1999 Stag Coaster Ride

or
When's the next exit I wanna get off!

Ahhh, the ups and downs of sports car ownership. There becomes a gray area during the ownership of these vehicles when they occasionally cease to be fun. While these temporary moments of sanity can cause you to consider selling your car, insanity settles back in and you forge ahead to remedy whatever ails the beast. If we were absolutely logical and reasonable, we would at a Mazda or BMW dealership picking out a nice red Miata or Z3. But the reasons of British car ownership can be the topic of a whole other story.

1999 would go down as the first year that "Kathy's" 1973 Stag would be on the road after an extensive restoration (the only difference between extensive and expensive is "p" for poor). During the beginning of the year, things were looking great as everything was falling into place quite nicely. Some of the final parts had come in to finish the engine and the interior was starting to look sharp. Finally we could see a light at the end of the tunnel, and it didn't seem like it was a train either.

Every roller coaster ride starts at the bottom, and of course this project was no exception. Once the engine was put together, installed and the ancillary items connected, we were ready for the first crankover. Even though the engine was assembled using liberal amounts of assembly oil, it is always a good idea to prime the engine using its own oil pump. On the Stag, this is a relatively easy operation as the drive shaft for the oil pump is driven by a hex shaft coming off the bottom of the dizzy (learned recently this is the English word for distributor, gosh you learn sumthin' every day). This shaft also happens to be 5/16" in size so a socket can be attached easily, eventually ending up with a portable drill at the other side. The drill is fired up in a anti clockwise rotation to get the oil pressure up and primed. This did not happen as the drill spun rather than the oil pump. This is good! Why not bad? Because we could have broke things if I went immediately to step 2 or startup. During the restoration, the oil pump area was a major oil leak source. The "warning" here was during the original rebuild. I was able to remove the oil pump bolts with my fingers alone. No wonder it was leaking all over the place, loose bolts. Fine, new o-rings were installed during the rebuild, clearance tolerance, while tight, was within book specs, torqued the pump bolts down to spec and finish rebuild. When the pump housing bolts were torqued, this tightened the pump rotor to the housing. So off with the pump, machine down and reinstall. Pump now spins no problem and my drill can turn off the oil idiot light plus sustain a decent psi on the pressure gauge. We are now moving up the roller coaster track.

Countdown to startup goes on. So we crank her over, nothing. Well I got spark, I smell some fuel but nothing. Quadruple check timing and replace ignition parts just for the sake of doing so. Still nothing. Couple of small squirts of fuel down the throat of the carb and she fires right up, then dies after that amount of petrol is used up. Pulled carbs off to see what was what. Floats are perfect, fuel there, everything seems to be ok. Hmmm, Oh Tim, can you bring your Stag over? Pulling the carbs on the Stag is fairly quick. So we swapped carbs and she started right up and ran very nice. Ok back to the carb drawing board. What was eventually found was that I had inadvertantly rotated the startup valve disks 180 degrees out. A small dip but we are climbing higher now.

For the next couple weeks we were at the top of the coaster ride. Kathy and I had our first date with the car and took it out for a drive and dinner. The Stag was running at about 95%, the 5% being a problem with a lean running condition. No problem as the Spring Tune-Up clinic was the following Saturday at LaFox and we could throw the car onto their diagnostic equipment and have a look see. Most of you know the story of what happened next. In a effort to find a non-existent manifold leak, a technician was using liberal amounts of carb cleaner to find the root cause of the lean mixture problem. A carb backfire ignited the pooling fluid and the top of the engine was engulfed in flames. What seemed like an eternity, a fire extinguisher was used to douse the flames. While the car left South Elgin under its own power, it left with extensive heat damage to carb linkages, hoses, ignition wires, choke and accelerator cables. Not to mention paint damage to the valve covers and abrasive scratches from the extinguiher on the boot and bonnet. The car had 48 miles on it since the total restore. The ride has now slammed us down to the bottom. The low point at that moment was nothing compared to pulling the car into the garage and realizing that I had to restore the engine bay all over again! In case you are wondering what was the root cause of the lean mixture condition, it was a gasket on the bypass valve of the carbs. There can be one of three different types. Once replaced with another type, the mixture problem was corrected.

