Make717: Milling a Square or Hex on Round Stock

Fair warning: this post is to document a specific procedure for members of Make717. Regular subscribers don't need to feel guilty for skipping it!

MAKERS: the machine shop at Make717 has all you need to easily mill square or hexagonal shapes on round stock. This before-and-after photo shows what I mean:

Z-Axis Digital Readout - A Story in Pictures

See if you can create the narrative just by looking at the pictures!

Beck TD, Part 37 - A Temporary Speedometer

Back in Part 32, I told the tale of how I installed a "temporary" Auto Meter tachometer to replace Beck's non-working unit. Now Beck has a matching "temporary" speedometer!

A Square Hole

I needed this: a square hole in the end of a brass rod.

It's for a project on Beck TD which will be described in another post. The hole needed to be rather precisely 0.120 inches square, and the way you usually accomplish that is with a broach. That's a square tool that is pressed into a round hole to make it square.

Beck TD, Part 36 - Pointless!

You got the pun in the title, didn't you? Pointless? Beck TD no longer has ignition points!

Cor Engelen, on a recent visit, told me of his choice for an electronic replacement for the troublesome ignition points. Instead of the expensive Pertronix solution, he found a "small shop" solution at www.hot-spark.com. It was much less expensive, with perhaps some additional knowledge needed to make it work.

The tipping point for me came on this beautiful morning, when I captured this early-morning image of Beck TD. It seems bathed in light, doesn't it?

Beck TD, Part 35 - Fixing an Oil Leak

After a couple of very involved projects with correspondingly involved blog posts, it's a relief to do something easy for a change! In fact, so easy I almost didn't post it, but I wanted to document the part needed to fix an annoying leak, in case some of my other Volvo/MG buddies are having a similar problem.

After driving Beck TD for any distance, I always got a sizable oil drip under the car upon returning. For the longest time, I thought it was coming from the dipstick tube, caused by too much crankcase pressure due to bad piston ring sealing. But on a recent visit to the Grant St. Garage, Cor Engelen looked at it and said, "You know, there's a seal behind that vent tube, and it has gone bad. That's your leak!"

Beck TD, Part 34 - 3.9 Rear Gear

If I'm at Part 34 of Beck's saga, I've reported a lot of work, but today's work was perhaps the most obscure work I've tried to describe. It involved removing the rear end from Beck, totally disassembling it, and replacing the gears and axles. A lot of work, and the reason was discussed way back in Part 4. In a nutshell, the rear gear ratio in Beck limited the reasonable top speed to about 55 MPH at around 3700 RPM. Running that much engine speed for any length of time in a 60-year-old engine is so noisy that it's the opposite of relaxing. I'm always imagining the internal engine parts coming adrift and creating new, unintended holes in the engine block.

Beck TD, Part 33 - Disc Brakes!

Big news - after a year of discussion, planning, gathering parts, rebuilding parts, fabricating parts and installation, Beck TD has front disc brakes!

Beck TD, Part 32 - A Temporary Tachometer

For such a basic sports car, in 1952 the MG TD came with a very elegant set of gauges in front of the driver. The speedometer and tachometer had a complex shaped face, with domed glass instead of the more common flat glass. The tachometer even had an electric clock, and there are very few of those clocks working these days! Even though Beck's instruments have the patina of time, they still reflect that former glory:

Beck TD, Part 31 - Indicators

In 1952, the MG TD left the factory with exactly two indicator lamps on the dashboard, one green (for gas level) and one red (a charging indicator for the electrical system). Back in Part 22, I detailed how I made a green indicator for the fuel level using some fancy LED indicators from Oznium. They look like this:

Beck TD, Part 30 - Unbending Beck

I am so grateful to my friends at Lancaster Mitsubishi for putting up with my crusty old MG. Even though they are obviously a new car dealer, they also have a large used car lot, and have factory trained techs on the German cars that were my projects for so long. Somehow, they are also willing to work on Beck, even though it barely fits on their equipment!

So far, Beck TD has been on both the alignment rack, and now, the frame machine. The results were stunning! The photo on the left is from Part 26 when I got a front end alignment, and it shows the severe hit that the front cross member had sustained some time in the distant past. That resulted in a serious caster misalignment that I suspected was the cause of the steering having poor self-centering performance. Sorry about the dangling wire - that is now attached to the new driving lights.

The photo on the right is the result after Dave in the body shop put the muscle on Beck with the frame machine. That is waaaay better, and the first drive, even without a realignment, tells me we're on the right track for the tracking, so to speak.

