Pages cut and sold on eBay.

Left is from a 1963 English magazine: MG "Safety Fast! at Le Mans." Right is from 1967: "BMC show their class at Sebring."

      
Pages from Road & Track magazine, January, 1956

Click the left thumbnail to see an advert for the heater I had installed in my MGTD in about November, 1957. I got it done for $25, hoses, clamps, fittings, and labor included. It was better than nothing, but not much. Who is the entrepreneur? "Wacky" Arnolt. 

Click the right image and see up close and personal an advert for the Judson supercharger. I found one like that in 1961, at a dismantler in Riverside. When I shopped for it, the guy told me it was a hundred dollars. By the time I'd spent a week scraping up the money, he apparently confused what he asked with what he would take, and sold it to me for $60. A bargain, this time, since it really did work.

I just bolted it on, adjusted the Marvel Mystery Oil® drip-feed, and away we went. It worked good for a month or so, until one day at Running Springs, up above San Bernardino, the front rotor bearing siezed. I undid the belts and it ran fine but not well (long, convoluted intake tract) while I came down the mountain. Disassembled it and cleaned up the low-pressure path, replaced the bearings and seals with off-the-shelf parts, put it back together. Displaced the rotor-casing orientation by one bolt-hole. I don't know how they could design one that would go together wrong, and no keys! After a few days of puzzlement, I sussed it out and got it right.

With that blueprinted TD engine and a straight fiberglass muffler it made a blue flame six feet long shoot out the tailpipe at 7000 RPM. I never did get it to idle properly. It always wanted to run 3-400 RPM too fast. Went to the Judson guru's Pasadena shop (Bill . . .  Bill . . .  Corey!) for advice, an oversize throttle shaft, a new jet and a range of needles for the 1½ SU carb. All to no avail. After the car was trashed and I was cleaning out MGTD stuff, I found a long, soft coil spring that had barely been cause for a minor head-scratch in the excitement of getting the supercharger. Everything had been assembled, even the carb, so, no clue. Turns out the spring belonged inside the dome of the carburetter, a little pressure to keep the piston down and the idle under control.

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