TBI - 1 Year Later

NOTE: Throughout this write-up, you'll see references to John Wilson who supplied the electronic components of the TBI conversion kit for my upgrade done in 2006. To the best of my knowledge John is no longer doing Triumph conversion kits and Rick Patton has now partnered with Affordable Fuel Injection (AFI) for all of the electronics. The main advantage to this new partnership is that you now have one stop shopping with Rick. Everything from the adapters to the electronics to the distributor modifications are all handled and shipped by Rick. In addition, AFI will provide all technical support and up to 4 custom chip programs.

I get quite a bit of email regarding my conversion to TBI and one fellow recently wrote asking why I haven't updated the TBI section of my site lately. Was there anything wrong? Was I still happy with it? I guess he thought that no news was bad news. Well..........I'm happy to report that the past year has been the most enjoyable year of driving my car since I got it in 1997.

Last year at this time (December) I had already put the car up on jack stands and was anxious to get the conversion going. This year I also have big winter plans (Toyota 5 speed & Goodparts' Differential) but I was very sad to put the stands under her. It's been such a joy to drive that I'm going to miss driving her over the next few months.

In looking over the site I can see where my last update was in the Driving Impressions section way back in February after I got her running again. Well, here we are about 3000 miles later and everything is great. We went to the VTR National Convention in Valley Forge PA, about a 3 hour drive and also up to Stowe VT for the British Invasion, another 3 hour drive. In between, I drove her just about everyday for trips around town, to the golf course, grocery store, mall.....etc......etc.

She starts and runs with no hesitation, backfires, misses, stumbles, hiccups or burps. My city mileage is about 21 mpg vs a dismal 12 mpg before and highway mileage is about 28 mpg up from 18 mpg. And that's with a stock 4 speed.

The best testament I can give the conversion is that we may go down to just 1 modern car and the TR6. This is my wife's last year of teaching so we'll both be retired come July and she doesn't see the need for 3 cars now that the TR6 runs with the reliability of a modern car.