Rusty But Trusty

From time to time, you can stumble on some cool old car parts in online listings. In the heady days of the post-war sports car movement, there were all kinds of parts available to help extract more power from your small-displacement, European-type sports car. Suppliers like EMPI, JC Whitney, and even the Donald Healey Motor Company competed for enthusiasts’ attention, selling bigger carburetors, mag wheels, and superchargers. That’s how we have parts such as this Shorrock C75B supercharger for sale for $3000 in Bloomfield Hills, MI.

Equipped with a 92mm supercharger pulley and a 1.5″ SU carb, this setup is said to be intended for cars running the BMC A-series engine. It comes with the manuals and a military-surplus-looking boost gauge from KDG instruments, still in its original box. It doesn’t appear to have been installed on a car in a very long time, although since the manifold has a previously repaired crack, at least that part was used at some point. The setup appears to be complete, although there’s perhaps a missing bracket to support the non-pulley end of the unit.

Quite a suggestive tagline for the early 1960s! Perhaps this didn’t mean the same thing back then… at least in British slang. Ahem. It’s interesting to see that Donald Healey didn’t restrict himself to selling cars, but also was in the parts business, and not just for Healey cars.

But, you say, I don’t have an A-series engined car on which to mount this wonderful device. Well, here’s the solution to your problem – check out this 1967 Austin Healey Sprite for sale for $3400 in Dover, MA. Though the seats look a little saggy, and the front bumper seems a little bent, this primrose yellow car looks to be in overall good shape. It has new exhaust, tires, gas tank, front & rear suspension, brakes, clutch and tune up. With the turning and stopping covered, looks like it’s time to improve the going. And who’ll notice a tweaked bumper when you blast by them at un-Sprite-like speeds?

Tags: austin healey, british, Feature, shorrock, sports car, spridget, sprite, supercharger

This entry was posted on May 9, 2014 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.