This weekend after many years of putting it off and moving the MG from one garage to another I finally rolled it out into daylight with a view to turning it into my everyday car, thankfully it did still roll and after accidentally finding out that my shin is the perfect thing to stop your mgb rolling into the a near by mercedes sprinter that you left parked to close we were all set...
I've tried resurrecting the car a few times and have added an electronic fuel pump and an electronic ignition distributor over the years as the points in both are a pain, new for this attempt was a recon starter motor and starter relay which i picked up from the very helpful wrexham mg centre when i picked up the mgb i bought on ebay, (don't ask..damn stella, computers should have a time lock as well as your credit cards, lets face it nothing you buy at 2am is something you want to tell your mam about)
After narrowly avoiding the almost comical (if it's not you) starter motor hitting you bang in the head when you finally get it off, the parts went on pretty easily, the only battery i had in the van was a car sized brand new leisure battery,this didn't really get things working with little engine turn and a lot of relay clicking, no worries i had a back up, the grey 43kg battery in the photo above, with them both wired in, (excuse my rather rubbish jump leads,they are more for quads...) it was turning over at an ok sort of rate.
At this stage i whipped the plugs out (new previously) and gave them a clean, a squirt of easy start in each carb and before you know it engine running for ooh maybe 4 seconds, but life non the less!
After slopping a fresh gallon of unleaded in and draining the carb bowls with a shringe so the fresh could get in there, + finding that the choke lever on the carb shaft was slipping and not really giving choke the engine fired up and even ticked over to a certain degree, tickover still way to fast tho and the engine doesn't seem to want to slow down unless you push the carb end with your hand, maybe it needs a new spring?
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The link is the engine running, but it's missing when you rev it and doesn't seem to happy, with what i considered at least a partial sucess under my belt and after a few 10 foot drives forward and backward on the drive time to have a look at the driver's door. I never had the correct roadster dropglass when i built the car so it hadn't been considered that the gt glass that was filling the hole didn't fit properly.
Now the correct glass was in the garage, (and had been for years!) thought this might be a nice little job to tick off the list, anyone who works on cars can see where this is going.... stripped the door in no time and released the old glass, quaterlight and the rear support, tried to reassemble and manage to pull the rail that is clamped to dropglass off the window, bum, nipped to me parents place where the car i got from wrexham is improving the value of their house and stripped the door on that, amazingly considering the rusty mess that is the rest of the car all the bolts came out easy and didn't even shear on the quaterlight. After a bit of polishing back home for the final bolt up and a stand round basking in what i had achieved.
No matter what which way the parts are assembled the window wouldn't wind up, about 3/4 of the way up the glass jammed solid and got stuck. If i only wanted the window to come 3/4 of the way up i suppose i could call this a success but... after telling my mates about the problems with the door it dorned on me what had happened, unfortunately inexperience and youth, (i did a good bit of the welding on this car when i was 15 before i'd worked at the MG Centre cardiff, or could even really weld) many years ago i'd had to fit 2 door skins to this door as the first when went badly wrong (didn't get the swage lines lined up) on the 2nd attempt so much of the door frame had been ground away the door skin could move a bit on the frame, i think what's happened is that the door frame is to far back on the door skin not leaving enough room for the glass and quaterlight, both of which are a set length, so even so the door fits the car well and is rust free paint matched and has cost me 2 door skins so far it has to go!
Such is working on old cars, i could reskin it again but haven't got the heart and am not confident it'll be any better so ebay for a hopefully rust free original door then see if it's fits the car!
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