RBRR Drivers Meeting

We had the pleasure of hosting the Club Triumph Round Britain Reliability Run (Northern) drivers meeting again last night. Tim Bancroft and Jason Chinn (part of the organisational team) pitched up early to help me prep the old museum buildings ready for the evenings entertainment. Cars were moved out to reveal tell tail oil stains on the floor that Tim immediately declared a health and safety risk! Suitably armed with a mop and bucket and some neat traffic film remover (steam cleaner heavy duty detergent) he set about making the floor spick and span. Meanwhile yours truly trawled the place for chairs, and only having found 20 odd decent comfy ones I resorted to steam cleaning off the green stuff growing on the white plastic garden variety I collected from outside. Having done a half passable attempt at cleaning the floor Tim hung the CT and RNLI banners, whilst Jason supervised, and talked about pies (that boy has a one track mind).
The meeting was set to start at 20.30 sharp. Tim was starting to panic half an hour or so before the kick off when only half a dozen crews had turned up. Representatives of 60 odd crews had turned up Monday night for the southern meeting leaving Tim to expect 40 odd tonight. Then they came! Piling into the car park came a steady stream of Triumph's (well done guys) until we were well and truly packed out. We have never had so many people on the premises at one time, it looked like Tim would be talking to a capacity crowd.
What a phenomena the RBRR has become, the buzz surrounding it has to be experienced first hand to appreciate the madness of those who wish to spend 48 hours circumnavigating the UK. Serial RBRR's (and I include myself here as this is my eighth RBRR) would probably find it difficult to explain/justify why we keep coming back time after time to what might seem to others as organised torture. All I can say is to really understand it you have to participate, and until you do you aint never going to understand the highs (and lows) of the best driving event bar none.
Now for the staticions. Over 80 cups of tea and coffee were drunk last night (the water boiler has a meter on it) and it could have been more but it ran out. That's never happened before, but if someone had pointed it out to me I could have soon filled it up again! Over 400 biscuits were scoffed (rich tea, bourbons, and so on, you get the picture) with a handful of damp ones left over for me to have for my breakfast this morning.
Roll on RBRR I'll see all you mentalists, as Mr Bancroft calls us, a week on Friday at the Plough.

Big Brake Kit Correction / Atlas panel work

First off apologies over the picture used for the Atlas big brake kit in my last Blog. The more observant amongst you have noticed that the front suspension looked nothing like that of an Atlas. The hub was more Caterham than Triumph 2000 (modified to fit the Atlas). The disc was of larger diameter, and vented. The caliper looked nothing like an iron Girling type 16, in fact it looked more like an alloy 4 piston type! The picture was in fact taken when we converted Joe's Spitfire 1500 a couple of months ago to test out a new kit on the RBRR. That'll teach me to make ambiguos picture descriptions and not open them up for a look see before up-loading them to blog.

Anyway back to today's picture (carefully checked!), it shows the Atlas resplendent with it's now filled in holes as collected from Wes the master tinny. Actually the picture was taken yesterday outside Dave's paint shop a good 20 miles away from Wes's place. That meant a good blast down the A5 to get over to Dave's place with the wife riding shot gun in the Chicane. As yet I haven't had time to fix the speedo so I was blissfully unaware of our speed. Imagine my surprise when Clare informed me that we had maintained 55 mph for a good 5 miles on the A5, that's 3mph faster than an Atlas's top speed when they were new. Looks like that diff ratio change has paid dividends. Dave reckons he will have the van back to me by the end of the week in its fresh coat of powder blue paint (original colour). I have known people loose cars for months if not years in paint shops and we are now less than 2 weeks before the start of the RBRR, I must be mad!

Big brake kit

Probably wouldn't make a lot of money out of retailing a big brake kit for the Atlas seeing as there are only about half a dozen still on the road!

Converting our Atlas to front discs turned out to be one of those jobs I wish I hadn't started. Initially I decided to do it based on all the horror stories I had heard from Atlas drivers of old about the drum brakes on the front. Then having looked at the state of the original stuff on our van and realising it needed everything replacing I thought about swapping to discs instead. So what bits to use? Atlas have 2000/2.5 wheel stud spacing so using Herald/Spitfire/Vitesse/GT6 hubs was out of the question. Using 2000 hubs meant a lot of lathe work in order to fit Vitesse discs, and Type 16 Girling calipers. Unfortunately having bolted it all together and feeling very pleased with myself I was a little dis-chuffed to find that the road wheels were fowling the calipers. The Atlas wheels look like early MKI 2000 jobbies, so into the stores for a late MKII 2000 rim and bobs yer uncle problem solved.

The back brakes are pure Vitesse/GT6 so no problem's there. After a precautionary master cylinder rebuild and road test it was nearly time for the MOT.

6.66 sign of the devil?

Well I hope not but as it turns out 6.66:1 is the diff ratio of Standard Atlas's from new. As we are hoping to do the 2,000 miles of Club Triumphs RBRR in a few weeks I thought it might be time to investigate a ratio change. When new an Atlas was flat out a 52mph but having spoken to Dave Gleed when he was in our shop he recalled the Triumph Service Division (who Dave worked for) fitting overdrives to their fleet of Atlas's (Atlasy?). Dave said that it added another few mph to the top end on the straight and level, but that any sort of gradient was another matter. As far as I could see the only easy overdrive box to fit would be a Standard 10 type but having sold all our remaining core units to Tony L Dean some years ago that option was going to prove difficult in the short time we have before the RBRR. So out with the diff and a strip down was on the cards. I already knew from the parts books that a lot of the guts were 2000/2.5/TR and so it proved to be. In went a nice 2000 4.11:1 CW&P set I had on the shelf and the diff is back in the Atlas.