It’s time for Iain to focus!
Ihave owned many 1960s Triumphs, and on the ladder of cool Triumphs I climbed as far as a GT6. I’ve always fancied completing the list with a TR6, although the list is just a little bonus – it’s the masculine styling, the perfect proportions, the comfy touring suspension, the handsome dash, the silky torque and the delicious exhaust music of the TR6 that really push all my buttons.
I bought this one last year because the price was so low it would have been rude to refuse. Maybe you would have had the strength of mind to bat it aside and focus on more important stuff, but sadly I did not. What happened was that a friend had to move house, and he phoned up and said: ‘Okay, here’s the deal. The TR6, and the welding of its T-shirt and the rear suspension beams, and the little 1950s wooden speedboat and its trailer, and its 35hp Mercury outboard, and the spare outboard – $2500 for the lot.’ 2500 Canadian dollars equate to around £1460...
The 1972 TR6 had been bought by him to be restored and fitted with a BMW straightsix for a non-petrolhead relative, which is actually not a bad idea at all. Then a much more suitable mostly-restored TR6 turned up, with many NOS panels but missing its engine and box. So now my TR6 was surplus to requirements and irresistible. The little plywood boat turned out to be rougher than it looked, and getting a registration for the trailer morphed into a Kafkaesque bumf nightmare. Some optimist paid me $50 and took them both away. The outboards I’ll hang on to.
But I have a big book on Specials to write, I’m working on converting Silver Clouds from four-door saloons to two-door convertibles, there’s a 1950s Bentley to build as a Blower lookalike, there’s a website ( www.ayrspeed.com) to develop to support those projects, and a blogazine within that website. Writing is a chronic disorder that must be indulged or I’ll go mad. There’s also a half-finished ten-year Cobra project, a Mini Marcos
to assemble, and assorted other old cars requiring regular nursing. Okay, it is time to get sensible about this.
Mind you, it’s actually a very sound TR6, and an excellent base for a restoration, so maybe I should keep it? No! Back off, evil car troll, the TR6 needs to go. ‘But it’s solid.’ Shut up!
It really is actually a good project, though. The critically important trailing arm section of the chassis and the bottom T-shirt section have been professionally repaired. The car’s panels have mostly been stripped to bare metal to reveal the real and minimal extent of rust, whereas many nicelooking TR6 bodies turn out to be more or less scrap when the true and horrific extent of corrosion is revealed. With my TR6, the inner wings are sound. The floors are solid. The doors are rust free. The bootlid, including the vulnerable section at the back, is solid. Most of the interior is toast, although the seats are actually quite good.
The sills are bad and will need repair, but around £200 a side will sort that out. Two wings are good, two should probably be replaced. The front panel is bent. If you bought a fairly nice-looking TR6 for $10,000 in Canada with a few rust bubbles, it would usually end up looking much worse than this after you took the paint off.
Restoring this car to be a solid, clean, usable TR6 would be relatively easy. There’s no grovelling or body removal, as the chassis is sorted and the floors are solid. There would be some simple minor patching of the top edges of the front inner wings, and the tonneau panel rust repairs could be prettier. Two wings are bad, but they’re detachable and the shapes are simple – even the bad wings could be repaired; the good ones just need tidying. The fact that the wings are detachable is excellent as they can be flipped and turned and held up at the perfect height for welding and grinding, a piece of cake compared to some body welding jobs.
The interior needs to be replaced, but you just order it and fit it, no big deal. I have good tan leather MX5 seats just waiting for a TR, which would look lovely with burgundy paint. The dash needs new veneer, but that’s an excuse to redo it in unendangered African red mahogany, glorious when coated with enough yacht varnish to exploit its richness. The engine spins smoothly, and I know that the car ran well before being dismantled. Overall, being properly accountantish about the real costs, we’re looking at something like $10,000 or about £6000, plus about 250 hours of work.
And this is where it all falls apart – I don’t have 250 spare hours for a side issue. So I decided to sell my TR6, and replace it later with a complete one. I will finally take the advice I have given in several books including the Essential Buyer’s Guides for Triumphs and Cobras – I will seriously lowball TR6 sellers at the perfect time of year. If I’m patient about the timing and brutal about the size of my offers, I can get a $15,000 TR6 for that same $10,000 and skip the 250 hours of restoration. In the couple of weeks just before Christmas, nobody else at all is buying sports cars. ( The same applies to yachts, BTW.) So I’ll go and check out whatever TR6s are offered at the $15,000 level – which means good mechanics and virtually no rust. I’ll bang on the chassis and pull up the carpets, and then I’ll gather my nerve and offer $10,000 cash, waved in a fat wad of fifties. I may be told to bog off, in which case I’ll say no worries, give me a call if you change your mind. One of them will.
I’ve already put the first part of this cunning plan into action. My old TR6 has been sold to a nice bloke called Craig, who promises to stay in touch as it is restored. Now for part B.
“I will finally take the advice I have given in several books ”