British Marque Articles - 2021
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The View from Behind the Wheel, By Ralph Spayd Holy cow, we actually put 2020 behind us … whew and a big Happy New Year to all in 2021. This is my first in a series as Steve calls them “ramblings”. I am honored to lead the club for the coming year and want to thank Dennis and all the other officers for leading us through a very trying time. Good job! I’d like to but can’t ignore the COVID thing, as it will affect some of our programming in 2021. But I won’t let it put a damper on our enthusiasm for the year. We’re going to try some Zoom club meetings in February and March to try and keep us in touch. We’ll restart our Coffee – Cars and Conversation in March at the Burger King in Columbia. They have a big parking lot and we can all safely socially distance. And depending on how finicky your LBC is you might really be social distancing. We’ll work in the usual cover bridge tour, the driving tours and assorted stuff in the coming year. But we have some new adventures planned. We’re kicking off a new event, the Ice Cream Tours (ICT) starting in April on the 3rd Wednesday of each month thru October - meeting at 6:30 PM at each venue. The 1st ICT will be at Scoops and we’ll change venues each month. We’re also planning a drive-in movie night in June at Haar’s Drive In in Dillsburg. Need to finalize the date for that event. With the COVID thing, I’m speculating that drive-ins will make a big comeback, but then I also bought stock in Blockbuster back then because we’d always rent movies on tape at a store…. The coming year will be challenging, but that should not stop us or deter our enthusiasm for our cars or each other. The camaraderie of the club is bigger than a virus, social distancing or whatever. These are certainly trying times for each of us, but our ability to change and adapt to our circumstances is only limited by our imagination. God knows I’ve got a vivid imagination, so I don’t intend to be a shrinking violet with the club. I was pondering what 2021 should be for LANCO and came up with the idea the year should be “the catch up year”. More drives, more creative events and just more getting together to share our enthusiasm and friendship. Not big planned events, just casual get togethers to keep us connected. That’s my pledge to you for the coming year. I want to thank the new officers and board members for stepping up to help lead the club. Our slate is Deb Eckart, VP; Bruce Hurley and Jim Harbold, Board Members; Gloria Ciarrocca, Treasurer and Steve Dellinger, Secretary and jack of all trades. Thank you to all, it’s a privilege to work with everyone in the coming year. I’m excited for the New Year and seeing you all at our club events. Remember our cars are important, but they are only cars. It’s the drivers and passengers that matter. Never skip an event because of your car. We all know what the heck you drive, we’re wayyy more interested in seeing you. Stay safe and positive and remember to check out our web site at www.lancomgclub.com and mark your calendars for the upcoming events.
Annual Service Awards – 2020, By Steve Dellinger Due to COVID-19 concerns, the Annual Holiday Banquet scheduled for December was postponed to March 20, 2021. Service awards for the year, which are normally presented at the Banquet, included the following: Years of Service in the Club: 30 Years of Service 25 Years of Service 20 Years of Service 15 Years of Service 10 Years of Service
The Annual Holiday Banquet has been rescheduled from December 2020 to Saturday, March 20, 2021 – pandemic permitting. Stay tuned for email updates.
Tech Talk on Tuning, By Cliff Maurer Our local MG club got a message from a former member who was packing up and moving to Florida. As all people in this hobby, he had accumulated a significant amount of spares and tools that he wanted to find a new home. Having just put new plugs, wires, points and condenser in the MGB, I had found I no longer owned a timing light. I called the gentleman and asked if he had a timing light. He informed me that another gentleman in the club had “Claimed” everything to distribute to the club members, but he would pull the timing light and any other things tuning related for me. When I went to pick up the timing light, he also had a compression gauge, an SU tuning tool and a Gunson “Color Tune” tuning device.
Gunson “Color Tune” I am not a gearhead and most of what I know about mechanics I taught myself over the last three years. I have seen pages of information in early issues of the New England MG T Registry’s (NEMGTR ) Sacred Octagon magazine about ignition timing including enough charts to lull the biggest gearhead to sleep. Each chart for a different octane rating. But here was this little box that consisted of basically a spark plug replacement with a glass tube that allowed you to “see” the ignition inside the cylinder. Essentially you tune the engine until the explosion inside the cylinder goes from orange (too rich) to a “Bunsen Blue”; not a “Whiteish Blue” (too lean). Now this is the 21st century! For $100, I can by a computer-based analyzer that can tell me the day that I switched my car from 87 octane to 93 octane. What is this color tune eyeball thing, some kind of a joke? I imagined seeing an ad for this thing in a 1960 copy of Popular Mechanics. Right next to the Johnny Atlas ad with the big brute kicking sand in the skinny kids face! Well, thinking I’d get a laugh from my mechanic friends I showed this thing to them. To my surprise not only did they recognize it they also admitted to having used one! Apparently, this thing works! Then I thought about it - gas burners on a stove and in a gas oven are adjusted the exact same way. I did some research and found 50+ YouTube videos on how to use it. It is still in the Moss catalog and online forums have a bunch of threads devoted to its use. The only negative thing I have come across, and I must agree having worked in the petroleum industry for 25 years, is that modern gasoline is not the same chemical soup that was gasoline from the 60’s. And that was before they put ethanol in it. So, the question would be, is tuning to a “Bunsen Blue” color still accurate? What is a modern alternate to accurately tuning a 40 to 60 year old carburetor system? That sounds like a good topic for a Cars and Coffee!
