ABFM @ Van Dusen Gardens

Nicholas and I took the Jaguar up to Vancouver BC on Saturday for the All British Field Meet at Van Dusen gardens. I’ve never been, and several people told me it was a “must do” event, so this year I figured I’d go.

I got up pretty early and checked the weather forecast. It was raining at 5:30 AM, but the weather guys all said it would clear up later. Nick & I climbed into the car with the top up and headed north. It rained virtually the whole way to Bellingham. Thankfully I Rain-X’ed the windscreen… but I forgot to apply my “aftermarket weather-stripping” (i.e. tape) between the glass and top, so sure enough, it leaked. Nicholas could scoot over in his seat and avoid getting wet. No so me, whose hands were right in the drip line on the steering wheel. Nick just zoned out with the iPod and I just drove up the Interstate. We passed one big Healey somewhere south of Bellingham, but no other ABFM cars were seen. The border crossing was swift and painless… the guy asking only if we were going to the car show and the usual gun/gift questions they ask on the northbound crossing of 49° N.

We stopped at a gas station on Oak Street to drop the top, grab some $CDN from an ATM, and something to drink for the day, then pulled into Van Dusen gardens. We found out why we saw so few cars before… we were late! We were virtually the last car to arrive. I registered and was told where to go, and we went to the Jaguar area. Bruce Cox (the guy I shuttled tires north for) was assigning parking spaces, and placed us up on the hill with the rest of the E-types. There were 25 of them!

The car was very dirty from the drive up, and Nick and I made a half-hearted attempt at cleaning it. In reality I was not equipped for the task. I haven’t washed it in about a month, and haven’t vacuumed the interior in well over a year. The tonneau cover I pulled out of the boot (to deploy should it rain) was covered in cat hair… damn cats! I reached for my lint roller thing and it was gone. Oh well. I just stuffed the hair covered part down behind the seats. Nick grabbed some rags and started polishing off the dirty raindrop marks on the bonnet. I grabbed a can of ArmourAll wipes and a made a valiant attempt to clean up the interior and tires. It got to the “passable” point and I gave up. We had zero chances of winning any beauty prizes anyway. I left the splashed road grime all around the bottom of the car, deployed my “It is OK to touch this car!” sign**, grabbed the camera, and took off with Nick to see the show.

**[I made this sign a few years ago and leave it in the car all the time. It has a brief history of the E-type, both as a model and the specific history of this car. Since this car has been through all sorts of misery, and is far from "concours condition" I have no qualms about people touching it. There is nothing the casual observer can do to it that is worse than what this car has been through at the hands of the weather and idiots with wrenches in Texas.]

We made two laps of the field, with a stop for lunch halfway. There were hundreds of cars.. maybe 600 in all…. maybe more. All British, with virtually everything from AC to Wollesey. Everything from sports cars to saloons and sedans. From the sublime to the ridiculous. The only British cars I’d expect but didn’t see there were any pre-war Jaguars (SS cars), or pre-war Bentleys, or a Lotus Elite (type 14, not the 70’s ugly thing, one of those was there!) Otherwise, it was a very complete show.

You can see my pictures from the day here.

I ran into several people I know, including Doug & Constance Martin, Bruce Cox, Sandro Menzel (whose engine I finally photographed, and who helped Nick get permission to climb into a roof-mounted tent on a Land Rover), and the MacCormacks, who shared their wine with me after we’d walked the field. Mark Norris, who I’d corresponded with online came by and introduced himself, and showed me his gorgeous big Healey. His E-type is still in the process of restoration. I was introduced to a bunch of folks, whose names I’ve already forgotten… I’m bad about that.

Just like the weatherman said, the day improved as it went, becoming very nice by afternoon.

