1979 Triumph TR7

[humanoid]

Any of you fine folks in hp.org land own a 1979 Triumph TR7 convertible out there? I might be inheriting one from one of my dad's buddies. I haven't seen it yet, but I think he put a huge ass carb on it. Hopefully it'll be more than the estimated stock HP of 88! Anything I should lookout for? TIA!

[N_Jay]

They tend to end up on the list of worst cars ever, however they do have a small cult following.
Like most British cars they can be a maintenance nightmare, especially of they have had a few "really smart people" "fix" things over the years.

[macphanatic]

Learn how to reinstall the doors. My high school girlfriend's father had one. We had to put the doors back on several times after they fell off when opening them. Fun little car, but the biggest POS.

[tim.s]

My brother had one in high school. One unique thing about it was that you could blow hot air out the lower vents and cold air out the top. I remember it being fun to drive...

...then one day the electrical system malfunctioned and it caught on fire while it was parked at the store.

[N_Jay]

Originally posted by tim.s
...then one day the electrical system malfunctioned and it caught on fire while it was parked at the store.

You sure?

There is a chance it was designed to burn up, but had never worked right since new, and then one day it did!

That would be more like the Lucas electrics I have known.

[jdeanski]

Originally posted by N_Jay


That would be more like the Lucas electrics I have known.

awwww........ Lucas Electrics: the "Prince of Darkness"

Why to the British drink warm beer? Because their refrigators are made by Lucas!!

[N_Jay]

Side Glances
Our old pal, The Prince Of Darkness.

By Peter Egan, Editor-at-Large

April 2005

My friend Jeff Zarth called me up last night and said, "What's your e-mail address? Someone sent me a whole list of Lucas jokes and I think you'd get a kick out of them."

Now, I thought I'd seen or heard just about every Lucas joke in the world, either on bumperstickers, T-shirts or by word of mouth — the warm English beer/Lucas refrigerator joke, the three-position Lucas switch with Dim, Flicker and Off, and so on — but Jeff's list contained a couple of variations I'd never heard. For instance:

"I've had a Lucas pacemaker for years and have never experienced any prob..."

And: "A guy peeked into an old Land Rover and asked the owner, 'How can you tell one switch from another at night when they're all the same?' He replied, 'It doesn't matter which one you use; nothing happens.'"

I was also pleased to see that an R&T quote made the list. It was from an old cross-country touring story I did years ago with my friend Chris Beebe, who muttered, while grinding away on a Lucas starter, "If Lucas made guns, wars would never start."

I should point out here, for younger readers who didn't live through the '50s, '60s and '70s era of British car ownership, that Lucas was the British electrical firm that manufactured most of the wiring, switches, coils, points, condensers, horns, headlights, fuses, voltage regulators, etc., that were used on nearly all British cars in those days.

And let us just say, delicately, that some of these devices did not inspire praise. Especially among those of us stranded by the roadside on a rainy night.

Or stranded in the grass by the side of the track on Turn 5 at Road America.

Or stranded on East Washington Avenue at night in Madison, Wisconsin, while our TR-3s smoldered and filled with smoke and our dates in their prom dresses stood on the sidewalk, watching for cabs.

Or...well, you get the picture. Notice the overuse of the word, "stranded."

British cars of that era suffered from a variety of reliability problems, but any time you saw one parked by the side of the road you suspected the complicity of some Lucas product. It was like seeing a known pyromaniac standing in the crowd at a burning apartment building; he might be guilty and he might not, but his presence made you wonder.

Anyway, this long record of trouble has spawned a lot of jokes, but not everyone has always been amused by them.

When I first came on staff at Cycle World magazine in the early '80s, I wrote a story that contained a typically derisive remark about the Lucas electrics on my 1967 Triumph Bonneville, and I got an indignant letter from the legal staff of Lucas in England. They explained that Lucas was now a high-tech company that manufactured the highest quality automotive and aerospace components, and that its dedicated engineers and skilled workers should not be made the brunt of these tired old jokes, which were rooted in a bygone era. The letter politely but firmly asked me to cease and desist in my derogatory comments.

