If you’re a professional mechanic they’re about as reliable as it gets.
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I was sitting on MoPac one day going to work, and a tire just came rolling down the road on the lane line between the cars, going straight as can be and never hitting a car. Damndest thing I ever saw. I have no idea where it came from or what happened to it.
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If you owned a British car built in the 70s (or 60s or 80s), you needed to be a mechanic or related to a mechanic.
Ironically, my wheel came off because when my mechanic replaced the stub-axle he stripped the lug nuts re-attaching the wheel.
Fun fact: we still don’t know why a rolling wheel stays upright.
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I think we understand why a single rolling wheel stays upright. It’s about angular momentum. A rotating wheel creates a torque force perpendicular to the rotation which resists the gravitation pull on either side to topple it over. It doesn’t counter it completely, because if you were to say kick that rolling wheel, it will topple, but it gives the wheel no reason to fall over on it’s own until it either slows spinning enough that the torque force is overcome, or another force acts on it.
A bicycle is different. The mystery of bicycle stability isn’t so much why the wheels want to stay upright, it’s why two independent spinning wheels want to self-align.
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My high school didn’t have a soccer team in the 80s so the mechanic at the Triumph/MG/ Jag/Fiat dealership in town created a club team. He was from England and knew the game. He drove an Opel GT. He was a pretty cool guy.
My brother got diagnosed with water on the knee and Coach Drew told him the cure was a tap on the ankle. Went right over our suburban heads but he thought it was hillarious.
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How did the guy have any time to do anything other than work on Triumphs, MGs, Jags and Fiats? That’s the yang to the Maytag guy’s yin.
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Wasn’t it 60s MGs that had that weird dual carburetor that had to be synchronized in some unachievable way?
I always wanted one of those cars, and still have a hankering for a Mazda Miata. I understand Miatas are in fact reliable, and are always the answer.
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Fix
It
Again
Tony
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In a situation even tighter than living in a van…an old coworker of mine drove a late-70s Fiat Spider for years. We both traveled a lot, working in the field, but he even more so. He didn’t have a house or apartment, just lived in hotels in whatever city the job was in. For the few weeks he wasn’t on the road, he rented an extended stay hotel in Houston. He said he could pack everything he owned into that Spider, and if it didn’t fit, that’s how he knew he didn’t need it. He lived that way for four or five years.
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Where did he put his piano?
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In the conservatory, duh.
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Next to the candlestick or the lead pipe?
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Same with the Triumph. 4-cylinder engine that somehow needed twin carbs. 
[quote=“Limey, post:76, topic:755, full:true”]
I had the same exact thing happen to me in my 1963 VW bug. My brother, sister and I were on 95 north headed up to Georgetown for some under 21 drinking (it made so much sense at the time) and right about the time we hit Lorton, I see this wheel with attached drum, axle and suspension cruise by me on the right going about 10 miles per hour faster than I was. I nonchalantly said to my sister, who was in the backseat, “hey, do me a favor, don’t sit back in that seat. Why don’t you lean forward up in between Donny and I here?”. Being my sister, she immediately sat back in the seat to get away from her weird brother making a strange suggestion at which point the right rear of the car (right where the gas tank is) burst into a shower of sparks as that corner of the car dipped down to the pavement. I was able to wrestle thing over to the left side median but it took me cranking super hard to the left to keep it from spinning out to the right. Good times, good times. And by “happened to me” what I mean is I’d never done a single thing to perform any maintenance on any of the four corners of the car for its entire lifetime with me up to that point.
Everything turned out OK though. We hitchhiked the rest of the way to Georgetown and met up with our friends, only about 30 minutes late. Unsurprisingly, the car was still there four days later when we went to go see if their was anything left to pick up.
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Sweet. I had a 1969 Triumph GT6+, which actively worked to kill me every single time I drove the thing. Nader wrote “unsafe at any speed“ about the Ford Pinto but the Pinto was a Volvo compared to the GT6+. The back end suspension was upgraded from the deadly Mk1 version which merely changed it from probably deadly to possibly deadly. But, it was a chick… magnet…
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IIRC, it wasn’t until the 1974 “MkIV” models that they cured the dreaded tuck-under issue with the swing-axle rear suspension. Of course, by then, they’d stopped making the GT6. It was a gorgeous machine, though, especially with that bulldog front bumper.
I always had a plan to drop the GT6’s straight-6 into a Spitfire, as it was the same chassis (there were 6 cars that used that same chassis). Failing that, I had plans to swap the twin carbs for a twin-choke Weber, as well as add a free-flow exhaust manifold with twin down pipes.
Never actually did any of the above, despite them being common and easy mods, but it was fun thinking about it.
Here’s the aforementioned green '74 MkIV:
I always loved the looooong hood with those “hips” just behind the doors and the short back end. The whole front end (from those chrome clamps forward) flipped up, giving unencumbered access to the entire engine bay. Despite that, through careful and intricate design, absolutely nothing was easy to get at.
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That was my car, complete down to the mid fender mirrors. Although mine was dark blue and had steel slotted wheels instead of the wire wheels. Good times in that thing.
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I once snapped the rear driveshaft in my ‘77 International, but never had a wheel come off. The broken driveshaft just meant “WHACK WHACK WHACK” to the undercarriage as I coasted to a stop in the middle of an intersection.
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