By 2:30 or so we were basically done. I love car events, but much prefer DRIVING events to shows. To be honest, by mid-afternoon I was bored out of my skull. Nick was ready to go too. We laid down under a tree and watched people look at our car, parked a ways away. We talked among ourselves, and then a bagpiper played the pibroch (piobaireachd) to call the attendees together for the awards ceremony. For Nick & I it was a signal that we could leave, so we packed up the car and as everyone gathered at the front of the park, we snuck out the back.

We stopped in White Rock to get Sue some cider, crossed the border, stopped in Bellingham for a quick bite at Boomer’s Drive In. From there we took WA 11, aka Chuckanut Drive, which was a blast as always. Hearing the exhaust echo off the cliffs above, with the sights of the San Juan Islands to the right… what a trip! We rejoined I-5 through the Skagit Valley, but jumped off at Conway for the back roads of WA 534 and WA 9 home to Arlington.

The car ran great, and Nick was a great travelling companion, as always. Not a bad way to spend a day!

My “Jaguar Friend” John Bennett of Western Australia sent me this photo. I met John and his wife Eleanor over a year ago now when they were here in the northwest visiting their son, who works for Microsoft. They spent a night at our house (unfortunately raining, so the Jag fun was limited to the garage!) and we provided them some transportation to the rail station. They rode trains around western Canada before heading home to Australia.

Here is John’s photo caption: “Well this was sunset through my window today. The city of Perth is in the middle of a coastal plain about 25 miles wide and we are up on a scarp slope at about 800 foot level overlooking the plain.

One of the great things about the Internet is the ability to communicate with such immediacy with people all over the world.

My hub, an update.

The picture I posted last week (the story just below this one) is a small taste of what we found when Geoff & I removed the left rear hub of the Jaguar. It has always made an occasional “clunk” sound, usually when shifting from forward to reverse. I have been real good about keeping it lubricated (along with the wheel spline) and it usually went away for a while after I lubed it up good. It would eventually return and last winter, in the course of lubricating the car while the wheels were off, I found the left rear hub to have some free play in a fore/aft motion. You can read about that here.

We removed the hub and once the fulcrum shaft came out, the set of bronze bushings literally fell out onto the floor. Not an auspicious start to a hub repair! We disassembled the hub and other than an oil retainer seal and the two bushings, there was nothing else installed along the fulcrum shaft. My “old-school” Yorkshireman mechanic expressed outrage at this particular setup. I’ve never dealt with brass bushings, and have only seen the exploded diagrams of the stock hub setup. It looks like this:

That is a diagram from the SNG Barratt catalog. What we are talking about here are labelled numbers 1 through 11. Parts 1 & 11 are given… the nuts on the end, and the fulcrum shaft itself. Mine had those, plus #3, but nothing else… besides two really worn “TeamCJ” bronze bushings. And a huge wad of grease from the last time I lubricated of course. But, no spacers, shims, or sleeves. The retainer seals were chewed up, and went straight into the trash. In hindsight I should have taken more photos. Here is basically what was found:

The bushing and fulcrum shaft are fresh out of the parts washer, the hub carrier is about to go in. THANKFULLY the hub carrier itself was fine. We caught it just in time, as the shaft was just getting discolored, instead of actually worn. The bushings however, were chewed up and completely shot.

Looking at them closely I can make an educated guess as to why. I strongly suspect that in the post-flood restoration the fine mechanics at Classic Jaguar just plain forgot/neglected to disassemble the lower fulcrum. As a result it was lubricated with a fine paste of rainwater and bayou silt. Ugh.

Here are some photos of the two bushings, up close and personal.

I plan on having a look at the right rear hub soon. It has been noiseless and steady so far, but it won’t hurt to have a look.

Next up: Fixing the hub and followup.

Tulip Rallye 2006

Christopher & I ran the Tulip Rallye this year. It is put on by the local MG car club, and attracts around 200 cars from various clubs around the northwest. We went a couple of years ago, and had fun, but did horribly in the Rallye itself. It was the first “gimmick” rally he & I have run, and we over-thought everything… still being in “TSD mode.” Funny how easy things become hard when you over-think them. You can see our pictures from that 2004 event here.