I was somewhat taken aback, not to mention abashed, and realized that these folks had a point. Should young, hard-working engineers be held perpetually responsible for switches and voltage regulators that were probably designed before they were born? Maybe it was time to stop these jokes, just out of fairness. Also, the lawyers sounded kind of angry...

I showed this letter to my Managing Editor and asked him what I should do.

"Write back," he said, "and tell them that if they hadn't made junk for three decades, there wouldn't be any Lucas jokes. You can't rewrite history with a letter from your legal department."

My Managing Editor spat these words out with a certain vitriol. Perhaps because his Triumph Spitfire had just been towed that weekend. Or maybe it was because he couldn't get his AJS 500 vintage racer started because there was no spark. I can't remember which.

Anyway, he had a point. But so did Lucas. For all I know, they're making excellent stuff these days (and were then) and are no more responsible for my old Triumph Bonneville's ignition problems than I am for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Which I swear I had nothing to do with.

Also, I think Lucas was sometimes made a scapegoat for other malfunctions. I've run into quite a few former MG owners, for instance, who think the electric fuel pumps they had to whack with a knock-off hammer were made by Lucas, when in fact it was an SU pump. I wouldn't swear it didn't have Lucas parts in it — I've never taken one apart — but it was an SU product. Also, their troublesome Smiths instruments, which had the life span of a fruit fly, had nothing to do with Lucas. Unless they were dark at night.

Lucas did have some problems, though, and I've had a few. Looking back on almost four decades of British car and motorcycle ownership (27 vehicles in all), here is a sampling:

1) Lucas starters have given me a lot of trouble. In all fairness, though, it's usually been on Formula Fords, where the drive gear slides forward on the shaft and engages the flywheel ring gear under heavy braking. Still, these things wear out quickly, even in street cars. I've had two of them fail — on a TR-3 and a Sprite — and I automatically rebuild them on any "correct" British restoration project.

But the Lucas starter really was the bane of FF racing — the weakest link in cars that were otherwise pretty bulletproof — and most people replace them now with some kind of reworked Japanese unit. As recently as last summer, however, I helped push-start a vintage Formula B car with a bad Lucas starter at Elkhart Lake. It was like a recurring nightmare — the mechanic's version of the Missed Final Exam dream. Will we ever be free?

2) On my first H-Production Bugeye Sprite, I had an intermittent stutter-and-die running problem that cost me three DNFs. I replaced the plugs, points, coil, condenser, fuel pump, distributor, cap and plug wires before I discovered a bad connection inside my sealed Lucas battery kill switch. I was real mad at that switch, and later hit it with a big hammer in the privacy of my own garage.

3) In 1967 I honked the horn in my TR-3 and the wiring harness burned up. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of this pathetic incident on these pages, so I won't belabor it.

4) Several of the rocker switches on my two early '70s MGBs failed. Pretty junky stuff, and expensive to replace.

5) I've had one failed Lucas Sport Coil on a Lotus Seven, although these are usually pretty good, and I still use them on vintage racing cars. They put out a big jolt, and they look right.

That's about it, really. Some of the old Lucas parts work perfectly fine, if you service them once in a while, and others are actually quite beautifully crafted — the old chromed license plate and "wing" lights, for instance, add considerably to the understated elegance we like so much in old British cars. They are part of the charm. And a lot of these components are simply "of their time," and work no better or worse than their contemporary parts from other countries. Old stuff is old stuff, and you have to make allowances.

Lucas distributors, for instance, are pretty reliable if you occasionally do a proper tuneup and grease the advance weights and put some oil on the shaft. I've replaced two mysteriously malfunctioning high-tech electronic ignition systems in race cars with Lucas distributors and solved all my problems.

One of the rare benefits of these old Lucas ignition and wiring systems, in fact, is that you can usually track down problems with a simple test light or volt/ohm meter and fix them yourself. Some Lucas parts do have a short service life, but they are at least understandable, even by an electrical idiot like me.

Which is more than you can say for electrical components in modern cars.

Our local paper this week ran a story on this very subject, noting that the reliability ratings on several models of Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Volkswagen had recently dropped to a new low. The principal reason?

