Morgan back on the road (well almost)

9 month, almost 2000€ additional cost, 3 stitches to my eyebrow later and the Morgan is finally back in a driving condition. Well, almost… Let me do a recap….

Back last July I wanted to attend a first Morgan meeting and worked hard to get the car back together. At that point, the complete restoration of C6622 took me 15 month and swallowed the entire budget. And a stupid mistake/lack of care killed the (hard to get) 4.11 ratio pinion and crown wheel of my Salisbury 7HA rear axle. Just 5 weeks later – last September – I already had the axle back at JB Sport Engineering. Initially I was hoping to get it back in January – but due to Covid it took until the end of March.

As I started a new job this April my garage time is limited. Last weekend (Easter) I managed to almost finish the assembly – but when bleeding the brakes, I noticed that there must be an issue. The pedal just didn’t have the right pressure. Front brakes were dry and nothing immediately visible on the rear brakes. So, I took the drums off again and too my astonishment one of the brand-new slave cylinders was already leaking.

I ordered new ones right away and they were delivered yesterday afternoon. When I got into the garage in the evening, I thought that changing the cylinders would be an easy job. There is an excellent explanation on this website. But doing this with the car just on some jack-stands is not as easy as I thought. The space between the brake backplate and the chassis is limited – you must lay on your back with only a few centimeters between you and the cylinder. I decided to remove the entire brake backplate and do this on the workbench. And this is really easy. But when putting everything back on the car I didn’t pay attention for a second. And this is when accidents occur… I hit my head quite badly. My glasses broke and I didn’t notice right away that I had a approx. 4cm cut on my right eyebrow which had to be stitched together at the hospital. Most likely with will heel faster than the scratches on my ego….. 😉

Today I fastened the last two bolts that I could not finish yesterday – but now I have a new problem preventing me to finish the job. The thread of the rear axle brake line – the one that runs across the rear axle does not fit into the new slave cylinder. Even though I really would like to have finished this today – I had to head home because in a few hours I will fly to the US for a business trip for the next 10 days. It will take a while before I can post the next update.