We missed all car events in 2005 due to the whole Engine Debacle last year. (more gumblings about that later… more botched work has surfaced… sigh. Note to the Jaguar community: Avoid doing business with Classic Jaguar of Austin Texas. If my car is any indication, they make cars that look great, but are complete mechanical hatchet jobs!)

So based on our last performance, we went with low expectations but an eye towards enjoying ourselves. The weather was perfect… cool but sunny. The top stayed down all day! I ran into an old acquaintance, Sandro Menzel, who drives a nice old Jensen-Healey. I was too busy talking to him and admiring his engine (a Lotus DOHC 4 banger… mounted on a diagonal in the engine bay) so that I forgot to shoot any photos of it. Sandro had more presence of mind and got a great shot of Chris & I saddling up for the start.

Since we knew how it worked, we concentrated on the “gimmick” part more than the “rally” part, but knew how to recover from our “rally” part mistakes… we felt like we did pretty well.

Here are our pictures from the day.

The topper was finding out that we placed first amongst the Jaguars (of which there were 20 or so)… whoo hoo! Christopher gets the trophy as he did the real work. I just drove.

eBay bargain

It seems eBay has lost a lot of the “garage sale” bargain nature it had back in the early days. It has gone from the place we went to sell our cast off to basically a cheap e-commerce system for retailers who can’t figure out their own e-commerce system… or just like the easy exposure it provides them. For example I just bought a fuel transfer pump for my home-brew Diesel setup… I found it via eBay (but didn’t BUY it via eBay.) I just went straight to the web page of the seller (a pump retailer/farm supply in the midwest)… I had given up on finding a bargain. I found that transfer pumps sell on eBay at the same price, OR MORE than they sell at retail. Looking around, it seems this is true about just about everything on eBay. Sellers see the prices and inflate theirs accordingly. Suddenly there are no bargains.

I remember days when you could buy stuff for pennies on the dollar, auctions were really auctions and you could find just about anything you wanted for a reasonable price.

While it seems that the days of finding a bargain, or even a reasonable price on eBay are gone, I’m happy to say I found one recently. I’ve been scrounging for a stock S1 air cleaner assembly for the Jaguar, but I’d rather not forgo my kids’ college funds to do so. It seems these items are becoming unobtanium. The three major components (trumpets, plenum & filter cannister) routinely sell for well over $100 each on eBay, even in poor condition. “New” from the usual vendors, you would spend well over $1000 for the set.

A friend pointed me to an eBay auction with both a plenum & trumpets, with less than a day to go, and I was able to grab the set for under $50. Whoo hoo.

They are a little grotty, but should clean up well I hope.

So I packed the trumpets in the car today as I headed up to Chilliwack to visit Geoff Pickard at English Classic Cars. Geoff wanted to have the car back, 1000 miles into my rebuilt engine to have a look and check on it. So I played hooky from work and headed north, stopping in Bellingham to grab a S3 fuel pump from Greg Bilyeau to courier to and from Geoff for repair or replace. I figured Geoff would appreciate the deal I found on eBay, as we had discussed the price of these parts before.

Drive was wonderful, car ran fine, border crossing was painless. Geoff gave the car a checkup, and fine-tuned the carbs. He used a combination of techniques, mostly “ear” along with some “eye” in the form of three “Colortunes”… which are in a nutshell see-through spark plugs. He put one in a cylinder served by each carburettor. You could see the combustion change color (from blue to yellow) as the fuel/air mixture was adjusted. It was the first time I’d seen one in use… pretty cool. Hard to photograph them in ‘action” though as it is best in low light and timing the shutter would be near impossible.


Above: the Colortunes in the XK.

We decided to tackle my loose left rear hub. Thinking it would just be a few shims, it turned into yet another “Archeology Expedition of Doom” unearthing more horrors from the past… but I’ll leave that for another post…

So to keep me out of his hair while he fixed the hub, Geoff parked me in front of his media blasting cabinet with my grotty trumpets and let me loose. What a blast. =)

The trumpets look great now:


Above:2/3rds done.



