Mostly tagging this here for my woodworking, British auto loving roommate...
No @BentleyMotors, @Audi, or @VW cars were harmed in the making of this interior trim comparo: http://t.co/QHB2HNona6 pic.twitter.com/04OOvAOyuZ
— Car and Driver (@CARandDRIVER) August 14, 2014
Also, here's a gratuitous Rolls picture...
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| It was parked near that Willys Jeepster. |
What a boring looking Rolls, it looks almost like an 1980s S class Merc from that angle.
ReplyDeleteAl_in_Ottawa
Early-'80s Silver Spirits are not the most flamboyantly-styled autos in the world, no.
ReplyDeleteAlso note the way that the now tired and leaky Girling (a Lucas company!) self-leveling suspension sags at the back when parked, looking like an old DeVille or Town Car.
The sad part is that, Lucas was at one time the best maker of automotive and aviation electrical components. Lucas products from the '30s are more reliable than the stuff from the '60s and lets not talk about the '70s. Joseph Lucas took pride in his company; after he died his heirs had no interest in the business and quality declined until Lucas became a laughing-stock.
ReplyDeleteQ. Why do Brits drink warm beer?
A. Their fridges are built by Lucas.
Al_in_Ottawa
Lucas EARNED the derisive label "Prince of Darkness", for all the crap they loaded the British vehicles with, back in the 60's and 70's.
ReplyDeleteBTW, the reason they were able to get away with this was the laws that required "in-house" parts for all British production. Since there was no external competition, they didn't even bother to buy the rights to produce newer tech items. I suppose they might not have been allowed to, but that seems a stretch, even for them.
Lucas - Prince of Darkness
ReplyDeleteI had three of those old Brit cars starting with my Bug Eye Sprite in the early 60's and later and E-Jag and a restored 58 TR-3 I sold in 1990. The all had that funny, funky smell of leather, gasoline and oil and natural rubber parts falling apart.
ReplyDeleteThat was a love/hate relationship and I almost got suckered into a restored Bug Eye last summer that I could almost afford for a garage pet and then common sense took over and that impulse passed because I really don't need another car that I might drive a couple hundred miles a year.
But, I sure did enjoy the rush of those old cars and the nifty noise they made shifting through the gears. I do enjoy the pictures of that exotic old metal on this blog site. One of the guys in my old Triumph Club when I lived in Oklahoma City in the 80's had a bumper sticker that said - THE PARTS FALLING OFF OF THE CAR ARE GENUINE BRITISH PARTS.
I am owned by a 1954 Jaguar and have been since 1990, It possessed me when its former host, (my dad) had an exorcism (caused by age) of his XK 120 that had owned him since 1960.
ReplyDeleteIt's Lucas electrical switches and other gear are all of good quality and very repairable or rebuildable.
I have dissembled and repaired several of the switches including the headlight 3 position switch. Not so with new stuff, if it fails, well you find a new one.
This is not to say that the later Lucas stuff of the 60's and later was good. Most of it was trash or worse.
Not until Ford taught the Brits modern quality control did the Brits begin to produce better quality motorcars.
That XK-120 has to be the most beautiful of all the Brit cars in my opinion, what a great car to have and take care of.
ReplyDeleteTruly sad that Rolls/Bentley had to rely on Lucas...
ReplyDeleteRemember JTR? Remove the Brit engine/tranny, replace with US of A small block V8/tranny and voila - Jags That Run.
ReplyDeleteHad an E-type that ate electric fuel pumps.
ReplyDeleteWorked my way through college in the motorcycle biz. The shops I worked in sold Japanese bikes, a couple also did BMWs, one did Rokons as well. In the winter when business was slow we'd usually take anything in, and that's when we saw the Brit bikes. One of the things we did a lot of was o-ringing the cases on Triumphs and BSAs to stop the oil leaks and re-bushing the Isospastic "suspension" on Nortons. We were looking at ways to put Japanese electrics on Brit bikes to salvage the millions of hours we spent hunting for Mr.Lucas' missing electrons when I graduated and moved on.
ReplyDeleteI remember the very late '60s and early '70s Triumphs used a mix of metric, Whitworth and SAE fasteners, so it wasn't just the electrics that were a mess.
Tailwind, the XJ6 series I ('68 to '72) came with an American built automatic tranny, a Borg-Warner BW66. It was such a flop that Jaguar went to GM and bought the TH350 for the series II which is why swapping a Chevy small block into a '73 or later XJ6 is so easy.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget that the XK engine was designed in 1944 and won LeMans four times in the '50s. It was a great engine for its time.
In the '50s Rolls-Royce and Bentley were equipped with GM automatics too.
Al_in_Ottawa