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(Continued from page 12)
at British Car Ranch in Wenatche, on a side road in the hills. They do everything from minor repairs to full restoration work, and they are booked up three months in advance. Off to the eastern end of the state we stopped at Botzon's Automotive in Spokane. Their vintage mechanic John Leighton works on all British cars and some other imports.
Southern Idaho, what's not to like?
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 Crossing the upper handle of Idaho, we continued to visit Jerry Berry in Libby, Montana. He has had lots of vintage British cars previously, now working on restoration of an MGA, an long ongoing project with hopes of completion. That might be wishful thinking, but his wife is pushing with encouragement. Cruising farther east into Kalispell, MT late night, I recon we put on 280 rather hard miles through the mountains that day. Next day another shop Restorations Limited in Columbia Falls, MT. Then we ran another 3-1/2 hours to find Culver's Foreign Car Service in Missoula, MT. This is encouraging to have a couple of shops in a state that has so few vintage British cars and no British car club. More driving, and by day's end we were camping out with some snow at 7,000 feet on the border between Montana and the foot of Idaho.
Storey's Garage in Meridian, ID
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Brian Storey
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In the next few days we hit three more shops in southern Idaho and the Idaho British Car Club in Boise. That was a boisterous bunch, 12 people for breakfast and 30 people for the club meeting later. Information gathered here gave us two more shops to add to our list, and we managed to visit both of those the same day. One is a fairly young fellow Brian Storey at Storey's Garage in Meridian, ID, a moderately large classic car shop (huge on vintage British cars), providing most of the service for the local area. The other was IDART Enterprises in Garden City, ID ("Idaho Drinking and Racing Team"). Andy likes Range Rover but also works on other vintage British cars.
Going south out of Boise heading for Utah, late night at Bliss Rest Area on I-84 we found a Mitsubishi in distress. Quick diagnosis found a dead solenoid on the starter motor, so we lent our floor jack and jack stands to the lady's son who was working diligently through the night to extract the difficult lump. The replacement starter they had turned out to be the wrong part, but we got our tools back in the morning before they headed off in the son's car to exchange the starter. By 3-pm we stopped to visit a friend Rick Busche in Layton, UT. He has a '67 MGB and a '73 Midget. Didn't get to see either one (off premises at the time), but we had a nice chat.
Throttle body fuel injection on a Midget
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On May 20 we got carried away and managed to visit 20 shops around the Salt Lake City area. There were a couple upholstery shops, a few chrome plating shops, a couple paint shops, a few machine shops, and RSR Motorsports in Layton, UT. They specialize in vintage German cars, but will service vintage British cars as well. Re-found Snap Rebuilders in Ogden who have recently bought up Henstrom Generator and a couple other shops to be consolidated into one for rebuilding starters generators and alternators. We had problems with a few closed shops, but by end of day we found American & Foreign Garage in Midvale, UT, with vintage British cars all over the place. The owner Butch VanCleaf has developed a throttle body fuel injection system that uses a clone of a Weber downdraft carburetor that can then be used on any car that can accept the Weber downdraft manifold. He has it installed on an MG Midget, and it runs like a charm, and I would bet that it gives better performance and fuel mileage than the common Weber carburetor. Next day we touched a few more shops a bit farther south and east in Utah.
By May 23rd we were checking out FAB-TEK Willow Hill Ltd in rural Cortez, Colorado, down some side roads in the mountains (after a few miles of gravel, potholes and puddles). Dave Headley (with some assistance from his wife) is building MGB race cars and MGB race engines. His personal MGB has a 5-speed and Oldsmobile Quad Four electronic fuel injected engine (think
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June 2019
