1975 TR6, I discovered that the camshaft had a missing lobe on one of the cylinders! It was just round!. So, for whatever period of time, I had been driving a 5-cylinder TR6 – actually I had probably been driving a 5-cylinder TR6 for the entire time that I owned the car, but now the engine was back together with a mild performance cam, increased compression (10:1) and ready to go back in the car. Another side note in this project is that I came to realize that the 72 was supposed to be an overdrive-equipped car based on the VIN number that ended with the letter O. I guess at some point in the car’s life it had a transmission problem and either parts were not available or somebody pulled a fast one on the vehicle’s owner at the time and put a plain old 4-speed transmission in the car without overdrive. it would have been a nice feature to have, but nobody had made any promises to me about this car when I purchased it, so I still felt I was lucky to have this 56,000 mile car with a good solid body and a steel hardtop.

I can’t remember what other work I did on the car to get it ready to go back on the road, but when that day finally came I was stunned by the performance of a true six-cylinder engine in this nimble little car.

I sold the 75 and soon thereafter began a cosmetic upgrade on the 72. I chemical stripped the body and turned it over to my friends at Abacus Racing for final body work and paint.

The picture on the right shows the beautiful dark, dark green paint job the day it came home from Abacus. If you look at the left border of the picture, you see my kids’ basketball pole. I was unaware that the pole was rusted completely through at the bottom and the next day it fell over on the back fender of the car. There are a lot of ways to react to something like that, but it’s just a car and nobody got hurt, so I shrugged it off and called Abacus. Unfortunately, the state had come in and shut down their painting operation and my car to this day is the last customer car they ever painted. I had to find another body shop, so I got some recommendations, picked one and trailered it over. To their credit, they did a flawless (to my eye) job of panel beating and color matching.

Hard to believe now that this was the beginning of a 25 year segment in my relationship with this great car. It was my daily driver, commuting 40 miles or so a day round trip to the various locations my career took me. The factory hardtop made it comfortable in our relatively mild winters and I took it off hung it up from the garage ceiling in the summer. I guess I replaced the soft top a couple of times when rear windows fogged and cracked.

In the spring of 2003 I retired from a great career working for the Navy as a federal employee, repairing electronic systems and finally managing software development projects for the ships. To my wife’s relief, I got a part-time job at the nearby West Marine which helped support my expensive boating hobby. Later that year, my older son told me that the Shell service station near our neighborhood was for sale and I soon found myself the owner of a three-bay gas station. I’ll leave the details of that part of my career for another blog, but in 2010 I found myself short of capital, so I put my dear TR up for sale. A local used car dealer took a fancy to it and gave me my asking price for the car, saying he wanted it for his personal collection. He kept it out on his lot on a highway I travel frequently, forcing me to look at it sitting, never seeming to go anywhere. I would occasionally pull through the lot noting that he had the car repainted in the same dark green and put Coker redlines on. But it still just sat for the most part, sometimes moving from one side of the lot to another. A couple of times I stopped in and asked him if he wanted to get rid of it and he offered it to me for 12 grand. Thanks, but no thanks. As I said, he was a used car dealer. One day I noticed it was in his service bay, so I stopped in and talked to his tech who was in the middle of putting a new head gasket on it.

In 2010, my shop was deeply involved in hybrid vehicle repair, including a franchise operation to recondition hybrid batteries. As a result we found ourselves with access to a lot of “distressed” Priuses that we could buy, repair and sell. We opened a small car lot which was my primary responsibility. Again, fodder for another blog post. After five years, I was ready to stop punishing myself and we closed up the lot, selling the remaining inventory at auction – except for one lone Chevy SUV that had a wholesale value of about $5000. I drove it over to owner of my TR and offered him the SUV in straight trade for my car. To my surprise, he took the deal, so eight years later, I was reunited with my baby. I found that during that eight years he (or somebody) had driven it 149 miles. He said he tried to drive it and he couldn’t fit in it. The soft top was in bad shape and the car body is, as of this writing riddled with rust and peeling paint. the Cokers were dry-rotted and when I drove it home, the master cylinder leaked all of its fluid into the booster. The dash is delaminated and crumbling. The lights were sketchy, but now LED and working great. The headlight switch, now replaced, had come apart. I’ve installed some nice, practical Goodyear tires and a new soft top from TRF.

While I was installing the soft top, I had the hardtop sitting on the pavement directly behind the car. I went inside briefly to attend to some shop business, and when I came back out, someone had hit the hardtop.

Most important, the car runs and drives great after all this time – engine strong, transmission smooth and quiet, minimal “clip-clop” from the rear axle, Falcon stainless exhaust sounds great. I have licensed it as an antique with the personalized plate REUNITED.