I had passed the Ebay info yesterday to Charles Runyan at the Roadster
Factory.He has two of the cars and I think he may have missing one set. Maybe
he bought them.
Bob
---- robertten1@aol.com wrote:
> Curious,
>
>
> Did someone on this list purchase them or did some Triumph old timer guru
> grab them?
>
>
> Bob T
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Porter <mdporter@dfn.com>
> To: billdentin <billdentin@aol.com>; fot <fot@autox.team.net>
> Sent: Wed, Mar 16, 2016 7:39 pm
> Subject: Re: [Fot] Now that's something I've never seen before. Sabrina motor
> carbs for a TR
>
>
>
> On 3/16/2016 1:10 PM, billdentin@aol.com wrote:
>
>
>
> Agreed! If nothing else, it would be nice to have just for its
> rare, historical significance. But down through the years I have
> always wondered why the SABRINA engine never made it into their
> production cars. They sure seemed to do their job on the race
> track, but there must have been issues why they never went into
> their normal production cars.
>
>
>
>
> I wonder if Kas or Mike Cook has any take on that.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> I imagine they do, but, my first guess would be the overall cost.
> At precisely the time that the American market was expecting lots of
> changes year to year, Triumph was making just a few cosmetic changes
> to control expenses and to address manufacturing problems. It made no
> sense to hang onto an engine the basic design of which dated
> back to the `30s--which Triumph did==except for reasons having to do
> with money.
>
> Tooling costs, especially for low-volume producers, are horribly
> expensive. With talented people and enough time, it's possible to
> make a few units in-house without production tooling and come up with
> something that works reasonably well (this might be why the engines
> had, IIRC, some persistent oil leaks during racing), but translating
> that design to production is quite another matter. New castings means
> new forms, and any changes in the design means changes to production
> equipment, too--most manufacturers at the time had specially-made gang
> drills to drill out the bosses for head bolts in the block and the
> head, etc. (by and large, no CNC machining centers then, especially
> for small producers), and all those had to be redone or adjusted
> to new tasks. And all this would have come at the precise time that
> Triumph was just absorbing new tooling costs for the Spitfire and the
> TR4. And in that period, early `60s, market conditions were already
> changing--the trend toward muscle cars in the U.S. certainly had an
> impact on the sports car market--and emission controls were coming and
> the company was already inching toward receivership (wasn't the first
> part of S-T turned over to British Leyland in 1968?).
>
> In a way, it was a perfect storm of adverse conditions. I'm
> sure that S-T sensed a need to make some radical changes, but they
> only had the money to make do.
>
>
> Cheers.
>
> --
>
>
> Michael Porter
> Roswell, NM
>
>
> Never let anyone drive you crazy when you know it's within walking
> distance....
>
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