If you’re a normal car owner, and your modern car breaks down, you’ll never think about touching anything under the bonnet. If you have a problem, you take your car to an official dealer garage equipped with a computer and the appropriate tools to repair it.
With a Morgan it’s a different story. They’re handcrafted and manually assembled in Malvern, UK. And as any handcrafted and manually assembled car, a Morgan is relatively simple to repair. I say relatively, because if your problem is related to complicated major things, such as the engine or the gearbox for example, as with any other car you won’t be capable to repair it at home unless you’re a professional mechanic with a super equipped garage.
So, considering what’s just being said, if you own a Morgan, you’ll carry tools and spares in your car, because simple repairs can be done by yourself. In fact, in our opinion, it’s one of the joys of owning a Morgan. Working on your car achieving small repairs and improvements can become a real hobby.
The 3-Wheeler might be even simpler than the four-wheeled Morgans. It has few things that a valiant handyman wouldn’t do.
When choosing the tools and spares to be carried in your 3-Wheeler, you need to distinguish the essentials from the very recommendable and the outer space “do you really carry this stuff?” tools and spares.
In our case, being a little bit tool lover, this is what we carry with us in our 3-Wheeler.
- A couple of webbing
- A couple of elastic ropes with metal hook
- Emergency flash beacon (magnetic, orange LED visible 1km away)
- LED torch (powerful; magnetic cap and emergency red flashing)
- Small aluminum carabiners (4x)
- Wrenches 19, 17, 15, 13, 12, 10, 8 and 6 mm
- Imperial sizes Allen keys set
- Adjustable plastic cable ties (medium and small size)
- Black duct tape
- Insulating tape
- Small pieces of cables: blue, black and earth (green & yellow)
- Small crescent wrench
- Channel lock pliers
- Needle nose pliers
- Standard pliers
- Loctite crazy glue
- Loctite 243 thread locker
- H4 light bulbs (2x)
- All-in-one toolbox: screwdrivers, Allen keys, tubular wrenches, etc.
- Cutter
- Hammer for wheel nut wrench
- Wheel nut wrench
- Emergency tyre repair spray
- Front wheel inner tubes (2x)
- Resistant gloves
- Reflective red warning compact triangle (red box)
All the above listed fits into the four leather bags of the picture below.
The black one comes as a standard with the 3-Wheeler, containing a wheel nut wrench, a short hammer for it, and the emergency tyre repair spray. The other three with the Morgan badge can be purchased from Morgan via their webpage or through their dealers. Once everything is reorganized, as said, it fits in these four bags and there is still a little bit of room in the large one for more tools, if needed.
You may think that the number of tools is exaggerated, and you’re probably right. However, having room for them, and all four bags kept under the bonnet without taking any room in the boot – see the next post –, we prefer to carry all those better than getting short.
However, please let us justify few of these tools and spares. It might help you to reconsider your tools & spares bag!
Front tyre inner tube. Discussing with our friends in the Talk Morgan forum, we immediately realized this is a spare you shouldn’t miss in your 3-Wheeler. Because the front tyres of the 3-Wheeler are motorcycle type, and they have inner tubes, but the size of these is not so usual. This means that a normal tyre repair garage won’t have them available on their shelves. We bought two of them in the Internet, in the Motor Wheel Service web. The exact model is BLTU400/19, item described as 400 x 19 “Centre/Side” TR11 Blockley Superior Metal Valve Inner Tube. If you don’t carry at least one with you, waiting for this unusual inner tube spare can take days! Your call: one hour at the tyre shop and ready to go or days with the car immobilized waiting for the spare supply.
Imperial sizes Allen keys set. Almost the whole 3-Wheeler has metric screws and nuts. So, why imperial sizes? The S&S engine comes from overseas. A classic American. And consequently, the screws with Allen head of the engine and its accessories are imperial sized. To clarify, we bought a set of imperial sized Allen keys because we changed the air intake filter for a Muscle Cover type. And to do this easy task we needed imperial sized Allen keys. Otherwise we may not have them. Touching the engine part of the 3-Wheeler, beyond this change of the air intake filter, is not in our plans. But now that we have them, they make much more sense in the 3-Wheeler tool bag than at home, where imperial sized tools are totally useless.
Electric spares. Reading in the Talk Morgan forum, we learned that the permanent shacking and vibrating of the 3-Wheeler may cause premature wearing of cables’ outer jackets due to rubbing against hard surfaces. And, in some cases, can end up creating electric problems. So, taking with you a little bit of cable and insulating tape may save your trip one day.
Recommended spare parts not listed above. According to the experience of many owners, there are two specific spares, not so usual but very recommendable if you’re planning a long trip away from home: an extra fuel pump, and a rectifier.
The spare fuel pump to take with you is not precisely the original one mounted on the 3-Wheeler. The original is a model used in the late 90s Land Rover Discovery V8 EFI, and it’s very oversized from the flow point of view for the need of the S&S engine. The recommended spare is the Walbro GSS342. You can buy an genuine one for less than 100 € in Amazong or similar web pages. Be careful with the fake ones! The real Walbro GSS342 has metallic internals and is very reliable. Some fakes with plastic internals are offered in the Internet. Try to avoid those!
About the rectifier, the original one doesn’t seem to be reliable enough. Carrying an alternative Harley Davidson rectifier in your spares bag if you plan a long trip may be a wise choice. However, most of the drivers have no complain about the original one. Again, it’s a personal choice to buy a spare or not.
Another tool we may carry with us if we go for a long trip may be a set of battery jumper cables. However, those are quite common, and generally they occupy a relatively large volume. So, you may think twice before carrying with you this kind of tool. In fact, you have a large offer in the Internet of portable Lithium battery starters, that take less room than classic battery jumper cables. And they start your car! They’re a much better choice…
As you’ve seen, we carry four bags with tools and spares. Quite a volume for such a little car! Originally, we put them in the boot, where they occupied almost half of the volume.
Looking for a better place to keep those bags, we finally built a specific aluminum bin for the space available under the bonnet, which is a space you usually never use because removing the bonnet is cumbersome, and generally impractical.
But the story about this metal bin under the bonnet is for next post! I hope you have enjoyed this one and it helped you to choose your own tools!
Added tools – July 2020
After our recent short fighter missions, we’re completing the tools onboard that we feel one day may be necessary.
An essential one is a tyre repair kit such as the Slime Smart Repair, that comes with a single tyre sealant bottle and a tyre inflstor to be connected to the 12V socket of the car.
We also added another tyre repair kit, this one thinking just about the rear tyre. It’s an indian kit called Grand Pitstop, and its special characterictics making it different from other tyre repait kits, is that it uses mushroom-type plugs instead of the regular seal strips. We hope we’ll never have to check it, but we believe this mushroom-type plug is better, so we’ll give this kit a chance.