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The View from Behind the Wheel - Ralph Spayd Well here’s message #2 for the year. Unfortunately, February looks a lot like January. We did cancel both our club meeting and our CCC for the month. But the good news is we’re kicking off both for March. As always, masks will be required at both events. We’ll hold Coffee – Cars & Conversation (CCC) on March 6th at the Burger King in Columbia. They do require masks and have a 50% capacity restriction. But they didn’t feel it would be an issues at 9 AM on Saturday morning. We can only sit in groups of 4, but it’s a start. We’ll do the same thing in April on the 3rd again at the Burger King. Our club meetings will kick off on March 14th at 3 PM at the Centerville Diner. Again, same drill as masks will be required to enter the restaurant. We’ll be in the banquet room and social distance. We will also meet there in April on the 11th for our meeting. For both events, we’ll evaluate a change in venue for May, but for now we’re set to get the year started. We held our 1st board of directors meeting on January 26th. Bruce and Sue Hurley were gracious hosts. We have a great board and the club is in good hands. Deb did ask why we were meeting on a rainy, foggy Tuesday night and not on a Saturday morning. To which I said……ummmm, don’t know. That’s a good idea! Don’t you hate it when people apply logic and reason? Actually, it was a great idea and will take it to heart for the next meeting. Some old habits are hard to break. But had we not met at the Hurley’s we would have missed the amazing work Bruce is doing in the house. Bruce ain’t just a car guy……and his shop is spectacular. Nice work Bruce and it provided my rationalization!!!! We have a great year planned with lots of drives and venues. We definitely plan to get out and about this year. I have invited The Central PA Triumph Club and The Austin Healey Club to join us at any and all of our events. Hope we can plan some group tours and events this year. We are also setting up a Meetup account to keep every informed of our plans. Some of the events may be short notice events to just show up and participate. Not major planned events. We need to become more spontaneous with our events. Also, don’t forget our post-Holiday Banquet on March 20th at the Fireside Tavern. A kinda post-COVID Christmas event! We’ll it’s that time to ramble on. This is Steve’s favorite part of my missives. I hope everyone is staying safe and positive. These are trying times for all of us and it’s easy to feel isolated. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Very easy to pick up the phone and just call to talk to an old friend. Send an email or text, very easy peasy for all of us to stay connected during these times. And I guarantee it will make both of you feel good. I did get my 1st COVID vaccination shot scheduled for February 13th. I was very lucky to get scheduled and hope you are all having some level of success in scheduling a vaccination. One last story. I bought a 2014 Jaguar F Type this summer. I absolutely love the car, but the potential maintenance does scare me. So, I bought an extended warranty. Whew….a level of comfort and security. The car did develop a coolant leak in the tubes cooling the supercharger. Thank goodness I bought the warranty……guess what, the parts weren’t covered. What a big surprise. Oh well, it is British and by this point of time in my life, I should not really be surprised by much. But I still do love the car and it gets me back it the good graces of the LANCO club by driving a British car. I’ve seen the error in my ways in driving a Corvette and Porsche…….not!!!!!
Back to British! Stay safe and positive and remember to check out our web site at www.lancomgclub.com and mark your calendars for the upcoming events.
