August 16, 1998
It sat in my Dad's garage until today, when Dad and I finally got a chance to start tearing it down. We opted to start with the interior so that I could work on refinishing the seats and trim at my house (an hour away).




Here's the engine before we do anything. Notice the chromed valve cover. That's another swapped TR3 part. The block itself is from a TR3 as well. The correct SU4 Carbs (the two bolt kind) and head are here, fortunately.
The battery box has long since rusted away, and been replaced by a typical DPO hack job. The silver & red canister in the lower right is the air horn feed. It'll be gone before we're done.
Notice in the lower left corner, mounted on the inner fender, is the old style latch for the bonnet release. This is a cable operated system dropped by TS4229.




Here is what we faced. Notice the incorrect TR3 grab bar, lower left guage, and gear knob. At some time, many items on this car were replaced with TR3 (or worse) replacements. Oh, and that chromed thing you see in the passenger area is the front bumber. Good place for it, eh?.




The seats came out fairly easily enough, although the seat rails did not as the nuts under the floorboards and the wrong screws holding them on were quite solidly combined.
The seat frames are actually in fairly good shape, but the passenger seat (at least) is newer, as it is the folding type, not available until the TR3 (and the rear "seat" option) in 1956.




Here's what we found under the seats. The wood we knew about. What lay underneath was what we wanted to see. Unbolted the "custom" wooden floorboards and we found.....




.....RUST and HOLES and some Bondo-ish Plaster of Paris stuff trying to hide more Rust and Holes! 8-)
Those are the Clutch, Brake, and Gas pedals you see in the upper left & center.

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