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: