My TR7’s in 2025

One final look back on 2025 from a TR7 point of view, before 2026 is well and truly upon us. Starting with the repairs of the DHC’s body. Below are a few shots of the work done so far. More in the relevant blogposts;

Early in the year the original body shell of that car saw the light of day again,

after many years of storage in the shed.

Ready for the next chapter in this car’s life and a new beginning!

After paint removal and shot blasting.

The repairs of the right hand sill and rear wing edge.

Rear of the right hand cabin floor section.

Left hand sill repairs.

Rear right hand suspension pick up points.

Next car in line for some attention was the 1976 TR7. Actually looking back not much work was done to this car (proof HERE!). But there has been some progress. Starting with a few small interior jobs.

Refurbishing and fitting the early style roof mounted interior light.

Fitting the gear-lever-gaiter-finisher to the gear-lever-gaiter.

It wasn’t as straight forward as it looks because I wanted the top of the

gear-lever-gaiter to be folded inside by a few millimetres to give a nicer finish.

Reassembling and mounting the steering column.

Always nice putting nice shining parts back on a car!

Than there was the business off redoing the gearbox extension because

my first attempt turned out not to be thorough enough. I think it is now.

And swapping the mounting hardware for the brake

balance pressure reducing valve for some nicer items.

Later in the year I had a go at fitting the ill-fitting but very nicely refurbished repro parcel shelf to the car. Needed an extra pair of hands to complete this job. But well worth the effort. And with the parcel shelf in place the boot trim could be finished:

But most of my Triumph time was spent on ‘t Kreng. Starting with another water pump replacement earlier in the year, after which the car was used as much as possible.

So far this pump has been pretty fine, with only a few very tiny leaks from time. But that is nothing to worry too much about with a graphite drag seal. These can always leak a tiny bit. So the most worrying bit is the lack of time to use the car on a regular basis. And thus preventing oxidation starting on the water pumps sealing surface. Which in turn can start another leak. But I did my best, covering exactly 2750 kilometres since fitting the new pump in the second half of April 2025. With the last drive just over a week ago:

End I reached an important milestone with this car. The car's odometer is around the clock for the second time in its life! Sadly at the moment the roads are covered in rock salt to prevent icing. So the next drive will be “somewhere” in 2026!

FHC resto nr. 171; A few rectifications

It’s six months since I last worked on the ’76 car. And as you can read in my blog, there are several reasons for this: ‘t Kreng's water pump, the work on the DHC, and my regular work of course. But with a few weeks holiday ahead of me I decided it would be nice if I could finish the rear of the car’s interior. Time to pull the cover of the car and start to work. But first there were a few (small) jobs that needed rectifying. Starting with the mounting hardware for the brake balance pressure reducing valve. While fitting the steering column I found out I had used the wrong bolt to fit the valve. It was the bolt for the column’s G-clamp, which is longer than the one for the valve. As I had prepared only one bolt of the correct length it was taken from the valve and used on the steering column. But that meant I needed to prepare new fasteners for the valve. Luckily I had a few rusty spares lying around. And with the help of a friend’s blasting cabinet, a blow torch and a small container filled with oil, it was blackened and fitted. Looks quite nice.

Next job that needed rectifying were four small holes in the cabin floor. These needed their rubber plugs fitted. Something I forgot when I fitted the sound deadening pads almost 10 years ago. First Idea was to just open up the holes and insert the blanking plugs. But that didn’t work. The combination of the steel panel, the underbody protection and the sound deadening pads was too thick to fit the blanking plugs. Time to borrow a professional (and very sharp) hollow punch set from a friend to remove the sound deadening pads around the holes. These punches are designed to cut through material when hit with a (big) hammer. Not a good idea on steel panels. But being very sharp punches, they could cut through the sound deadening by simply pushing and turning them through the sound deadening pads. This way a ring was cut loose from the sound deadening pads. And this remaining ring could then be removed quite easily using a pen knife and a small sharp screw driver. And this removed enough material for the blanking plugs to be fitted. Some clear wax oil was used for rust protection.

The last correction concerned the carpet over the transmission tunnel. When I fitted it over the 2024 Christmas period, I wasn’t impressed in the way the carpet ballooned coming down from the top of the transmission tunnel. So I decided to use some fancy high strength “gecko” tape to glue the carpet to the top and the sides of the transmission tunnel. And this worked very well. And it enabled me to perforate the carpet to fit the plastic carpet protector and the mounting bolts for the seats.

The last tasks for this productive afternoon were the preparations for mounting the parcel shelf. A job I've been putting off for a while now, because I'm afraid I'll make a mistake with the dimensions for the holes I need to drill. Measure three times, drill once! The fact that the guy who covered the parcel shelf has died since he delivered this quite nice job, didn’t help! Also checked and corrected the sound deadening panel I made and which fits between the parcel shelf and the rear window. More on that later!

