Learning a Lot!

 The first 12,000 or so TR2's have a unique wiper motor and location (opposite side of car from later models).  We have the motor and the drive system for the wipers.  One of the drive gearboxes was missing a bracket, were able to fabricate a new one.  Motor would not run, dismantled it and found gears were jammed mostly due to 69 year old solid grease on them.  Was able to drive the gears out, lubricate, and reinstall and it works!



Got our initial parts order in.  Included a heater valve.  Here's where the heater valve located on the cylinder head:



There's a square headed plug where our heater valve goes!  Could not get it loose.  Ordered a special socket for a 7/16 inch square, broke off the lug.  So we then drilled out the plug, looked like this:



With help from our friendly neighbor Danny we used a chisel to remove the remaining thin wall of the plug.  Part of the wall fell inside the cooling passage, beyond reach of the retrieval magnet, so it's going to stay in the head.  Used a thread chaser for pipe threads from Danny and got the threads all cleaned up, heater valve done.


Filled cooling system, first gallon went fine, second gallon resulted in coolant leaking from front of the engine.  Initial thought was water pump, but when we disassembled it we found the leak between the casting and the head right behind the water pump.  A gasket was missing.  Gasket now ordered.


Starter motor rebuild place could not get a new drive pinion gear for our starter, which was messed up:



Started pursuing finding a NOS gear drive somewhere, or at least a nice used one.  All sources said it would be tough to get this part.  But very thankfully a guy from BPNW suggested reaching inside the starter opening to see if the ring gear on the flywheel was shrink fit (first 50k cars) or bolt on (after car 50001).  Glad we checked, our car at some point in time had the later flywheel and ring gear installed - but did not have the correct change made for the starter!  That's why our pinion gear is damaged.  We could have gone to a lot of trouble to get the "correct" starter and have it's pinion gear get damaged like the one we had!  We decided to install an aftermarket high torque starter for the bolt on ring gear.  Good catch!


Started working on brake lines.  There's a whole bunch of pits and pieces required to make all the junctions.  Getting them all in place was quite a puzzle.  Fortunately we found all of them and just need to order new copper washers (about ten in total).  Picture of the front brake line assembly, all cleaned up and threads work easy:



Tried to rebuild brake/clutch master cylinder.  Ran the hone for like 15 minutes in each side, still had rusty indentions in the bore.  Could have the original casting re-bored and install our new parts.  But we can order an aftermarket master cylinder for less than the cost of re-boring.  We will keep the original parts in case we prefer later to go back to the original.  This picture doesn't do a great job of showing it, but you can feel the rust indentations with your finger in both bores:



We've also started installation of rear lights (brake, turning signal, and running).  



So we've got a big parts order coming that should allow us to spin the motor (starter and gasket for oil filter), check for coolant leaks (gasket for front casting), and start installation of brake system.


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