Electrical trouble.

Too much complexity. Servo motors, black boxes, computers, 57-way adjustable seats, information screens, nav systems, warning lights, frill units and frippery sensors. Yes, even Germans can have technical problems.

So maybe old Joseph Lucas will have the last laugh. As our generation dies off, perhaps Lucas jokes will gradually fade away, renamed for some other company that's not even British.

Or maybe PCs will take over as the new target of electrically fired derision. My home computers have caused me infinitely more frustration in recent years than the Lucas electrics in my E-Type, which have been almost trouble-free. Maybe Joe Lucas jokes will be displaced by Bill Gates jokes.

It could happen. Humor, after all, is nothing more than pain and despair, recollected in tranquility and mitigated by half-demented laughter.

[jestmaty]

That recap brings a tear to my eye.. sniff, sniff

I have owned 2 TR6's in my life and I owe all my mechanic skills that I now possess to those cars!

Ownership of my first Triumph was in high school.... can you say chick magnet?

The second was maybe 6 or 7 years later during college. My daily driver had pooped out and my dad had an old TR6 in the garage. Gave it to me as he was NEVER going to get around to restoration.

[N_Jay]

Originally posted by jestmaty
That recap brings a tear to my eye.. sniff, sniff

I have owned 2 TR6's in my life and I owe all my mechanic skills that I now possess to those cars!

Ownership of my first Triumph was in high school.... can you say chick magnet?

The second was maybe 6 or 7 years later during college. My daily driver had pooped out and my dad had an old TR6 in the garage. Gave it to me as he was NEVER going to get around to restoration.

Peter Egan has an excellent column on "Dating in an unreliable car", that is a must read for anyone who had a British car in high-school or college.

I have not found it on line ;(

[humanoid]

Ha ha! Thanks for that article, N_Jay!

[dgipalo]

Going back from my (increasingly foggy and nostalgia-filled) memory, I'd classify the 'root cause' of issues with Lucas electrics being their choice of materials for insulation. They used oiled/wax cloth for insulation late into the 50's and 60's, and then went to a plastic that deteriorated fairly rapidly. Both of these materials allowed water to seep in to the wire, and being stranded, cause it to corrode rather rapidly and leave the owner stranded. Could be the composition of the wire also contributed to the corrosion; the alloy used in Brit crocks seemed to 'go green' within 4-5 years of warm humidity. The deteriorating insulation and resulting short-circuits were the cause of most of the fires attributed to Lucas electrics.

I recall a TR-250 (precursor to the TR6) of 68 or so vintage, where at a tender age of 8, the entire wiring loom needed replacement due to it turning to powder. Granted, the car hadn't been garaged, but that rapid deterioration started causing problems when the car was only 3-4 years old, with more and more systems shutting down after each month. Once a proper (aftermarket) loom was installed (a REAL piece of work and contortion, even as simple as the old crock was), the car ran reasonably well, and the flickers and blown fuses were greatly reduced, and confined to failures of the accessory rather than the wiring. A number of other Brit crocks from that vintage I'd been associated with exhibited similar wiring weakness, and had a comparable cure.

[robrecht]

Originally posted by N_Jay


Peter Egan has an excellent column on "Dating in an unreliable car", that is a must read for anyone who had a British car in high-school or college.

I have not found it on line ;(

Reminds me of the smartest girl in our high school. Senior year, once it became clear she wasn't going to be valedicorian, she realized how much fun she had been missing, literally let her hair down, and was actually rather attractive. Her dad bought her a new MG and she began calling me up, wanting me to teach her how to drive a stick and go for a ride. He he he. True story.

[colorider]

Originally posted by robrecht
....she began calling me up, wanting me to teach her how to drive a stick and go for a ride. He he he. True story.

You dirty ole man!!!!

[robrecht]

Originally posted by colorider


You dirty ole man!!!!

What can I say? I was probably only 17 at the time.

[krygny]

Originally posted by jdeanski
...
Why to the British drink warm beer? Because their refrigators are made by Lucas!!

How come the British don't make televisions?

They can't figure out how to make them leak oil.