More TLC for ‘t Kreng

Part two of the general service and maintenance check of ‘t Kreng, which was carried out over this weekend. With the most important job being flushing and bleeding the hydraulic fluids. From a mileage point of view this wasn’t really necessary. But both clutch and brake fluid were well over three years old. Where my normal interval for these fluids is two years. So time to call on the help of a friend for a traditional flushing and bleeding session!

Starting with emptying and cleaning the clutch cylinder’s reservoir. And this immediately showed why regular hydraulic fluid changes are absolutely essential. The fluid I sucked out of the clutch cylinder’s reservoir was almost completely black. Forgot to take the picture but the one in this earlier post gives a good indication on how it looked! After that the reservoir was cleaned and filled was fresh brake fluid (Bosch DOT4). Flushing and bleeding the clutch system was left till later though.

We moved to the brake system instead. Starting with the removal of the brake master cylinder’s pressure failure switch. Always tricky as this one is by now old and brittle. But I succeeded to remove it intact. Probably helped by the anti-seize paste I used when I re-fitted it a few years ago.

With that hurdle successfully out of the way, we could start flushing and bleeding the brake system. Starting with the front brakes which are fed through the rear chamber of the fluid reservoir. This chamber was also first emptied with a small manual suction pump, after which it was filled with fresh fluid. And the flushing/and bleeding could begin, starting with the front calliper on the right hand side. For both sides together, we used twice the contents of the rear chamber. No air came out.

As the reservoir’s front chamber can’t be emptied with my simple pump (a large syringe type affair) we had to empty this chamber by pumping the brake pedal with one of the bleed nipples at the rear open. My assistant was a bit overzealous though, emptying the front chamber too far. Which resulted in some air being drawn into the system. Luckily the air could be bled very easily though one of the two bleed nipples at the back.

Next job was flushing the clutch system. With the reservoir filled with fresh fluid, and the old fluid still in the pipe, it should be clearly visible when all the old fluid was expelled from the system. It was! But just to be sure all the old fluid was expelled, the contents of a full reservoir were flushed through the system after clean fluid came out of the master cylinder. Job done! Actually the biggest problem here was removing the rubber dust cap from the slave cylinder’s bleed nipple underneath the car! It had collected some oil, resulting in a rather slippery dust cap.

Next on the to-do-list where the wheels. They would certainly benefit from a good clean. Rather straightforward with warm soapy water and a collection of different brushes. I did need a shower afterwards!

Final job on the on the to do list was cleaning the two earth points behind the head lamp mounting panel. Hardly any oxidation there, only a lot of paint. So I cleaned away the paint around the mounting points and refitted the earth points using some copper slip to prevent future corrosion.

And the final job for the day was cleaning the steering wheel and treating it with a leather conditioner. The lack of use in the recent years had dried out the steering wheel’s leather cover. And after well over thirty years of service (it started life with me when I fitted it to a Mini Cooper, in 1994!), it could do with some tender loving care. It did soak up quite a bit of leather conditioner fluid.

FHC resto nr. 149; Various smaller jobs

Over the past weekend I have been using the fine weather as an excuse to work on the FHC. It were mainly small jobs like cleaning the sound insulation pads for the parcel shelf (YKC3632) and rear bulkhead (YKC1609). Nothing glamorous, but good to kill a few spare hours. Especially the ageing adhesive residue of the tape used to hang the bulkhead pad from the parcel shelf pad was a pain to remove. But white spirit, an old rag and a fair amount of elbow grease solved this. And yes I forgot I had a bottle of special glue removal hidden away somewhere. Only ran into it when I had finished this job! Though it didn’t have an impact on the end result.

The parcel shelf pad (YKC3632) before

And after cleaning

The rear bulkhead pad (YKC1609) after cleaning

And with the two pads cleaned they could be fitted to the car. Sadly the third pad (WKC3340) was attacked by mice, so that isn’t quite up to my standards to be re-used. That is one that will be addressed somewhere in the future!

Another area that got some attention was the brake master cylinder and the ignition coil. The brake failure switch got a quick health check and a cleaning job. After which it could be fitted and wired up together with the coil. If in doubt; the White/Yellow wire goes to the coil’s + terminal and the White/Slate wire to the – terminal.

And sticking with the wiring, I added some extra wires that were deleted on later cars; the wires for the roof mounted interior light. I managed to salvage part of these wires from the cars original wiring harness;

But that wasn’t long enough to reach the A-post on the passenger side. But I did have a few meters of the correctly colour coded wires in stock to adapt the later door harnesses for a roof mounted interior light. And with my trusty crimping tool adding the appropriate length was easy. Next job will be refurbishing and adapting the passenger door harness.

And to finish this post; I sorted all spring clips etcetera that I might need while fitting the car’s interior;