Esprit

Panel steel is typically pretty soft stuff so that it can be easily formed (malleable) with little springback. Depends what you want though... if you're just doing little patchwork repairs and basic shaping pretty much any annealed, mild steel will work well. If you're looking at forming bigger sections you may want to look at either a deep drawing steel or a low-carbon mild steel as the forming will be easier. Be very careful if you're forming bigger curved sections in cold-rolled low-carbon steel as you'll end up with the steel forming Luders Bands (ripples) via strain-aging after a period of time there a perfectly formed, painted panel will self-ripple over time. This can be avoided by using VERY low carbon/nitrogen steels (<0.003%), or by artificially over-aging the steel as part of the annealing process to try and encourage the formation of carbides in the steel to draw out the interstitial carbon that causes the strain-aging. It's also possible to reduce this effect by performing a small-reduction cold-rolling pass (0.7%-1.9%) reduction after annealing. This introduces mobile dislocations that will allow a more continuous yield. This should only really be relevant if you're doing large-scale deformation though such as complex curvatures in metal, which is a pretty advanced panelmaking skill.

Talk to a motor rewinder (there should be some around) as they rewind armatures in motors, which are the same deal really.

I think you'll find that a droptank should run a bladder..... basically you may have trouble come WOF time not running a burst-proof tank positioned there. Given that if you get rear-ended the car is likely to crumple there as well as the tendency for the rear-ending car to submarine beneath the rear of the car in front, I'd check out the legality thoroughly first.

Fair enough... I guess that most of the settings I've dealt with have also had some kind of lateral linkage. de Dion setup makes it a little different, but you still want to look at improving roll stiffness. One good book to look at with regards to what suspensions setups to use is "Race car vehicle dynamics" by Milliken and Milliken... this book is the bible, read it, know it and ye shall be forever knowledgable! (I've not read all of it yet... it's a weighty tome)

Surely the rear end is located with a watts-linkage already? Or at least I'd have thought it was.. but yeah, if it's not got any form of anti-roll, you're better off stopping it rolling by adding some rather than trying to just stiffen the heck outta it.

Do you have a rear anti roll bar? If not, is there a variant of the car that does? Will make the biggest difference to increasing the rear roll stiffness and prevent you having to go uber-hard on the rear end to control roll.

Not so sure about the 2000s, but on the TRs, the Zenith Strombergs always came out on the "emissions spec" cars, for the yank market. The SUs were always fitted to the "full fat" sports cars. The TRs that I've seen that don't run injection often run SUs unless they've gone the full weber route. Nothing terribly against the Zenith Strombergs, just the SUs were always consensually preferable. Get a couple of HS-6's on there, they're pretty common

Sure it's not a lazy battery Richard? Just recently had similar trouble with the E-Type and it ended up a mixture of timing being a bit out and too much voltage drop when cranking for more than a second or two.

Get a good one, or restore one to top condition and they ride as well as any modern luxury sedan.... rich and creamy

Bit of TLC should sort that.... new points/plugs and perhaps a bit of tweaking of the SU's (Or Zenith-Strombergs?) should see it behave a little nicer for you

Your assumption is right. The Triumph 2L Six was an all-new engine, so designed because it was believed that four cylinder engines weren't refined enough for the market Triumph was trying to target with its larger Saloons and sports cars after the late sixties.

No they're not. The only Massey Fergusson that used a Triumph engine used the engine that was in the TR2/TR3/TR3a/TR4/TR4a 4 cylinder. The Triumph 2000 sedans all had inline sixes.