All done.

Now I just have to find some hammerite paint.

And find a cannister.

Hockey story

I posted this as a comment on Chuq von Rospach’s blog, but I enjoyed writing it so much that I figured I’d share it here. I haven’t written enough hockey stuff anyway, so here you go. A discussion of hard shots to the groin started it…

In my goaltending days I was an equipment modder. Taking Jacques Plante’s lead, I did my best to fill in every gap (pucks are very good at finding gaps in armor!) and beef up parts that mattered. The cup was a wonder of Red Green style handiwork. I had a nice air-padded goalie-style strap, with a metal cup. Around the metal I added some closed-cell foam strips, and carefully wrapped the foam and attached it with… Duct Tape! That stuff has amazing impact-absorbing properties. I played with some guys with some pretty damn hard shots, and never even lost a breath over a cup-shot.

Speaking of hard shots: I did scare the hell out of a bunch of guys on a casual-hockey night once though. I played for a while with a group of guys here in Seattle on a couple of weeknights back in the 80s, several ex-pros and college players. One of them was a guy named Jim McTaggart, who played two or so years in the NHL (Caps IIRC… yep Google sees all!)… anyway, great guy, and a ton of fun to play with. Jim had a real hard and heavy slapshot that he rarely fired off… mostly because he didn’t want to hurt anyone in a casual drop-in game. But the game had gotten intense and he broke out of his end and found himself with nothing but ice between him just outside the blueline, and me… way out in front of the net. He cocks the stick *way* back and *boom!* lets one fly.

The problem is… I can’t see it.

(the following sequence of events happened in milliseconds, but in that odd goalie-time, it seemed like minutes to me at the time… I still recall every moment)

Instinct tells me it is going for my head… so I start rising up to take it in my chest. Usually changing the viewing angle, even just a bit, will allow you to pick up the puck in flight again. Basic trigonometry. I raise up, but still can’t pick out the puck(!) I KEEP going higher and higher, hoping to give that puck a nice fat chest protector to bounce off of, but STILL can’t see the damn puck. I have popped up so fast that I’m now off the ice, in mid-air, with that weird shoulders-up, head retracted-to-hide-your-neck posture that we assume when we sense a puck flying high towards the noggin. Like a “Rock’em-Sock’em Robot”… on ice.

Sure enough, I finally make out the puck… in perfect clarity (it had “Made in Chekoslovakia” in raised letters on the side, slightly lower than halfway down the left side)… about a foot from my nose. It was as if it teleported there.

I’m five feet eleven inches tall, with another inch or so in my skates, about four inches off the ice, in mid-air, with a (very) fast moving puck now eight inches off my nose, closing fast.

My brain stops thinking like a goalie, and reverts to pure, animalistic “fight, or flight” and my brain’s not really in a fighting mood. My body has in all likelihood reached the apogee of it’s short-hop vertical takeoff, but my head, with the brain in the lead is beating a hasty retreat. They say your head can move very quickly… faster than any other part of your body, when properly motivated. I swear mine jumped back a foot. Unfortunately the puck was moving faster. At that point I closed my eyes.

*Clang!*

The puck hits squarely on the vertical bar that runs down right between my eyes, and ricochets off straight up. My helmet and cage go flying off my head – straight back and into the net. My body, likely thrown more by my high-speed cranium retreat than the impact of the puck, lies out horizontally and I fall straight down to the ice, in what would be called a belly-flop, were I face-down.

Jim swears to me later that he firmly believed that he had shot my head off.

I open my eyes in time to see virtually everyone on the ice, Jim being the first (on his knees and with abject panic on his usually cheerfull face) come to a stop over me in disbelief… both in what they saw, and in the fact that I was perfectly fine, with no injury whatsoever.