Making a TR6 more fun to drive....

I managed to make a supersized mess in the garage today. I run a top end oil line to supplement the standard oil feed through the block to the head. That oil feed is basically run off the cam and is a bit weak feeding to the valvetrain. So the popular solution for many people through the years has been to add a supplemental line to the head external to the engine- there is even a threaded fitting location on the back of the head which normally has a bolt and a copper sealing washer sealing it from stock. 

The one negative to this arrangement is that it can overdo oiling of the top end of the engine, and if you have leaky valvestems (which I had before, but don't now), you end up sending a lot of oil out the tailpipe. 

The fix for this as suggested by most of the go fast suppliers is to put a 3/32" roll pin in the end of the feed line, constricting the diameter of the feed. So, today, I pulled off the line, bought a roll pin and tapped it in to the line. Reinstalled everything and fired up the car. I did this with the valve cover off to look at the oil holes on the rockers to see that they were still pushing a hint of oil while idling. Everything looked great.....

Until stepped around the car and into 2 1/2 quarts of VR1 pumped on to the berkleying garage floor.

Apparently when I installed the upper end of the line, I had it somewhat crooked and it was bound up against the head casting and that did not let it seal. So, I loosened it up, re-arranged the line and re-tightened it up. I then elected to test it before the cleanup started. 

A couple years ago, my wife thought we should get a cat. I'm the man of the house, so I said I did not think we should. So we got two cats. Therefor, we have plenty of cat litter. Unfortunately, it is the cedar pellet type. That stuff does however work in soaking up oil-maybe not as good as regular stuff, but it does work somewhat. I also had the mandatory 3x4foot steel pan under my car that every British car owner has and it caught most of the oil. Dumping that in the catch tank and using the cedar pellet cat litter worked pretty well followed by plenty of paper towels and Zep cleaner. 

So that is how my 30 minute job turned into a 3 hour ordeal. I hope your Sunday was more productive. 

I wish I could say that I've never done that.

Let me know when you start refilling your engine oil after a change and realize you haven't reinstalled the drain plug yet.

Well, December is nearly on us. Family and work stuff have resulted in my missing the last 2 autocrosses, as well as the last of the year which will be next weekend. 

On a positive note, I mounted my hardtop and have been able to drive the car to work a fair bit lately. The hardtop really transforms the car. Not just into a coupe, but it feels like it improves the rigidity of the chassis as well.

I have a hardtop hanging from the ceiling that has never been on the car.  It's missing both side windows, all of the seals, and most of the mounting hardware.  It's also the wrong color (BRG), the rear window is badly scratched (and unavailable new), and the headliner is rotted with over spray.  I still have hopes of using it some day.  They function well and look great.

Better luck next year on the autocrossing.  I'm hoping to get back into it with either the TR6 or a MS Miata.

Time to make the car yet a little more fun to drive. 

During autocrosses, I could definitely feel a wheel spinning as I was pulling away from corners. I'm leaving time there. 

There is a very popular upgrade for the car- put a Nissan R200 diff along with axles from Goodparts.com in the car. The R200 has a VLSD that is just right for the car and way overrated HP wise. The axles are CV joint based, and again over engineered from a strength standpoint. They also address one of the weaknesses of the car which is the rear axles. I've crushed one crush sleeve in a rear hub already at a track day a couple years ago. Not a good thing. Hub failure in that narrow little car is pretty catastrophic. 

So I needed to find a diff. Richard from Goodparts provides a nice chart of the cars that are good donors with the right ratios, and which match is adapter kits correctly. The one I really wanted to find was one from a 98 or so Infiniti Q45. A G35 would have been a good donor as well, but slightly worse gear ratio. 

Have been watching the lots locally online lately, and one lot popped up this month with 5 cars as likely donors. Christmas vacation time today allowed me to get up there with my tools and check them out. They had a Q45 with a diff, and a G35 with a diff. The other G35's were open diffs, yuck. 

I watched some vids of people dropping them, and they were all talking about spending 5-6 hours to drop one. I was in and out in an hour and a half, and that included looking at 5 cars to figure out if they were good donors. It was good spending time out there on the lot. I had all my tools and was ready for what I had to do, so that made the job easier. If it had been hot out, that would have sucked. 

The diff I ended up with has basically no slop (compared to a 50 year old Triumph Diff, its tight as E36M3). It is VLSD as well. Got it home and dumped the fluid and it looked good as well. No metal, no milkshake. It was oily on the outside, so I may do new oil seals before installing it. Then again, a little oil leak might suit the Triumph's character. 

