[TR] Engine colours

[John Macartney]

It must be more than twenty years back when this topic on reconditioned engines was aired and I remember contributing to it.
One of the major issues in unit reconditioning is getting the old units (aka in the U.K. as corps or cores) and it would be tedious and cost prohibitive in the extreme to ship worn engines, gearboxes and other electrical items across the Atlantic or more oceans if you include Australia and the Far East. All unit recon work on engines and gearboxes for the U.K. and Europe was undertaken by a Standard-Triumph subsidiary called Beans Industries. In my day, a Beans rebuilt engine was painted an unattractive shade of blue and the engine number was ground off and replaced by a totally different number stamped in place.
George Durand who was the company’s Parts Director was very proud of the unit recon and service exchange programmes he had established in a number of major markets and there was definitely one for the US and another for Canada. Basically, Standard-Triumph North America in Leonia, NJ together with their opposite numbers in Toronto, contracted two local companies to do their recon work as genuine factory replacements using parts supplied by STNA and STC parts divisions. It can’t be ruled out that some blue Beans recon units arrived stateside as part of regular parts shipments from the factory but it makes economic sense for the import company to set up this sort of arrangement on a local basis but what colours that might have been used is anyone’s guess.
It’s all rather like the Triumph branded radios sold as genuine factory approved units. The Acclaim was the first car to have a radio as standard fit but cars that went for export were usually radio-less and had a locally supplied unit fitted before delivery.
Lucas had a different arrangement and usually supplied a new unit in a service exchange packaging identity at a slightly lower retail price.

Jonmac