Hello Phil, 

I've attached a photo of what the car looked like when I brought it home about 3 years ago. I found it in the desert above Los Angeles with the paint mostly roasted off by the sun. Remarkably, I changed the oil, put in a fresh battery and drove the car this way for about a year, as all my attention (and cash!) was going to completing my TR3. This was despite the interior being in tatters and the odd electrical fire. The summer of 2006 I decided to paint the car properly, and of course this led to so much more. I stripped the car down to a bare shell for painting and in the process rebuilt the the engine and installed a new wiring harness. Rewiring makes all the difference in reliability, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a vendor in the US that could make up the replacement harness, or loom, right down to the correct color codes and fabric covering. I painted the car myself, matching the paint from the inside of the door, under the panel. I've found an original sales brochure for the Triumph Sedan-- it was never referred to in the literature as anything else-- and learned the color was called Mandarin Red.

It was built in August of 1958, but was not sold until 1960 from San Diego British Motors, so it's been a California car the whole time. As a result, it's rust free except for a spot the size of a silver dollar on the passenger side floor, where the windscreen leaked. Now that the seats are reupholstered, it's been my daily driver for the last three or four months. This is mainly because it gets 45 miles to the gallon. I know that fuel is still just a fraction of what you pay in the UK; about $3.50 a gallon, but of course that has everyone here up in arms. Meanwhile, I seldom fill the 7-gallon tank more than every other week.

Still needed: the interior door panels, the headliner and the front parcel shelf. A local man did the seats and I'm extremely pleased, so I'll have him do the panels and headliner as soon as my bank balance allows.

I hope your readers find this interesting. When the car is finished, I'll be happy to supply a more complete report.

Bryan

Click through these following photos to see enlargements:

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