[TR] TR4 Back on the Road and Running Sweet

Will Daehler will.daehler at gmail.com
Wed Jun 25 13:34:15 MDT 2014


I did a lot of work on the front end over the winter.  I replaced the brake
calipers and pads, brake hoses, the rotors, the wheel bearings, the tie
rods, the A-arm bushings, and the ball joints.  It really paid off, the new
parts coupled with last year's anti-sway bar installation, finally tightened
the car up so that corners nicely.

 

Then there was a feeling of real drag on all the wheels, and after a joy
ride or two, the brake shoes and calipers were smoking hot.   With a little
investigation in the Archives, I found that there was a primitive device in
the brake line's  5 way connection called a restrictor valve.  The
recommendation was to remove the guts and I did.  Problem solved, the brake
pedal travelled just a little bit longer, but top speed in my car jumped
from 72 mph to 88 mph!

 

After that last speed run my car wouldn't even start the next day.  I
fiddled around a bit, cleaned the rotor and re-gapped the points but it was
definitely time to do the tune up, postponed since I bought the car in 2005.
The postponement was out of fear of failure, but now since I had won the
V-21a Snap on tools valve clearance adjuster on eBay, I was clearly enabled.
I replaced the points, the condenser, sparkplugs, distributor cap, the
wires, and the coil.  I pulled off the valve cover, and gapped the
clearances on the rocker arms using my new found tool. Voila, I was running
again, it did start right up and ran like stink.

 

This weekend I might experiment with the timing of the distributor, maybe
play with the vacuum advance, and the finer adjustments of the carburetor
tuning. I think there are few more horses trapped inside that need to be
freed!

 

Will Daehler

63 TR4

HVDA 5 speed


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