Well, first off, thank you all for being so gentle with me.
No, I hadn't had a bad day, or anything like that.
It was nearly midnight though, and I was trying to hurry through the e-mail
'cause I never liked it a lot whenever I'd get bounce messages from people who
let their inboxes get full. Plus, I'm still trying to "adjust" to doing this
from home, and let's admit it up front, Ramon sippin' suds at midnight has a
somewhat different attitude than Ramon munchin' coffee grounds at 6:00 a.m.
Anyway, after two, three, maybe four messages about people doing all sorts of
wierd things to their cars as the result of real or imagined overheating
problems, something just sort of made me want to rant and rave a bit. So I
did. Thank you all for indulging me. I got a lot of private responses, and
I'll get to 'em all as soon as I can.
It just seemed to me like somebody who's a relatively new Tiger owner might
get the impression that he HAS to do all sorts of strange things to keep his
Tiger from overheating. Like I said, I don't think that is the case.
Certainly not with stock or near-stock cars that are not used in
noncompetitive situations. Sure, I'd agree, go uppin' the displacement to 302
or beyond, uppin' the compression to ten or twelve to one, install a radical
cam, or even like in my case, a real low gear set, or put the car on a race
track, drag strip, rally circuit, or hill climb and you probably do have to do
something because you probably will have an overheating problem.
But a healthy stock street-driven Tiger should not need any of the changes
being done.
Maybe ours is a minority experience. We bought our Mk I used in '67. It was
all original and bone stock except for a four-barrel Autolite carb. on a cast-
iron intake. We've driven it numerous times across the Southwestern
USA--Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. We've driven it fast. In the summer.
The first time was in July. Did the temperature gauge go up? Yep. Pegged
the sucker climbing grades and under hard acceleration; dropped down a tad on
the downhill sides. Did it "overheat" and start to running rough? Nope. Did
it puke coolant when we stopped for gas? Nope. Did it refuse to start in all
that heat? Nope.
Maybe we've been blessed, but in the 31 years we've had the car, only one time
did it ever show any signs of overheating. Five or six years ago Theresia and
I were at Lake Tahoe celebrating a wedding anniversary--the first week in
August. We had a friend with T-bucket street rod who was "doing" Hot August
Nights in Reno, so we decided to Tiger on down the hill, look him up, and
party with the street-rod crowd a bit. We hit Reno at about noon and after
trying for over forty-five minutes to get around the block and find a place to
park at the hotel where they were, the car started running rough, and I have
no doubt it would have puked the cooland if we had shut it off. At that we
decided we'd experience Hot August Nights some other time and made a bee-line
out of town.
Does that mean we have an overheating problem? Do we need to start blocking
off holes here, punching holes there, and fabricating doo-dads for under the
car? I don't think so. I think next time we'll just go at night!
Ramon
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