A Sad Restoration Story

The title of this story can be interpreted two different ways. It's either a sad story about a restoration, or it's a story about a sad restoration. The actuality is that it's both, and unfortunately it's a story we hear and see all too often regarding TR's that were "restored" somewhere other than here at Macy's Garage. Imagine how fortunate you would have been if your Father had purchased a new TR3A in 1959, and took your mother and you to England to pick up the car at the Standard- Triumph factory. Then, following the trans-Atlantic flight and all of the excitement of receiving the new family sports car at the factory, you toured Europe in your Triumph for 3 weeks before flying home to await the arrival of that special little car. As great as that experience was, imagine how lucky you felt when this same TR was presented to you a few years later as a gift following your high school graduation. You drove that car all through college and well into your new adult life, until the day it had become so used up that it entered a long slumber and slowly started to rot. You promised yourself that some day you were going to fix it up and drive it again, but then the years passed by so fast. Now one day you realize that it's time to bring your TR3 back to life, and you start looking for someone to restore it. Imagine again how lucky you would feel to walk into a business that restores old cars, and find that it is owned by a transplanted Englishman! Who better to restore your precious little British car than someone who was born and raised in England? You must certainly be feeling like you and your TR3 were both born under a lucky star. And this is the point where the wheels came off of the apple cart. The shop owner was better at telling tales about things he used to do back in England that in actually doing quality work here in the USA, and his knowledge of TR's was superficial at best. The restoration drug on for multiple years, and ended up costing more than $75,000. At that time it wasn't an unreasonable amount to spend on a quality restoration of a car needing everything, but it's about 3 times as much as it should have been for the hack-job that was received. The photos below will show just a small sampling of the technical errors and poor workmanship we discovered once the car was brought to our shop. The problems noted here aren’t all- inclusive (there are plenty more), but this is enough to give you the general idea. Unfortunately, there's no shortage of low quality work like this that folks have paid to have inflicted on their precious TR’s. Don’t become the next victim of some incompetent who can tell a good story! This car would barely run when the "restoration" was finished, and so it sat unused for a couple more years. Eventually the owner found Macy's Garage, and saved up enough money to have us make the repairs necessary to make the car run reliably. It still isn't pretty, but it's finally able to be used as dependable transportation once again. And the best part is that the smile has now been restored to the owner's face! For our mobile site, we can only show just a few of the atrocities we found while repairing this car. For more photos and descriptions of the low quality workmanship of this “restoration”, and things which can go wrong if you choose the wrong “restorer”, please view this page on a large screen device. A big part of the reason that the car didn't run well was because the camshaft of the "rebuilt" engine was installed one tooth off. We had our suspicions that this was the case when we revved-up the engine with air cleaners off, and a mist of gasoline could be felt blowing back out of the carburetors. Pulling down the front of the engine and performing a mini cam degree process confirmed our hunch and repaired the problem. It still has a couple of cylinders pumping oil, but now it will at least keep up with traffic! Another contributor to the poor running, especially on hot days, was the absence of the carburetor heat insulators. Both carburetors were bolted directly to the intake manifold with a single thin gasket. Needless to say, it was very difficult to get the car restarted after the hot engine had been shut down for 10-15 minutes. There were plenty of plumbing issues. This is the brake line which runs from the front of the car to the rear axle. There are several comments I could make about this, but the single point I'd like to make here is that if a "professional" restoration shop coils up a line because they are incapable of cutting one that's too long and re-flaring it, then they aren't really capable of performing a complete restoration on any car. It doesn't get much more amateur than this! We had plenty of vibrations and clunking noises from under the car, and we traced most of it to a loose driveshaft yoke on the rear of the gearbox. The large castellated nut did have a cotter pin installed half way in, but it was 2+ turns away from being tight. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy! One week after I first posted this story, I received the following e-mail from the owner. It warmed my heart, and so I want to share it with all of you who visit here. This is why we all work so hard on these wonderful little cars. Lord knows it isn't for the money! “Until this summer I not only thought about every time I wanted to drive the TR...I worried about it. I knew that even if I could get it started it probably wouldn't run long enough to get me home. Besides all the horrendous things that happened it was just NOT reliable. Which I hated because when it was new; it was. Granted I haven't driven it as much as I could have before I started this job. BUT I know that if I get it in it now my baby will start, run wonderfully, stop without chugging, AND start back up again at the end of the day!!”