The new grill badge commissioned by AHCO Regalia launched me on one of the more interesting little projects I have encountered with our Healey. The badge is beautifully done and Marilynne decided that we must have a badge bar on our Healey with the AHCO grill badge and about 6 or 7 other badges mounted on it.  Subsequently, I decided we ought to have a pair of driving lights for the bar.  Therefore, I ordered a Moss Motors original equipment (OE) badge bar and a pair of stem mount 5 ½” driving lights from Tom Monaco. 

When the items arrived I began the installation by dismounting the front bumper and carrying it into the family room.  Our family room is conveniently located right off of the garage.  Marilynne learned long ago that I consider our family room as sort of a carpeted section of the garage.  She knows that most Healey projects I undertake will likely result in some major portion of Healey anatomy being stored or worked on in the family room, sometimes for extended periods of time.

The OE badge bar is a rather simple device consisting of a long gently curved pipe spanning the width of the Healey front end.  Two pairs of brackets are welded to the pipe.  One pair serves as mounting points for driving lights.  The other pair serves as mounting points for the badge bar itself.  The badge bar is mounted to front bumper using the bolts that anchor the bumper over-riders.  Sounds pretty simple, eh?  If only it were so.  The bar mounting brackets are flat metal blades about 5″ long with about a 15 degree bend at the lower end of the blade.  The lower section of each blade also has an oblong slot for the bumper over-rider bolts to pass through.  The lower section of this blade ultimately must be perpendicular to the ground.  If it is not the driving light brackets will not be parallel to the ground and the driving lights will more than likely point to the sky.

I ran into two problems as I began the installation.  First, the slotted bolt holes in the mounting brackets did not center with the over-rider holes in the bumper.  Second, the backside of the Healey bumper is not flat.  Rather, a cross section of the bumper is sort of a rounded capital “W” laid  on its side (see the diagram).   The off-center bolt hole problem required a little filing effort to relieve the misalignment.  The second problem was a little more difficult to correct.

As I said above, after dismounting the bumper from the car I carried it into the family room where I could lay it on the carpet with minimum concern for the freshly re-chromed finish.   Attempting to mount the bar on the bumper immediately revealed the mismatch of the mounting tab bolt slots and the bumper over-rider bolt centers.  However, when I finally got the badge bar mounted to the backside of the bumper and remounted the bumper to the Healey I discovered the major problem.  The driving light mounting tabs were angled in a manner that would point the lights into the heavens.  I was advised by several sources to simply re-bend the pairs of  badge bar tabs until the problem was solved.  While this might have worked it would have caused the already rather thin chrome plating to flake off.  Besides I already felt that having to file larger bolt-holes was suffidient irritation.

In an attempt to remedy the rotation of the badge bar when bolting it to the bumper I tried stacking washers between the bar’s mounting tabs and the bumper.  At one point I had four washers stacked on each bolt.  This technique  mimics the British auto engineering solution for imprecise machining, i.e., “If it doesn’t fit, shim it.” In this case I was reduced to using washers.  It didn’t work.  The lights would still blind passing aviators.  Well, maybe not.  They are Lucas lights, afterall.  So,  I removed the bumper and laid it on the family room carpet again where I could comfortably study the problem.  As I lay on the carpet peering down the length of the bumper the solution came to me. The problem was the uneven surface of the backside of the bumper.  The undulating surface causes the mounting tabs to find their own comfortable position without any concern for rotating the bar or for the positioning of their mates, the driving mounting lamp tabs.  The tabs needed to mate with a flat surface.

I fabricated a flat surface on the bumper backside using a pair of two inch pieces of high density polyethylene with a bolt hole drilled in the center of each,  “spacers” if you will.  When I re-mounted the bumper with my spacer placed as seen in the sketch below the driving lamp tabs were parallel to the ground. The driving lamps were installed next and sit perfectly upright.  Now I could get on with the next phase of this little project, wiring the lamps.  This was yet another special experience.

During the course of this project I had developed a rapport with a gentleman at Moss.  He was unaware of a problem with the big Healey badge bar.  I had sent him a couple of digital pictures of the problem.  He immediately agreed there was something drastically wrong with the badge construction. He even took a badge bar home one weekend and tried to mount it on his own Healey.  The following Monday the phone conversation started off with,  “Yup, Mark, you’ve got a problem.”  This was not the answer I had hoped for.  However, when I finally resolved the problem on my own and shared the spacer concept with Moss Motors they thanked me.  I was told by my friend at Moss that their research had revealed that the OE badge bar was originally supplied with two spacers that were to be placed between the badge bar and the backside of the bumper.  I was told that future Moss OE badge bar kits will include a pair of spacers currently under design development and that a $75.00 credit would be placed in my Moss account.  These new spacers will probably look something like packing pieces that are placed between the spring bars and the bumper.