Michael Stoliker's Journal

As the title says, I feel I am at a tipping point in my Triumph ownership. Due to my continued unemployment I find myself teetering on the edge of a decision to keep the cars or sell them to recover what little money I can.

My concern is that if I keep the cars and wait for the economy to improve to the point where employers will take a chance on a 59 year old IT guy, too much damage will occur to both cars from sitting out in the open under covers and tarps.

Frankly, it's getting to the point where I can'teven justify spending money on rust removal tools and paint to preserve the parts I have removed. I've been unemployed since April and unemployment compensation is going to dry up shortly. My best shot at a permanent good paying position over this time period was withdrawn at the last minute due to the economy, and most resumes just go unanswered.

I may need to admit defeat and embrace my inner Walmart greeter. I can't pay the bills and restore two cars on a minimum wage.

Watch this space...

The title for the 76 Spitfire came in the mail yesterday along with an unexpected gift...the ignition key. I'm now determined that this car will see the road again. With the body and frame from Rob's 78, and the drivetrain from John's 76, this car will rise from the slow burn of oxidation and with that image the car's name is obvious. Say hello to "The Phoenix".

The Phoenix will be put back together and will hopefully be sold to finance the restoration of "The Tomato" and give some lucky person an experience with British car ownership. The big hurdle is getting the title transferred and recognized by the state of Pennsylvania.

The only missling piece to the puzzle at this point is a usable bonnet. The rust on the original bonnet is bad, but not entirely beyond repair. But with the original accident damage and the subsequent rust damage, it's not worth the time it will take to fix.

Hopefully, I will have a potential replacement today as there is one just down the street from me being given away for free.

Work continues on stripping the 76. I pulled off everything from the engine forward and have two storage bins full of parts. I'm gonna need more storage bins!

The big issue will be how do I get the engine and transmission out? Buying an engine hoist at this time might be suicidal as the wife will be watching my spending. I think I have the answer though. I plan to use a come-along attached to a piece of Harbor Freight scaffolding and a big piece of angle iron. The question is will it be high enough? Perhaps with the stripped frame sitting on the ground.

I guess we'll see soon enough.

I now have 2.5 Spitfires. I went out Saturday to pick up a rust-free (brown paint) Spitfire tub. OK, so it wasn't entirely rust-free, but the previous owner had made some repairs, and the rest of the tub is remarkably solid. In addition, the frame has been stripped and painted. It also helps that I got a pile of parts to go with it.

The plan is now to put the 76 back on the road using the parts and getting the title sorted out somehow. Once on the road I plan to sell the car to finance the restoration of the tomato.

There will be extra parts that I won't need for either car, and these will be sold off to help finance getting the 76 fixed up. I will do what I can to repair any parts rather than replacing them, but the interior is toast. I will need to look for patterns for the door panels and the pieces around the back. I'll also need to figure out what to use for rugs.

I'm planning to either go the spray can or roll-on paint route to keep costs down. The original color was BRG, and I'll try to get as close to that as possible. I also want to go with a tan interior, which appears to be the original color.

Pictures to come.

I'm now the proud owner of two Spitfires. I brought home a 1976 Spitfire offered for free on this website. Being out of work, I should probably have my head examined as I want to put this car on the road as well as my first Spit, the "Tomato". However, since the rust problems are starting to look insurmountable and there's that small problem of no title, I'll probably break this poor car up for parts.

I have to say it breaks my heart to consider this, but it was the plan all along.

On the day I went to pick up the car, with my son Kris, it was raining slowly but steadily. As we left the Lehigh Valley headed for parts south, the rain turned into a drenching downpour and I wondered if I shouldn't turn back and make the attempt another day. However, with a trailer reserved and waiting for me somewhere near Lancaster, I decided to continue on, and the rain finally broke near Reading, PA. It seemed like our luck was changing.

My son had agreed to come only if I could assure him that we would be home by 2:30, and with a two hour drive one way, and leaving by 9 AM, I was certain we would just be able to make that. As it turned out, it was not to be. My son would end up missing his appointment.

I had thought that I would save some time, and jangled nerves, by renting the tow dolly from a location near where the car waws sitting. Dragging an empty tow dolly behind you can get on your nerves quickly as it bangs loudly over every bump in the road! So I thought I was being quite clever by reserving the dolly so close to the car.

This was not to be the case and I felt like an idiot after U-haul moved the pick-up point to a gas station off Greenfield road and added an extra fifteen minutes to out trip down. I still had some margin to get my son back in time. That margin was eaten away as we pulled off the highway at Greenfield and saw a line of traffic waiting for a tow vehicle to remove a Jeep with a busted axle from the road. We sat for another 15 minutes watching our margin slip away and should have turned back then. However, being minutes from the gas station we figured we could slam the trailer on the hitch and zoom out of there making up time on the trip to the car.

Nope! Not gonna happen. The trailer had a broken lamp, and the gas station attendant had next to no tools or materials for fixing the torn wiring to the lamp. We had to wait nearly an hour while the guy stripped and twisted wires together and duct-taped them so they wouldn't come apart. As we pulled out of the gas station and followed the narrow twisty roads between the gas station and the four open lanes of route 222, we watched even more time slip away and my son got quieter and angrier.

Once we got to where the car awaited us, we found John, the owner, busy removing the driveshaft bolts, and we were able to quickly get the car prepped and turned around and pushed up on the dolly. With the car secured, we bid John goodbye and started the slog back to the Lehigh Valley.