Early History of Triumph Motors - By Cliff Maurer Every teenage boy growing up in post WWII America could tell you the difference between each carmaker’s yearly models as well as variants between models of the same car/year. I could tell you, as the car passed at 20 MPH, if it was a ’53 or ’54 Chevy and if it was a 6 cylinder or a V-8. Every boy had a bucket list of cars he dreamed of owning. Mine contained 3 cars. Top of my list was a Corvette. I would turn on the TV and watch Route 66 just to see the car. Next was a T type MG. I didn’t even know there were TC’s, TD’s and TF’s, I just wanted “one of them old looking cars.” The third was a Triumph TR4. What a cool looking car. A real girl magnet! (All that gender equality and sensitivity training must have paid off because I just wrote “girl magnet” NOT “chick magnet”!) Growing up in Central PA you didn’t see many of these cars. I want to discuss the last car, the TR4 or specifically the company that built them. We may all know that Triumph Motors started out making motorcycles. Actually, it started one step back from there, it started out not making but selling bicycles under the name S. Bettmann & Co. It was started by a young 25-year-old German from Nuremburg, Siegfried Bettmann. In 1886 he started selling European bicycles in London. He sold the bicycles under the name “Triumph”. There is no literature as to why he chose the word Triumph. Two years later with some underwriting by the Dunlop Tyre Co., Bettmann took on a partner, Johann Moritz Schulte, another German. Schulte convinced Bettmann to manufacture their own bicycle and in 1889 they purchased a shop in Coventry and began to manufacture their own machines and there were now known as the Triumph Cycle Company. As many bicycle manufacturers did at the time, in 1902 they added a motor and started to sell motorcycles. (OK, there were two brothers from Dayton who decided to make their bicycles fly!) Thanks to large contracts by the British army during WWI by the end of the war in 1918 Triumph was the largest manufacturer of motorcycles in Britain. But, that infamous time between the wars, 1918 to 1939, was a tumultuous time and the company was to go through a twenty-year period of boom and bust. In 1921, Bettmann was persuaded to purchase the Dawson Car Company and begin to manufacture cars. This proved profitable but sales were moderate until in 1927 the company introduced the Triumph Super 7. Four body styles were available including a two seat roadster with something called a “Dickey Seat”! It turns out it is what we would know as a “Rumble Seat”. (So, you can add that to your British car Vocab along with Boot, Hood and Bonnet) 17,000 were manufactured between 1927 and 1934, but by 1933 the “Dickey Seat” roadster was gone. In 1930 the name was changed to The Triumph Motor Company. About this time a strategic decision was made. Management felt they could not compete in the mass market for cheap simple cars instead they decided to focus on the high end luxury car market. Bad move! This was 1930, the end of the opulent 1920s and the beginning of the great depression. They managed to stay afloat. Significant events during this time were the appearance of one Donald Healey in 1934. Yes, that same Healey of the Austin-Healey. Healey developed an engine design which was the first to be designed and built by Triumph. Then in 1936 money problems hit. Not much can be found explaining what or why the financial problems came about. The bicycle and motorcycle portion of the company was sold off. The motorcycle portion was to become Triumph Engineering Co Ltd. This became Triumph Motorcycle Ltd. in the 1980s and is still manufacturing motorcycles. Triumph Motor Co. did not fare so well. In 1938, Healey developed a new car called the Triumph Dolomite. It featured an Alpha Romeo designed straight 8 engine. It featured an all-aluminum body and if you compare this with an MG TA of the same time period you can see that Triumph did aim for the high end market. It featured an 8 cylinder engine, wind up windows in the doors, automatic chassis lubrication, a leather-bound adjustable steering wheel, dual hydraulic brake circuits, and for an additional 4% of the cost you could get a radio. I cannot find any production numbers for these cars. In July 1939 the company filed for receivership and all assets including the rights to the name Triumph were sold to the Thomas W. Ward Co, a scrap yard. Two months later the Germans invaded Poland and started WWII. With the experience of making aluminum bodies the factory quickly entered into the wartime aircraft manufacturing. That brought the attention of Herman Goering’s Luftwaffe which completely destroyed the factory in 1940. That may be the reason for no production numbers. None of those things were even available on the MG TA. But don’t worry, we know this little company will be a phoenix in the post war car market, which we will take up next time.
Letters from the Dutchie! My name is Jacob “Jakey” Strohecker and I am the owner of the Lester’s Buggy Shop and Foreign Car Repair (Lester was my Father) here in Klingerstown. That’s in the Schuylkill County but if you go any farther west you’re out of the county and in the water once. That’s not the Susquehanna River but the Mahantongo Creek! The reason I’m writing this is that some of my customers have them foreign cars and they want to start a club up here. Especially those ones that drive British cars from England. Why don’t they call them English cars? So, we need some smarts about this club stuff. We already have a name for our club; We are Brits und Schnitz. Now my experience with these foreign cars goes way back when my father ran the shop. Elmer from up in Rough and Ready, he had one of those German WEE Double U’s. Ach now, when we saw that car, we knew why they lost the war. Those WEE Double U’s vas like those old SteadyBreakers (that’s what my Dad used to call a Studebaker) that you couldn’t tell the back from the front! Yah, you didn’t know if it vas coming or going. But here they got ferhuddled putting it together because the steering wheel faced the trunk! When you looked at the behind you saw the hood and the engine. Gut Fa Dumpt they didn’t even fix it right once. Instead of putting the steering wheel where it was supposed to be, they chust changed the transmission to one gear forward and three reverse gears! You had to drive the car backwards all the time. And these English are no better There vas this guy from over to Hebe that had an English car he called a MG TD. He brought it into the garage and here the doors were all fahutzt. The hinges were on the back of the door and it opened wrong. It swung out to the rear! There weren’t any windows in the doors either! It took us a long time to fix all that. And then there was Kermit Bohner from Pillow. He bought one of those English MG B’s when he was over in England. He said he bought it because his wife is such a back seat driver. With this car the steering wheel is on her side of the car so Kermit can yell at her as they go down the road. Well you chust let me know where I can get Club smarts and if your ever in Klinger Steidel stop into the buggy shop. Mach's gut! Jakey
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