Tara went to the license office today (Feb 12) and had no problem picking up some plates. Just got whatever they had as the personal plates will come later. Still debating over that at the moment but we have a list of ideas.

Another good day,Saturday, but it’s still really cold! I had to wrestle with the brake light switch as it seems I have a little bit of movement on the brake pedal from side to side. I must have been able to get it to stay in place long enough for the test though. Anyway, the car has passed and now I can get a plate on it and hopefully be able to drive it a little more. The fuel pump is still playing up but once running and warmed up a little it did quite well considering how cold it was today.

Anyway, I’m very please that the car passed as it will make it quite a bit easier to continue the work, at least I hope so. A nice milestone!

Well finally we have brakes back and what a learning process it was! We removed all the wheels and started with a thorough inspection of the rear brakes. It’s all new to me and removing the drums and backing off the adjustment was not too hard. We soon discovered that the pads were a little oily & greasy on one side and the wheel cylinders were a little leaky. Also the pads and some springs were not installed correctly – they were OK just not correct. So a full adjustment was made and new wheel cylinders installed and I learned a trick to getting oil & grease off of the rear brake shoes – laqueur thinner & heat.

By replacing the wheel cylinders we gave the rear brakes a really good bleed and this was assisted by use of a special tool to keep the pressure switch in place. It’s a bolt with a pin welded on the end. This stops the pressure switch from moving during the bleeding process and saves having to make sure this is adjusted correctly once the bleeding is complete.

When we moved to the front we soon found that that calipers had been installed the wrong way around. I had been the only person under the car previously so no-one else had seen this to notice it. With the bleed screw not at the top there was no way the brakes would bleed correctly. It also explained why the hoses seemed so short – not so short now the calipers are on correctly. Although I had read about not having the bleed screw at the top I didn’t realize how obvious this should appear. Since the bleed screws were above the hoses I thought they were OK but they are most certainly not.

It seems odd that you can just switch the calipers around but you can and we did and again only a quick bleed was needed since a lot of fluid was passed as we disconnected the front flex hoses to switch the calipers. Having done all this there was pressure quickly in the pedal and it seemed all was well. It took a while to get things all cleaned up and the wheels back on but it was a VERY good night of effort. I’m happy no know that a complete check of the brakes was done – as has been noted on the forums many times it’s just as important to be able to stop as it is for the engine to run! Hence the Safety Fast!

Well since it was 53F on Friday and predicted to be 20F on Sunday I started work on Friday night putting the brake master back into place. It went back in somewhat easier than it came out, or, it may simple be that as I am getting more familiar with this area of the car things are a little easier. John did give me some tips and the primary point was to make sure that all bolts for the pedal box were started before tightening anything down. Having got the master back in I started to try bleeding but there didn’t seem to be much fluid at the rear of the car and I couldn’t get much if any pressure at the pedal. Even using my bleeding vacuum tool I couldn’t really get and fluid through and thought that was rather odd. Still, since everything with the brakes has been pretty unusual not really much surprises me with this job now.

So Saturday it’s still above freezing, just, and I decide to carry on with my efforts. I checked the pressure switch position and tried to make sure the sliding mechanism was in the middle and again check the rear brakes. No fluid. Most odd. At this point I pulled the rear hard line from the pressure switch and little if no brake fluid came out. Now that is odd!

So I decided I would try my in car bench bleed of the master cylinder again and attached the plastics tubes and held them in place with the clothes pegs. Using the pedal I press away and sure enough absolutely nothing is coming through the rear hard line. So I took off the hard line and check it wasn’t blocked and it wasn’t. Crap! No other choice but to pull the master cylinder again and probably just start again by putting in the new one that had arrived. So that’s what I did – I removed and swapped in the new master cylinder. Since I don’t have a bench or vice I didn’t try to bench bleed the new master but did it in the car using the plastic hose attached to the hard lines coming from the master. This seemed to work quite well and did a good job of getting the master primed. I then hooked up the hard lines and was quickly getting fluid at the rear brakes again. I bleed all wheels and tried to get pressure on the pedal but that seemed to come and go. As I said somewhat deja vue. Figuring that I must be doing something wrong on the bleeding I just went ahead and fully bolted up the pedal box and the master cylinder and will resume as soon as I can perhaps enlist some more onsite help.

Well it was the Monday night group therapy session tonight and I took along the removed brake master cylinder. Encourage to pull it apart, that's exactly what we did and quite an education it was.

In pulling it apart John, the MG Doc, showed me various things that keep the cylinder together and the process for being able to remove them. We had to tear out one of the rubber washers but as it wasn't going back in it didn't really matter.

Once everything was out we discovered that there was quite a bit of rust block the flow from the plastic container down into the cylinder. However, the actual shaft did NOT have the rusted grove down through it that everyone expected to find. It fact it was very clean!

Since John had a rebuild kit in stock that's what we did, rebuild it.

You do have to pay attention as the replacement washers are of similar shapes/sizes and i nearly put one in the wrong place. However, I was being watched over and made sure we had things right.

I seemed to go back together easier than it came apart and we were then ready for the moment of truth - bench bleeding.

The bench bleeding worked! It took a while to get the air out and we waited to hold the tubes up to let air out once or twice and then reached the point where we had pure fluid circulating around. The master has now been plugged and seems to be ready to go back in the car.

Seems to have been a successful evening and quite unexpected. Of course a brand new master cylinder I have ordered may not be needed now - oh well, such is life.

Well it snowed overnight and this year's Triumph Club Polar Bear run is coming up shortly. Last year I fixed the car to have heat but the defroster switch would only turn to the Interior position and no further.

It's certainly pretty fiddly to get to but the cable was moving freely and so binding was not the issue. It seemed that it had got caught up in part of the wiring harness.

So I cleaned up everything and made sure the mechanism was moving freely and greased everything. I carefully put everything back together and before putting my stereo unit back in made sure that the binding issues didn't come back. It all worked.

Still, this being an LBC a new problem surfaced, no sound from the right front speaker. Although there appeared to be a broken wire fixing this didn't solve the problem. So I pulled the speaker from the door and it seems one of the wires had come off the speaker. It seems the window regulator may be rubbing the speaker a little bit and so I bent the wire connections back a bit and reinstalled and everything was fine.

A quick test run gave me heat, adjustable to both Interior and Defrost positions and the stereo was still working. Also the OD was still fine (switch in the ash tray so the console removal had to be check for no issues to OD).

So a long 3.5 hours for something simple but I'm pleased it's working right. Let's hope the car is happy with some TLC as well