Good Day Scions,
While searching through an old SOL archive, I came accross a thread
regarding Healey valve covers painted Florida Blue.
Christopher Ball (triumph@io.org) described his valve covers as:
" a very strange robin's egg blue, almost turqiose. (sp!)"
and someone advised him that the factory used this unpopular
paint on some engines when they were out of the normal engine
paint. This raises two issues for me...
(1) How can I see what Florida Blue looks like? I've never seen
this color in a Healey book, nor in person. Does anyone know of
a Healey book with a picture of a Florida Blue Car? Or have a
picture of a car painted this color? Sounds to me like it might
be a pretty color.
(2) The Valve cover on my 1960 BT7 MK I is painted Red. I always
thought this was very curious, because it shows no signs of
ever having been repainted, like red paint on the edges of
the valve clearance tag. Yet all literature I had read indicated
that the big Healey engine was always painted metallic green.
So I had convinced myself that a PO had done a very careful repaint.
However, this weekend I saw an old, unrestored BT7 in the local
british shop and it had a red valve cover too! This combined with
the Florida Blue valve cover story has me wondering if there is
a massive media conspiracy to suppress the shocking news of
multi-colored Healey Valve covers. In fact, I may be putting
myself in danger with this post, but I've always liked to live
dangerously.
Ob. Brit Tale of woe (TM): Finally installed both door panels on my BT7.
Previous owner had replaced the door panels with pegboard covered in vinyl.
The new ones look great, but were more work to install than I thought
(isn't that always the case!). The panels weren't pre-drilled so I
had to clamp them in place, mark the hole positions from the back (a real
pain because I had to figure out which set of holes were the originals,
while peering at the back side through an inspection mirror!), then
remove, drill, reposition, align 16 screws, etc. The only alternative was
to drill my own set of holes, but the doors already look like swiss cheese
inside from POs doing this.
Cheers,
Daniel Eskenazi - dve@bnr.ca Bell Northern Research, RTP, North Carolina
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