St. John's Pulpit

My good friend, Father Glenn Miller, is currently serving at St. John's Episcopal Church in Lancaster. He came to me recently with an interesting problem concerning the church's historic pulpit:

While a stunning example of the woodworker's art, the desk of the pulpit was stuck in a previous century - it was too small to hold an 8-1/2 x 11" sheet of paper:

Beck TD, Part 29 - Hold My Bonnet, Please

Yes, of course, everyone reading this blog knows I'm not talking about a hat when I say, "bonnet." That's the British term for what we Yanks call the "hood," the part over the engine. At least in the old days, in Britain the "hood" was the convertible top. That makes sense, with its analogy to a hood on a jacket.

When I bought Beck, it was only running the top of the bonnet, with the sides open. To keep things from flying away, there was a leather strap - a traditional British way of doing:

Beck TD, Part 28 - Random Fabrications

It occurs to me that the title might sound like I'm wandering around telling lies, but it's not that type of fabrication! Just about my favorite workshop activity is fabricating small parts that make Beck TD better. Since this blog is also my work log, here are four recent such fabrications.

Beck TD, Part 27: The Driving Season

Beck TD and I have had our first year anniversary! It was just a year ago that I first met the members of the LANCO MG Club, at the Rotary Club Wheels and Wings show at the Lancaster (PA) airport. That's when I first met Charlie Baldwin and Cor Engelen, saw their Volvo-powered TDs, and started the process that has led to a year of steady work, not a little expense, and a good bit of fun!

Beck has progressed to the point where it is driveable and safe, and I have celebrated by participating in a few car shows, beginning with the one-year-later version of the Wheels and Wings show at the airport. I even volunteered to be the point person in the club to recruit drivers and cars for the event. Ten cars signed up, but when the day came, there was a forecast for heavy rain.

Even though Beck doesn't have a top fitted (the roll bar is in the way), I stubbornly persisted and was at the meeting place at the appointed time:

An Amazing Coincidence (Zuckermann Harpsichord Visit)

Way back in 1995, I spent a weekend at Zuckermann Harpsichords in Stonington, Connecticut, at a seminar on building their harpsichord kits. I had already ordered their "French Single" kit, and wanted some expert instruction. It must have worked, because three years later I completed this:

It turned out to be a marvelous instrument, with a deep, rich bass and good tuning stability. Mary Ellen played it for several years in the Allegro Chamber Orchestra.

Beck TD, Part 26: Beck Gets an Alignment

From the very first day that I saw Beck, I knew there was an "elephant in the room." Even though Beck TD is astonishingly rust-free for a 66 year old car, and had solid woodwork and other fitments, there was one place where Beck had seen a hit. It was dead center in the front crossmember, and it was quite a hit:

Beck TD, Part 25: Improving the Interior

When Beck TD first came to live at the Grant St. Garage, the interior was definitely a mixed bag. The seats looked good, and there were reasonable door cards and panel trim in the rear. However, the floor was a different story: no carpet, bare plywood floors (that was correct - the car had plywood floors from the factory), and a balky shifter in a welded-up transmission tunnel:

Beck TD, Part 24: Remote Brake Fluid Reservoir

This is another one of those projects that has been proceeding in fits and starts for several months. In 1952, MG chose a really dumb method for maintaining the brake fluid. The master cylinder is under the floor, and you check the fluid level by removing the carpet, then a drop-in panel, then use a 13/16" wrench (same size as the spark plugs) to remove a threaded cap, and then somehow get your head under there with a bright light to check, and if needed, top up the fluid without spilling it in the interior of the car. Dumb!

Beck TD, Part 23: Prepping for Discs

From the very first day that I owned Beck TD, I have planned to convert it to disc brakes on the front wheels. Cor Engelen, a talented engineer who also owns a Volvo-powered TD, developed the modification using MGB parts, and several people on the Volvo Engined MGs group on Yahoo have made the conversion, including Charlie Baldwin, the group administrator. Of course, long-time readers of this blog will recognize those names as the guys, along with Troy Nace, who helped me get Beck home in the first place.

To begin the conversion, you must find a good-condition MGB front suspension, and after several false leads Charlie pointed me to a guy named Bob who was selling all his stock after having a decades-long career restoring MGBs. He was bringing his remaining stock to the Carlisle Import and Performance Show in May, 2018. I contacted Bob, and he had just what I needed. We agreed on a price of $100, and he brought it to Carlisle, and Troy and I picked it up in his pickup.

Beck TD, Part 22 - Gauging the Gas

In a recent post, I mentioned that I had the gas tank out in order to treat some surface rust, and also to replace the fuel level sender in the gas tank. In 1952, MG didn't want to waste a gauge on fuel level. Instead, there was a light that illuminated when the tank had about three gallons left. Of course, my 65-year-old sender was a mass of corrosion, and didn't work at all. The light in the dash didn't work either, and the wiring had been changed. A perfect trifecta of non-working-ness!