I spent the afternoon cleaning the thing up with my pressure washer and a wire wheel and then painted it with some rust eater. Will give it a prime and some black paint in a week. 

Then its time to load up the CC with a Goodparts bill. 

Some pics of the fun today.

More done on the LSD upgrade. 

Spent a couple days during the holiday working on the diff. It was pretty oily when I pulled it, so I ordered up new seals for the axles and the pinion. 

Used a slide hammer to pop out the axles. Cleaned out the bores and popped in new seals. A puller popped the input flange off and I then installed a new pinion seal. The axles popped right back in.

Where the seal rides on the input flange was a little scarred, so I'm going to order a Speedi-sleeve for it. 

Installing this diff also requires a shortened driveshaft and I managed to find one that had already been prepped for an R200.

Upgraded hubs with CV joints and the R200 mounting kit is ordered (with a roughly 4 week leadtime), so all that is left for prep is to find a machine shop to modify the Nissan flange to bolt up to the Triumph Driveshaft.

Do you have to modify the mounts to the chassis for it to fit?

Only two mods needed besides the adapter kit are the removal of the front half of a small boss on the top of the diff and the driveshaft flange mod.

No mods to the car at all.

In hindsight, I wish I had done this mod rather than rebuild a stock diff with a Quaife unit. It's not out of the question in the future to change it, but I'm going to wait and see how the current diff works first.  So far, it's doing fine if a little noisy on deceleration.

Big Brown Truck just dropped off some packages! 

Now I just have to have a weekend to get this rolling. 

In the boxes are the Goodparts CV axles and hubs to match the R200 in the pic. Also included is the adapter kit that bolts the R200 straight to the original mounting points on the chassis. The final box is the driveshaft (which I got a week or more ago). 

I pulled open the axles and the adapter kit. I worked in aftermarket autoparts for almost 25 years. Goodparts knows how to package parts. Everything is perfect and there's no way anything could have gotten damaged. Fasteners are all bagged in logical groups. You just cannot beat that. 

One thing I spent the week on was trying to get the Diff input flange machine/drilled to match the Triumph driveshaft. No one in my area would touch it. Ended up calling Richard at Goodparts and the price was so good it was absolutely a no-brainer. It will be in his hands by mid-week and should be back to me early the following week. 

Made a bunch of progress this weekend on the swap. Thought I might actually finish the job, but stuff got in the way. With a little luck. I'll have it done by next weekend.

I started by pulling all the stock parts out. Pulling the exhaust and anti-roll bar made the job go more quickly as well. 

I made a differential cradle for my jack that made dropping the stock diff easier. I'm going to modify it a little for installing the Nissan diff. 

One other 'while I'm in there' project that I'm completing is putting in some backing plates for my bolt-in rollbar.  The SCCA scrutineer at the last TNIA asked that I do that. Pretty quick project. 

Safety, never one of those " I wish I'd not added that extra bracing" items. Good progress.

I should also mention that my input flange had some wear grooves on it. I installed a SKF Speedi-Sleeve on it to take care of that.

Made a bunch of progress last night after work and tonight as well. A bunch of reading of the instructions for the CV axles and diff kit pointed out that I really had to think through exactly what order everything would go in. The new parts are substantially larger than stock, so more planning is involved. I've had the stock parts in and out of my car and others in the last 30 years and that process is a breeze.

Installing the axles first and then the diff is the way to go.

Prepping the trailing arms involved grinding the casting lines out of the inside. I tried with a flap drum and my rechargeable drill. What a friggin waste of time. Borrowed a plug in drill and went to town on the trailing arms. A job that was taking hours turned into 30 minutes.

Then with the axles installed, I worked on installing the driveshaft. 

Finished out Monday night with my son helping me bolt in the reinforcing plates that I made on Sunday.

Tonight after work, I filled the diff up with oil and popped it on my homemade lifting cradle on my floor jack. Bench press was not my strong suit when I was working out (and that was 20 years ago) so benching in this 80 lbs diff while fiddling with washers, nuts, etc was not gonna work. 

Took a bit to fanagle it into place, but it's home. Axles and driveshaft are connected. I think a little left/right adjusting might be necessary.

Minor concern now is exhaust clearance. We'll see tomorrow.

Well, this thread took a pause due to a bonehead move on my part. 

The instructions with the hub instructed prep of the lugnuts with a tap before attempting to install them. I tried a lugnut and it went on fine, so I started installing the rest. One spun the stud in the hub. 

Unfortunately, stud replacement requires sending the hub back to the mfg. The mfg was great about it, did the work and shipped back for free.

