Picture this: It’s 1976, in San Francisco, Ca. at a BMC dealer service department. A lady drives in with her new Aruba Red 1976 Jensen GT complaining of overheating. Now, she has been here before, and they just can’t seem to solve the problem. It just keeps overheating while she is driving around the city. She sits in the spacious waiting room and soon the service manger comes out and says that they have fixed the problem. She drives out, and the car never overheats again! Problem solved. Jet forward 40 years. The car now sits in Oregon in need of a new paint job, and interior, and basically be restored. The car has seen some harsh times since new and now needs to be cleaned up and started and get it running again. Its spent some damaging winters in Ohio, and was the victim of vandalism which shot out the windows and wrecked the interior. Even though the engine has only 33,000 miles on the clock, the car looks like it has been through a war. Little by little, the various components are replaced or refurbished in an attempt to get the car back on the road. These are not easy parts to replace, as the car was a conglomerate of a number of foreign vehicles like Vauxhaul Viva, Holden, Chrysler UK, Lotus,Triumph TR-6, and any Lucas items that sat on the shelves too long. This car was the last car produced by the now bankrupt Jensen plant, after many years of successful body manufacturing for such unique cars as the Austin-Healey, Jaguar, Sunbeam Tiger, Volvo P1800 and many others. Just 510 examples of this GT were manufactured in 1976… and then the doors closed forever.
Back to the current issue at hand-get the engine running. A thorough cleaning of the fuel and cooling system is required, as the car has now sat around neglected for years. Upon
removing the thermostat housing the car now revealed just how the dealer repaired the overheating problem in 1976. This is the original thermostat, with a Jubilee clamp affixed to restrict its movement, so that it would never again close. No wonder the heater output was so mealy on a damp San Francisco day, and maybe that’s why the car was abandoned in Ohio where real heater performance would be required. Never-the-less the Jensen never overheated again, just like the service manager stated.
— Hank Leach
'1976 Jensen GT Restoration' has 1 comment
October 31, 2016 @ 8:00 am Peter Hurney
I started at SF BMC in 1977 as a Jensen mechanic. The person I was replacing was the likely candidate for the hose clamp in the thermostat repair. I stayed at that job for five years and it was my favorite shop ever.