Beck TD, Part 21: Safety Fast! (Belts and Bars)

Safety Fast! was the official MG car slogan from as early as the 1930's, and it was intended to invoke the safety of driving a nimble, agile car that could avoid danger by simply driving around it. Of course, our modern idea of safety as cruising in a heavy tank lined with airbags simply didn't exist. In 1952, Beck's birth year, even seatbelts were a thing of the future.

It has become a common modification to add seatbelts to older cars, and I wanted to add some to Beck TD. I found some plans in the excellent book The Complete MG TD Restoration Manual by Horst Schach. This tome is out of print, and goes for serious money on the used market. I just checked, and Amazon has one used volume, for $997! But that's a scalper's price. I paid $85 for mine, including shipping, on eBay. I made the brackets to Schach's specifications:

Beck TD, Part 20: Seeing and Being Seen

This is a long blog post about a months-long process - going through Beck TD from stem to stern, improving the lighting. Indeed, when I bought Beck, it really didn't even have headlights. They were taped up, racer-style, with sporty British flag caps (left photo):

Glenn's Wind Blocker

My buddy Glenn has a very nice car - an Audi A5 convertible. He bought it recently as a used, very good condition car. The top-down season is upon us, and he wanted to be able to use the wind blocker accessory that came with the car. Here's a stock photo from eBay showing what that looks like:

Unfortunately, his was broken. The upright portion rests on two rubber posts, and they were both broken off. However, he still had the pieces. He asked if I could fix it, and I said I'd try. It looked like it would be easy to drill through, insert screws, and stitch it back together.

Beck TD, Part 19: Today's Lesson, Learned by Doing

Today I learned that a sloppy M10-1.50 metric nut will also thread on a 3/8-16 UNC (American) bolt! I was trying to marry this turn signal unit:

to a piece of 3/8" diameter polished pipe I had lying around. The light was originally designed for a Harley, and is readily available on the web because it's such a popular modification for those bikes. And cheap! I got a set of two for less than $12 shipped, from Amazon Prime.

Saving Money in the Shop

In a recent post about Beck TD, I noted that some new equipment has arrived at the Grant St. Garage, including a large Index milling machine dating from the mid-50's. Here's another photo, just because I'm really proud of this acquisition. It's plenty big, standing 6' 8" tall - exactly a foot taller than I am. I have to use a ladder to reach the drawbar bolt on the top!

Any time you buy new gear, you quickly realize you need some supporting tools and fixtures.

Beck TD, Part 18: Getting Negative

Work has been slow on Beck TD for the past few weeks, because I was preoccupied with some heavy equipment that has made its way to the Grant St. Garage. On the same day, I got a mid-50's Index milling machine from the Facebook merchant Lamlor Brandt, and a 1947 Logan lathe from Phil Oles. Lamar, the Facebook merchant, had a skid loader that made it possible, if not easy, to move everything. Here are the two machines in place. Many thanks to the "muscle" who helped out: Kelly Williams, Phil Oles and Troy Nace! Of course, also a huge thanks to Lamar, who didn't stay around for the photo.

I did do a bit of work on Beck, and even drove it around on a 45 degree day (Fahrenheit), which was chilly but rewarding. I also made a "punch list" of tasks I want to accomplish by early June, and it's a great big list! I finished one of the tasks today: converting the electrical system to negative ground.

Beck TD, Part 17: A Speedometer That Actually Meters Speed

Here's a little side trip from the recent brake work - getting the speedometer to work. Beck TD came with a cable sheath, with no cable inside, that I presume was the original stock MG part. It would connect to the speedometer, but not the transmission. On the Volvo Engined MGs group on Yahoo, Charlie Baldwin posted that he had found a company in British Columbia, Vintage British Cables, that could make a custom cable to mate the Volvo transmission to the MG speedometer. Charlie ordered one, and I did too. Mine was 68.5" long to match the MG cable I had.

Of course, with Beck TD it's never straightforward - the connection point for the cable on the transmission was mangled, looking like this:

Beck TD, Part 16: Three Bushings (Better Brakes, Part 2)

This is the second of several posts about rebuilding Beck's brake system. In my last post (link) I noted that the Internet called replacing the pedal shaft bushings in the frame, "the worst job you will ever do on your T car".  I'm happy to say that I've now done it!

Beck TD, Part 15: Better Brakes, Part 1 of Several

When I blogged about my first drive of the Beck TD on this link, I wrote this: "The brakes right now are truly abysmal. I understand why former owner (and racer) Steve Fox told me that he sold the car because the brakes were so bad." Further investigation led me to understand that the wheel cylinder on the left front was seized, and the one on the right was leaking. After I freed the seized one, it started leaking too. Time to replace a bunch of stuff.

Moving the Furniture

Today's work: finishing up a multi-day project to clean up and rearrange, to make space for a big 1940's vintage Logan lathe that I'm buying from Phil Oles. Here's the new space, exactly the right size! There's even room for an additional cabinet or tool near the door.