Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Parts gathering for the long-lived, slow-moving TR6 project is mostly complete. The car was short a battery bracket, though, and traveling without one is a bad idea because a loose battery can hop around, short across the terminals and start a fire.

Ebay is a pretty good spot for such odds ‘n’ ends and an original one for ’72 Triumphs turned up for 15 bucks. It wasn’t flawless, but flawless is boring anyway.

When I go back to get the back bumper overrider, which I left with a friend who cut the Bolt from Krypton out with a cutting torch, I’ll use his wire wheel to buzz the rust off this and give it a nice coat of primer and semi-gloss black.

First, though, it needed some straightening. For slightly misshapen flat steel, a few level hammer blows got the job done just fine. I hit directly on the steel since I’m going to repaint it and used a flat block of wood behind for support. (In the photo below, the little flare to the left of the hammer head is a stamping mark.)

One of the mounting rods was also bent. No big deal as these are soft steel. A vise handled that task, used two ways. I clamped it just below the bend and did a little hand straightening that way, then clamped lengthwise to press out most of the rest of the deformation.

A couple small wood blocks, a little observation and some crushing a couple different directions did the job. It isn’t perfect, but I use the can-anyone-see-it? standard and when the answer is no even for myself, it’s OK.

Finally, chasing the threads with a die will make for easy clampdown when the part goes in–soon!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Car parts, Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.