Unfortunately, the hub then got caught in USPS he'll and has been stuck there since. They called today and stated it should be delivered Monday- fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I pulled the exhaust and painted it. Also buffed out the stainless tips and then replaced the exhaust gaskets and hanger.

I followed that up this weekend by installing a modern gear reduction starter that I bought off a guy who sold his car and is getting out. 

Picked something else up this week that should come in handy in the future. I definitely need to learn to use it.

Airco was bought out, so it appears that this is really a Miller Thunderbolt 225.

Did a quick test with it today and it is fully functional.

Came with a bunch of rods, a helmet, gloves, etc.

In reply to oppositelocksmith :

What's picture #2?
At first glance, I thought "Damn, that cylinder looks like s**t, gonna need oversize pistons."
Then I saw the context from the other pix and realized it was part of the driveline work.

clshore said:

In reply to oppositelocksmith :

What's picture #2?
At first glance, I thought "Damn, that cylinder looks like s**t, gonna need oversize pistons."
Then I saw the context from the other pix and realized it was part of the driveline work.

Yeah, that would be one heckuva cylinder!
The trailing arm castings are fairly rough inside. That hole is where the hub bolts in and where the new CV joint passes through. The flap wheel work ensures that there aren't any casting flaws to wear down the CV boot.

And it’s on its wheels! 

Got the hub this afternoon after work and took a couple hours to go back through the installation of both hubs again. I used a stock wheel to install the axle nut on each side and torqued it into place with my new torque wrench. 

I then took it for a 5 mile test drive and back in the garage to go over it again as I smelled something hot. I pulled a wheel off immediately and felt the hub, drum, CV boots, axles and diff. Everything was cool to the touch except the diff. The diff was definitely warm, but not hot. Exhaust pipe under the diff was uncomfortable touch, diff was not. 

I put the wheel back on and took it for a 20 mile drive and still smelled the smell slightly, but it was not as significant. Will put a long drive on it this weekend and see how it does!

So how does it drive! The back end is much more solid and quiet. Diff gearing noise is gone. Clunk when going from reverse to forward is gone. There is also something that you normally feel in corners which is now gone as well.

Today was supposed to be the first autocross of our season, but this 'bomb cyclone' working its way across the country made a protest against the date and laid 5" of white fluffy stuff on the course.

Luckily it's rescheduled for a couple weekends from now instead of canceled outright. 

The diff and axle upgrade has been simply awesome. The rear of the car is so much more planted now. It's much quieter as well. 

I had an engine problem that popped up which drove me nuts for a couple weekends. Seemed like an ignition issue and after trying that and several other things, that is what it was. I had both a bad condenser and a bad coil. That combination made it tough to diagnose, but its all good now. -- Replacement part quality for wear parts has really gone in the toilet.

I did have two cool new additions for my autocross setup - a new Racequip Pro20 helmet (soon to be driving daughter modeling) and a new set of fridge magnets for the doors (after I lost part of my old set when I forgot to remove them before driving home).

I was waiting for my friend Jane to put up the pics from last weekend's Autocross before I posted this. 

Managed to get out there and get everything set up quickly. I also got in 4 course walks in good order, including a walk with the guy who designed the course - I picked his brains on the best way to drive certain elements. That was invaluable as always. 

Extra fun for this event was getting a buddy and his wife to bring their track day '10 Camaro out to drive as well. They had a great time and both did really well. 

The car performed really well. New helmet is great and I got the right size, so I'm really happy with that. 

So how does the LSD work with the car- In a word- Excellent! The rear end is so much more planted than before. It really is different to drive. Putting the power down is a different thing. I still have enough power to break both tires loose, but this is very different than breaking one tire loose and making smoke from just one. Those who've changed a car from an open diff to an lsd know what I'm talking about. 

I did a couple other things different at this event - it is still relatively cold out, so I left the hard top on the car. It makes about a 30lbs difference in the weight in the car, but makes the car so much more still chassis wise. I wish I could leave it on during the summer. 

I also built myself a tote box to put all the heavy stuff from the car - extra oil, spares, booster pack, etc - as well as gloves for clean up and other stuff. This allows me to just lift that box out of the trunk and dump it on the curb and keep it contained rather than having a yardsale before I run. 

How did I end up? No one in my class, so I was 26 of 32 by PAX. Everyone said I'm really running my car in the wrong class. If I had run my car in HCS, then I'd have been 20th by PAX out of 32. I guess I'm going to go ahead and switch classes. Why not?

