The Car
When I was fifteen, my dad and I stopped to look at an abandoned car parked next to a singlewide trailer. We knew about Triumph sports cars, but we'd never heard of a Triumph 10. Neither had my uncle, who restores British sports cars. It was an odd little critter, and we felt sorry for it, so we paid the landlord $200 for it and dragged it back to my uncle's shop. The plan was for this to be my first car. Couple of weekends, can of paint. As with any car restoration project, we had no idea what we were getting into. One of these days we'll get it on the road. We've just got the interior, exhaust, and side windows (seals and track reassembly) to go. It'll drive yet. We keep telling ourselves, yeah, we'll get to that this year... in between all our other projects. If you want to start at the beginning, click the Archive link above. |
Recent Work
Fall 2024, we've got a smaller steering wheel! I don't remember what the black wheel was out of, but it clearly wasn't one of these. The black wheel is 16", the new one is 13-1/2". 1-1/4" of additional knee clearance doesn't sound like much, but when you're folding a 6'4" American into a tiny British nugget, more clearance is more better.
The screws are wrong, the hub needs a few more holes drilled, the threads on the shaft need a little cleaning up, and the gap to the nacelle needs attention. But it looks good, and it'll look even better once we've got the horn button assembly installed.
Test-fitting the wheel reminded me how loose the steering box is. I've been doing a little research into that. The good news is that I've found a couple of writeups for adjusting the style of box that I think it is. The bad news is that it appears to be a LHD variant of the less-common-even-in-RHD late-production Cam Gears box, so we may be on our own in terms of parts. The club has a full rebuild service available for the more common Burman-Douglas boxes, but sells only the worm for the Cam Gears--and naturally that's a RHD-only worm. We do have some parts, thanks to the '58 that we parted out. I vaguely remember making one box from the best of the two, using the least-worn parts of both, but it looks like we didn't get it quite right. Hopefully a bit of tweaking brings it around. If not, we do still have that Sprite rack on the shelf.
January 2023, site's back up! Shows how often I check in. Our line of projects is long, and this one's a few notches down. It is still in line, though. December 2021 Site is back up! Project is still alive! Turns out the web host turns out the lights if you don't poke your head in now and then. The 10 had a little excitement this year as we evacuated from a wildfire, and it got to spend a few weeks at my cousin's place waiting for the smoke to blow over. No damage, we're all back home, and the 10 got a much-needed wash out of the deal. (It had been sitting in the back corner of the workshop, and was starting to look like a barn find.) Most of my wrenching time lately has been going into my neighbor's C10, my dad's hot rod TR4A, the stock TR4A he talked a friend of his into buying (which had been previously "restored," so you can guess how that's going), keeping my daily alive, and of course the odd "sure, I can fit that in" job in between that inevitably takes longer than expected. Best I can say on the 10 is we may have a line on a stock steering wheel. The stock wheel is a little smaller than the one we've currently got, which is a good thing, because my knees have to go somewhere. |
Check out the Archive for older posts.
This page was last updated November 10, 2024.
All material copyright Eliot Johnson 2006-2021 unless otherwise noted. I don't mind if you want to use my pictures, just give due credit--and drop a line if it's interesting!
