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AMX 360 at The Village Green

On Friday the 7th we were shop hopping (been a while since I could say that). We stopped to visit Peter Osborne at The Village Green Motor Car Co, Ltd in Halifax, NS. There was a 3-day-a-week tech who works mostly on Volvos (something to pay the rent). Otherwise Peter likes to treat the place like a hobby working on lot of British cars, mostly full restorations but also some service work when needed. He had an immaculate AMX 390 in the show room, Jaguars all over the place, an MG Midget with a new five speed gearbox, a TR Spitfire that rolled in to diagnose some electrical problem, and a vintage Shelby (Mustang type). We also had a brief visit with Bernie Smith in Fergusons Cove, Halifax who has tons of British car parts, mostly for Jaguars but also some for MGs.

Austin 1800 "Land Crab"

On the 8th we attended a barbecue with BATANS in Waverly, NS, trying to get all of the local groups together in one place. There were certainly more than 50 people present. A 2-1/2 car garage contained no less than six resident little British cars, a Mini, a big Healey, bug eye Sprite, a TR6, a Jag sedan, and a Land Crab (Austin 1800). Out front was a Leyland Mini (amazing what we find in Canada). Party over, we ran 100 miles north back to Pictou County, arriving 9:15-pm to visit Pat Leahy. Being short on time, we spent a couple hours late night working to tune-up for his 1973 MGB. This had a mysterious problem with little or no mechanical advance (with a nearly new distributor), and no connection for vacuum tap on the rear carburetor, so we would need to return later. Pat also has a new acquisition bug eye Sprite project car that came to him mostly disassembled with a lot of spare parts (most of two cars).

On Sunday the 9th we hopped a ferry to Prince Edward Island (goodbye NS). Captain had pedal to the metal making 16 miles in 69 minutes (14 knots being brisk for a large boat). By early afternoon we were visiting British Motoring Association of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown, PE at "the coach house", which is just what it sounds like, a nice English style coach house, sweet surprise. There were an MGC GT, something that looked like a vintage Bentley to be revisited later), two MGA, two MGB, and a TR3. We did some tune-up work on a 1977 MGB with a Weber carburetor, including a lot of tech discussion about disabled fuel vapor recovery, anti-run-on, and positive crankcase ventilation. A Piranha electronic ignition set-up seemed to be working okay, but we found part of the wiring harness trapped between starter motor and body chassis causing an intermittent battery short to ground. Got it running okay after tossing out a redundant ignition resistor and reinstalling the proper low resistance ignition coil. There was also an MGA with a stuck choke, out of balance carbs, and excessively advanced ignition timing, but appropriate adjustments got that running well too.

The Noakes Bentley-Jaguar-Ford

Next day we would visit Bob Bentley and a small collection of friends from BMA-PEI in Hunter River. Here we got closer look at what I thought the day before might be a Bentley. It turned out to be a bitsa car built up from a real Bentley

Barry Clark with his smoky MG TC

chassis with the rear half of a different Bentley body, a Jaguar XK engine (think fast), a Ford rear axle and a lot of hand tooled coach work. A very impressive work of art belonging to Peter Noakes, an affable Australian, newsletter editor and technical guru for BMA-PEI. Also present was a very nice 1963 pull-handle MGB (needing a tune-up) and an MG TC (with a Ford T9 5-speed gearbox from a Mercury Merkur XR4TI) that ran well but smoked badly, likely needing a ring job (or maybe more).

We spent much of the day working on Bob's MGA Coupe that ran so bad it was hardly drivable. We had to rearrange the fast-idle linkage, shorten the choke cable, invert shaft clamps and balance air flow, re-orient the distributor base clamp to set timing, re-route the vacuum advance pipe. Closing in on final tuning we found the distributor only giving 7-degrees of mechanical advance (3-1/2-d in the distributor). Giving it proper timing at road speed left it too far advanced at idle speed, which also

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