Part in my Oil Pan....

Ok, here is the whole story behind the part that I posted a few days ago.

My plan for the weekend was to drop the oil pan on the TR and replace the gasket. I drained the oil then went about removing the oil pan. Not that hard just took a while (I think there where 17-18 bolts holding the pan on) and a few light taps with a dead blow to get the pan off the car. After I got the pan off the car I took it over to my workbench to clean it up. I start taking the remnants of the old gasket off and I notice something in the bottom of the oil pan, uh-oh. Start fishing metal pieces out, at this point I'm in a bit of a panic. Thinking to myself, I'm going to have to tow the car to Decatur, pay a bunch to rebuild the engine ect. The picture shows what I fished out of the oil.

I get back under the car to examine the bottom end of the engine, trying to see where this part may have come from. Crank looks good, counter weights look fine, piston rods intact, bottom of the pistons look good, no groves or scoring in the piston liners....hmmmmm. I dilute the rest of the oil left in the oil pan and filter it through a coffee filter. No small metal shavings, odd. Look through my workshop manuals and parts catalogs, can't find a part that looks like this thing. Decide to call in some help, I e-mail the pictures to a guy I know who races Spitfires and has owned 20+ Triumphs (4, 4a, 6, 250, a few GT6s and Spitfires) and has worked at a Triumph shop up in NC on and off for a while. He calls me back and says this....

"First thing, that isn't from the engine so no harm done. I don't know how in the world it got there but what you have appears to be an old spark plug gapping tool!"

So there you have it, my TR was hiding a spark plug gapping tool in its oil pan. Very odd, at least it didn't say Lucas on it...... ::)

So an hour job turned into a whole day thing with just a hint of anxiety thrown in for good measure.

Exxon Valdez in my drive way...

I was changing the oil in the MINI last night, using a new drain pan. Well when I dropped the drain plug onto the drain pan and walked away I thought all was ok. Nope! When I came back out about 10 minutes later there was about a 4 quart oil slick growing out from under my car. Seems the drain plug fell and perfectly blocked the hole in the top of the pan so all the oil overflowed and ended up on the drive way! So I left for a quick trip to the grocery store to get cat litter and laundry detergent. Spread all of that on the spill and I will clean it up in a few days. Hopefully the cat litter will absorb most of the oil out of the driveway.

TR has been running great. Cleaned out the air filters last weekend. Plan on doing the oil and getting the wheels balanced this weekend. I also need to check the rear dif oil level. Right after I changed the oil in the rear dif it leaked alot, I am not sure if I over filled it or if the seal is starting to go bad (Hopefully it is the former). Also hoping the replacing the oil pan gasket will stop some of the oil drip that the car has (who am I kidding, anyone know a 40 year old British car that doesn't mark its territory?). I'll get back with some updates to the work this coming weekend.