Continuing on with the upward swing, I completed engine bay restoration part two in time for Tune-Up Clinic Part 2. With the help of Gerhard from Fuel Management Systems (Mark Fisher's boss), we peaked out ignition timing and tweaked the carb mixtures with his multi-million dollar (well, multi-thousand dollar) gas analyzer. Once some excessive smoke had been cleared. The car was now running at 110%. I've driven a few Stags before, but this one was purring like a kitten and roaring like a lion and its all mine .....oh yeah, and Kathy's too!

Riding the Stag coaster high in the clouds continued for the next few months. The first car show of the year in Champaign saw some distinct high points. This was the first long range trip with the car and it ran beautifully! The Stag was the lead car in our small caravan to central Illinois and fellow ISOA'r Steve Yezo did his best to help keep the car reigned in. His constant reminders over the CB made me keep it at a respectable mph. That's what passing zones are for! The Stag along with a Lotus Esprit blew away a bunch of fuddy duddy MG guys during the ill-fated tour. Who said patience is a virtue? The Lotus guy and I had a few laughs about that during the show on Sunday. We won our class at the show beating out the perrenial winner, a nice 1967 Triumph 2000. The Stag also performed its first rescue mission by transporting Steve and Sue when Steve's tranny blew out on his 250. The extra seating room allowed us to bring those good folks home along with their luggage. We be cruisin' the coaster ride.

The road to Stag bliss continued with the summer ISOA camping trip, Blackhawk Farms Raceway outing, the Sussex Wisconsin show and a host of other travels. This was all done in due course to put on at least 2000 miles prior to the BIG one, the granddaddy of the summer, the VTR Convention in Portland, the Maine Course and Nova Scotia!

I won't repeat the trip details as Tim Buja, Kathy Pawlak and Mr. Fuji have been giving you the scoop on what we did on our summer vacation. As you can see by the pictures accompanying those stories, we had lots of fun with the cars and fun with our friends. Other than a few minor dips in the Stag coaster, with an annoying leak coming from the overdrive unit (that only made itself present in speeds over 75 mph), a carb leak repair and the tightening of a strut, no other items needed attention.

We left Portland with the Stag winning national honors in its concours class. Continuing to ride high, we started the long trip back west. The final stretch had our group departing Cleveland early in the morning. We topped off the fuel tanks and headed on the Interstate back for home. Tim and Ann said their goodbyes as they branched off to the south to pick up Megan in Fort Wayne. This left Irv and Brian Korey in their electrically challenged TR6 and Kathy and me in our micro caravan for the last leg.

About 12 miles from the Indiana border, cruising at a leisurely 65 mph, the rear tires suddenly locked with a momentary chirp. Within milliseconds I disengaged the clutch and coasted to the shoulder with tach and oil gauges reading zero. I called to Irv, who was leading at the time, that we have a problem. See how important the radios are! Once on the side of the road, the bonnet was popped open to see if there was anything obvious. Everything looked in place. Turning to the underside of the engine bay revealed the horror of a catastrophic engine failure. The left side timing chain had broken, wrapped around the crankshaft sprockets and blasted its way through the timing cover. We were going nowhere fast as this was the end of the Stag coaster ride. Unfortunately it was on I-80 and several hundred miles from home. The car was towed to the next truck stop. With the help of Irv, Brian and Kathy, we secured a U-Haul truck and dolly and towed the Stag home to finish its journey. The highlight of spending a wonderful vacation with our friends and our Triumphs ended with the indignity of pulling the national champion into the driveway under the power of a orange Ford F350.

By Joe Pawlak
November 27, 1999