At this point, its time to look into tires. I put a thread up in another section of the forum, and it really seems like its time to bite the bullet and buy a set of race wheels and put some 200tw tires on them. I also need to put some new regular driving tires on the car as well. Since the tires I drive on regularly are 11-12 yrs old, that will have to come first while I look for wheels. Got some good advice in that other thread. 

So, I gotta add some pics and a vid. 

Youtube vid~!

https://youtu.be/MPQd3ji7ARs

This post is days too old, unfortunately because I typed it up in my phone and then somehow deleted it because 'all thumbs...'. 

Anyway, last week was simply awesome. 

I started off by getting a new set of tires installed on the car. I removed the crappy 11 year old 600tw tires that I had on the car and replaced them with a set of brand new 480tw Firestone Firehawks. Much better tire overall than what they replaced and so much grippier. Getting this done took me a while as the wheels on my car are lug balanced instead of center balanced - and only one shop in town could do this for me. Anyway, its done, the car is happy and I'm happy. 

With new tires installed, I took off for the Mitty. I live up in the Memphis TN area and was heading down to Road Atlanta via Northern Alabama. I took off on Wednesday afternoon and spent the night at a fellow Triumph owners home. Beautiful place overlooking Guntersville Lake. Also had an opportunity to see the 4k+ square foot shop that another buddy is building. I sure wish I had a shop like that....

Thursday morning, we got the cars loaded back up and headed out for Road Atlanta. The car never broke a sweat and drove beautifully the whole way. Weather at the Mitty was the best we've had in probably 10 years. The racing was great and all the cars in attendance were awesome to look at and BS over. 

I made it a point to pay up a few bucks to do some touring laps and take my buddy Phil for a ride in the car. He was simply invaluable as I was building my new engine back in 2020 and is always willing to help any way he can. He loved the track tour (though the guy in the pace car could have let us get a little more throttle pedal under our feet!). 

When I got home mid-Sunday afternoon, I had just over 900 miles of driving and a heckuvalotta good memories. 

Luck finally came my way and I was able to get out and race again. We had a double Autocross weekend, and initially I was supposed to miss both days. For Saturday, I was going to have to work for the first time on a weekend in what seems several years. For Sunday (today), I was supposed to take my daughter to a sports camp a state away. However, luck jumped in, and while I could not get out of work, a fellow sports-parent volunteered to deliver my daughter to camp on Sunday! Yay!

I found this out Friday night, so this meant I had a mad dash to prep the car and check everything over. I found the clutch fluid suspiciously low - She got a new master and slave cylinder in March, so there is no reason for it to be dropping fluid. I'll check the fittings this coming weekend to make sure I don't have a weeper. I had done an oil change over the 4th of July holiday weekend, so at least I was up to date on that! Everything else seemed ready to go. 

I've finally got things into a bit of a rhythm for Autocrosses.

I have a box that fits neatly in the trunk and holds a few necessary tools, spares, sunscreen, magnetic numbers, etc. That's nice so I can just plop that on the curb instead of having a yardsale at every race. I've been using that box the last 4-5 events. Gloves for picking up cones at the end as well -Why does everyone just leave at the end - These events really don't just put themselves on. I try to help the folks that put it together and stay until the trailer is packed back up. 

I finally found a nice wide brim hat to keep myself from getting stupidly burnt.

I love my Racequip helmet. Great sizing, good ventilation. I really need to wear a headsock with it though before I make it stink. 

All the above and a full cooler to keep from getting dehydrated. 

I got to work first, so I quickly saw that the cones that I figured people would hit definitely were magnetic. When I finally got to drive, I drove a couple runs trying to see where I should shift. This course was so tight, I just stayed in first and that definitely yielded my best runs. 

However, at my 3 run, things unravelled a bit. I tried a bit too hard, the car got a bit sideways in the slalom going towards the finish, and either when it gripped, or when I hit full throttle, it just simply died. I coasted across the line and could not re-start the car for about 3 mins. When it re-started, it was fine. 

Then the problem came back kinda intermittently - If I snapped the throttles open, it either cut out or bogged (hard to tell, and I can't tell from the vids I have) and then snapped back to running quickly. Real neck snapping action. With triple DCOE's, it does not seem like a fuel supply thing, but more like I flooded the car and it stalled. Either that or, I have an ignition issue with something coming loose in hard accelerations.

I went through the car when I got home and could duplicate a flood bog situation really easily, but could not duplicate anything ignition related by messing with all of the ignition related wiring throughout the harness. 

More diagnosis is necessary! 

Anyway, here is a video from today. My first run and my fastest run. 

(369) Triumph TR6 Autocross July 10 2022 - YouTube