Tony,
You are just going to have to accept the British ingrained cultural
proclivity to never throw out anything that still has some use. I know
plenty of Americans whose garage clutter attests to a similar bent
(including mine - want a 71 VW Turbo?). This may explain to you, if you
were ever wondering why you have khaki web straps in your trunk, and an
olive drab paint job (often referred to as "British Racing Green"), and
odd fastener threads in only one place on the car - holding down your seat!
For clarification, here are the reasons:
1) The Khaki web straps are War Surplus Army canteen straps, from the
Charge of the Light Brigade, that hadn't all been used up yet.
2) The "Rootes BRG" #86 (Forest Green) is WW1 surplus tank paint from
Gen. Patton's phony "Invasion" base of plywood and inflatable tanks and
planes. Other car manufacturer's "BRG" was from Home Guard and RAF
sources, so that's why they are not uniform.
3) Those seat bolts are the end result of the Anglo-European Metric
wars. Although they gave in on gasoline in liters, instead of British
Imperial Gallons (which are bigger than US Gallons), they fought the
fastener battle as hard as the Battle of Britain. They finally changed
from Whitworth to a UNF (US spec) thread. Firstly, most of their cars
were coming here anyway. Then metrics MUST be wrong, because that's what
those Frenchies use. In typical fashion, however, they went with fine
threads EVERYWHERE, rather than just where it was needed, but at least
it was "Uniform". Except for the seat bolts. Seems Lord Rootes second
cousin had a stock of surplused threads made for the first commercial
Comet jet passenger plane. When these came apart in the air, due to a
newly discovered engineering phenomena known as fatigue, they didn't
need the airplane seat bolts anymore, so they went cheap.
Now you know the inside story. Most things are exceedingly easy to
understand, once you have the facts. :-)
------------
Tony McNulty wrote:
>UNF ..... BSF!!!! It never even occurred to me to think that British and US
>would differ here.
>
>Sorta begins to give a sense for the value of metric. Live and learn.
>
>TM
>
>
>
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "John Slade" <edalsj@igs.net>
>To: <Sjhcobra1@cs.com>
>Cc: <tigers@autox.team.net>
>Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2002 11:19 PM
>Subject: Re: Seat screws
>
>
>Since we didn't seem to be getting anywhere, I went to my spare set of
>seats which have never (to my knowledge) been taken apart, and removed
>one of what I think are the screws under discussion.
>
>It measures as follows:-
>
>head.....flat head, slotted, 100 degree underneath
>length.....2.46"...call it 2 1/2"
>diameter.....0.246"...call it 1/4"
>thread.....fully threaded 26 tpi
>
>This screw equates to 1/4 British Standard Fine
>
>
>Hope this helps
>
>John Slade
>Manotick, ON
>
>
>
--
Steve Laifman
Editor
http://www.TigersUnited.com
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