My son's mood started to improve as the arrival time on the GPS started to tick down from 3PM towards 2:30 as I speed somewhat beyond posted speed limits (both on the road and the tow dolly). But his mood was not to last as our GPS took us right through the center of Lancaster in very heavy traffic. Not even the sighting of an Amish horse and buggy improved my sons mood now. The arrival time ticked back up to 3PM and beyond. And my son's quietness now was due to him falling asleep to the rythmic banging of the dolly over the joints in the pavement.

He slept all the way from Lancaster to Reading until I had to pull over to remove a tarp that John had secured to the bare top frame. The thin woven plastic had succumbed to the battering it had taken at the hands of the high speed winds of our highway travel. It was rapidly turning into blue confetti and showering the cars behind us.

The roadside was narrow and the trailer wheel was almost in traffic as I crawled out the passenger side door onto the steep grassy slope of the embankment. I removed the tarp as quickly as I could, acutely aware of the cars speeding by at 70 MPH just inches away from the trailer. Stuffing the tarp into the car's trunk, I ran for the relative safety of the van and waited for a big enough hole to pull the weight of the car and trailer uphill to highway speeds.

Back on the road again, my son, who had watched my side of the road antics with great interest, now slumped back into quiet anger as the GPS arrival time now sat firmly at 3:30 and refused to budge no matter how fast I drove. For the rest of the trip home, all I heard from him is "don't ever ask me to come get another one of these cars!". Also, the ominous, "You owe me for this!" I felt it to be the better part of parenthood not to remind him of what he owed me for the last 18 years as I was pretty sure that would not improve his mood.

When we finally arrived home at 3:17, my son, who had been texting furiously for the last 30 thirty minutes went off to go grab a bite and go for a walk on a nature trail with three lovely young ladies he knew from high school. I crawled under the dash of the car to chisel off the ignition lock screws by myself, as my son did not seem eager to stick around and learn something about cars, not that I can blame him!

Here we are with summer gone and winter closing in and the Spitfire still hasn't seen the road. I'm not finding the time to work on the car as much as I'd like and I really need the therapy.

I've finally returned to the rust on the bulkhead and have removed the worst of the metal. I have to decide how much further to go with the rust around the perimeter. As you can see in the first picture, there are some areas that are holed and too thin to ignore. But I'm wondering if some of it can't just be ground down to bare metal and then have the pits treated with rust converter/encapsulator.

If there's enough meat left to weld to, I'm tempted to take short cuts. If I take out all the rust I'm going to have to rebuild parts of the vertical bulkhead to about a half-inch below where the top plate spotwelds on. That's more metal fabrication than I've ever attempted before, and I'm already pushing my limits.

The second picture is the panel I bought from Lee. I'm now tempted to remove the bubble for the brake reservior and lay the rest of the panel up against the bulkhead and cut away around it to replace as much metal as I can.

If I get my new welder soon I'll hopefully post the happy ending to this story next post. In the meantime...find a sand blaster.

I've read somewhere that of all our senses, the sense of smell is most closely tied to memory. I was reminded of this recently while working on my Chrysler Cirrus, which having originally come from the Buffalo New York area, is slowly succumbing to salt poisoning.

I was working on the front brakes which had developed a rust induced squeal that when fed back throught the speaker at a drive-through was producing noises that would have made Jimmy Hendrix jealous.

The problem wasn't caused by the brake pads and rotors. It was that the steering uprights were so rusty that where the brake pads rode, there were hollows worn out of the rust scale and metal. When the brakes were applied, the pads couldn't move flat against the rotors and they vibrated in the hollows and made the piercing squealing noises.

I went to a local u-pull it junkyard and got rust-free replacement uprights for less than twenty bucks...good deal! I also went to a parts place and bought new pads, rotors, and also wheel bearing hubs which cost nearly $200. Not so good a deal, but look, I've doubled the value of my car!

As I was removing the old uprights, I was having a problem getting one of the tie rods separated, so I got out my pickle fork and BFH and had at it. The pickle fork did the trick, but tore the rubber boot, and the tie rod let loose with a spatter of grease and a cloud of rust dust.

With the smells of the rust and old grease mixing in my nostrils, I suddenly remembered being 17 years old again in my parents garage in New Jersey. At the time I was working on a Sunbeam Alpine that I had almost forgotten I had owned. Apparently, the LBC bug had bitten me much earlier than I thought it did. At the time, I had managed to get the car running, but I never figured out how to deal with the advanced rust in the sills. The Alpine was quickly replaced by a 65 Chevy Malibu, but to this day I still remember the smell of that rusty sports car.

I recently attended a British car show in Hellertown and saw many original and beautifully restored cars including a number of MG Magnettes. I was reminded of the 57 Magnette I owned briefly when I was 20, and again it was not the look of the car (as they appeared smaller than I remembered) but the smell of the car that brought it all back.

I can't put my finger on any one odor that stands out. Perhaps was the mixture of the leather, the horse hair padding, the large amounts of wood in the dash and door trim. Or maybe it was the smell of hot oily brass and British steel, or the hint of years of barn smell than hadn't worked it's way out of the carpets. Whatever it is, these old cars have a richness of smell that brings back memories whenever I'm near them.

This "old car smell" is a natural contrast to the petro-chemical induced euphoria of "new car smell" that car dealers love to sell as a feature of their wares. I don't care for new car smell. Maybe the odor of new plastic has permanently been associated with back-to-school sales, new binders and pencil cases for me. I value the old car smell for the memories it brings back as much as for the unique flavor that it adds to our cars.

Perhaps that's why I don't want to do a full restoration on my Spitfire, because even though it doesn't have the leather or horse hair padding...it still has an old car smell that seems unique to English sports cars. And I don't want to lose that old car smell.