OUR CLASSICS
Old-school experience and youthful tech understanding breathe life back into John’s long-standing fuel-injected A60 project car
1966 AUSTIN A60 CAMBRIDGE
I’ve known Dave Harries for 25 years so I’m used to his text messages being short and cryptic. But ‘starting it tomorrow – come over for ten’ was just about the most exciting message he could have sent. I made sure that I was there early just as Dave and his son Will were in the process of connecting fuel lines into a petrol can to correct the first disaster of the morning…
Before I’d got there they had poured a can of petrol in and, after a strong smell of fuel had begun to emanate from the boot had opened it to find it swimming in petrol. The tank had rusted through along the bottom while the car had been standing, a casualty of modern petrol that seems to corrode tanks far more easily. They had already removed the tank and mopped up when I arrived and were in the process of rigging the electric pump into a gallon can just to get the engine to run. This would then feed and fill the high-pressure injection swirl pot mounted on the boot floor that we will eventually build a protective box over.
Prior to this, I had sprayed the wooden instrument panel that my late father made many years ago (this project has been many years in the planning) with crackle black paint that gave a finish that approximated an MGB dashboard. We then wrapped that in the silver binnacle trim-frame from the original Farina Magnette dashboard that the car has had for many years. This houses an MGB speedometer and rev counter plus the standard A60 round triple gauge showing fuel, oil pressure and temperature.
Dave had elongated various wires to reach this new set-up and fitted the Triumph TR3 speedo cable that a friend in the Cambridge- Oxford Owners’ Club had worked out is the same as an MGB’s but much longer, so would reach up to the higher location of the A60’s instruments. The new battery that I’d bought had also been fitted. The rev counter is not yet connected because we need to seek advice on how to do that before taking the plunge.
The new wiring harness had been fitted and wired into four modern blade fuse boxes, as I did on the MGB a few years ago, so each fuse box now approximates to one of the fuses in the old factory set-up. This means that each feed now has its own fuse rather than sharing one with five or six other items, which allows for much more precise fault-finding and improved safety. The SC Components fuel injection had been
