Fettling

 Fettling is the British term for continuous trial fitting and adjusting things until they line up right.  We did some major fettling to the four fenders and chrome trim on the TR2 in the last few weeks.  This also includes installing the stone guards that are at the lower front of the rear fenders.  Here's some pics:






We had a lot of loose bolts and some missing bolts.  Most of the missing bolts were because the holes didn't line up - more fettling!  We are pleased with the way it turned out.


The front brakes were tackled - took about 2 hours, all parts were there, piece of cake!



There's even a grease fitting for the wheel bearings!  Greased all of the front end too.


So next tackled the rear brakes.  Whole different story!  Removed brake drums, there's no shoes or springs in there.  Then found out you can't buy brake shoes for these early cars with 9 inch Lockheed rear brakes.  If we had old shoes we could get them relined, but didn't even have that!


Luckily we found relined shoes at a NOS Triumph place in CN.  Double the normal price due to their rarity, but we sure paid it!   We had some extra springs in our parts boxes which we thought would work, but they are way short and the original springs of course are no longer available.  It looks like the front springs can be made to work if we drill some holes in our expensive brake shoes to adjust spring tension.  Here's a picture of what it will look like:



The problem is if you back off on the linkage then the rear spring can almost fall out:



So we've got four more front springs ordered, and will drill one hole in one shoe on each side to make the tension correct.  The goal is to have the extended length of the front springs installed on the rear the same of the extended length of the same part on the front brakes.


After installing the gaskets for the water pump and the casting behind it, we now have no leaks in the cooling system when we filled it up.  Yeah!


We got the correct size copper washers to install the oil filter housing including it's oil pressure line.  Kinda strange how the oil pressure feed goes around a mounting stud with a banjo fitting for the oil filter housing.



Got the new starter installed, now need to spin the motor to see if we have oil pressure.




Also got our new brake/clutch master cylinder installed.  Spent a lot of time checking threads on the bench, made installation much easier:



We seem to find more parts to order before the last order even arrives.  So you shift from one area to another as you are waiting on parts.  Sure would be nice if we still had Central Machine on Diamond Avenue as a complete parts source instead of ordering/shipping everything.



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