The Webmaster Zone

Floors are welded back in, and so is the new trunk floor. Right now the trumpet sections under the front fenders are being reworked. The pace is starting to pick back up, I'll get some new pictures as soon as I can.

Not a lot of progress to report I'm afraid. I'm not one to sit idle though, so while I've been waiting for the MGB bodywork and paint to be finished, I've been working hard on building a rally car!

No regrets! That's become the philosphy of this restoration. Since Joe has access to some great donor shells, we're leaving no "while we're at it" left undone. The end result will be a car at least as good if not better than when it rolled out of the factory at Abingdon in 1965. Unfortunately, all the previous work that was done by Bryce Mack in White Rock BC has turned out to be done so poorly as to be incompetent at best, and a serious safety issue. As such I would like to publicly apologize to anyone that used his services based on my recommendation. Check out especially the pictures of the trumpet sections, doglegs, rear sills and floor pans. The metal that the new pieces were welded to previously were either too deteriorated, not cleaned properly or not welded well, so they're all being redone - that's the sound of many thousands of dollars being flushed down the toilet! Live and learn, I guess. A lot of the welds you can pop apart with a screwdriver, as Joe keeps telling me "it's a good thing you weren't in an accident with it like this". Over the last year I have been contacted by several other people that have had the same experience - after getting the car back it was one of the worst repair jobs they had ever seen - some have been able to get partial refunds, but I have not pursued that option yet. One of these customers who had poor work done on his MG wrote an article on his experience which is currently being distributed to all MG clubs in North America. He emailed it to me and asked me to post it on my site. It is titled An MG Too Far and you can read it by clicking on the link. The sandblasted shell is really lovely and makes for a good starting point to build up the car RIGHT. You'll also notice that the engine bay is shiny compared to the rest of the car, it's already had a coat of POR-15 laid down. Extensive anti-rust treatment will be applied to the car as it comes back together. With the new "might as well" fabrication, deciding to go over all the welding, and a few other odds and ends (like filling in the 6x9 speaker holes), the revised start-painting date is Feb 1st. Suprisingly, the additional cost is not that much - NOW is the time to do these things, when the car is 100% apart and bare metal. Joe has built a paint booth at the back of the shop and the results on the "test car", which was done in black, look superb.

Not much else to do, so I'm starting work on the dash. The only gauge I hadn't renovated was the dual coolant temperature & oil pressure gauge because you have to disconnect the oil and water lines to draw the back of the gauge off. Now that the dash is out of the car though, it was easy. Three small screws each hold the separate gauge mechanisms to the side of the housing. I can then be very carefully drawn away. Then I masked off the housing and painted the inside high gloss white, like I had done to the rest of my gauges. After this treatment the night visibility of the gauges is way better (ie readable). I discarded the translucent blue filter ring for the same reason, since the blue can be easily reproduced by painting the instrument bulbs. After assembly, I calibrated the temperature readings - click on the pictures for details.

I'm cleaning the cobwebs out of all the corners of this web site, and converting all the pages to my new snazzy format. The end results is, I'm getting rid of a lot of bad links, reorganizing things more logically, and renaming everything consistently. As an added bonus, with all the automation I'm adding (CSS and PHP for you techies out there), it will be much easier for me to add new articles and control the look & feel in the future. I've already added some new articles, look for "Changing Wheels" below, and I've also added a bunch of performance data to the "MGB Specification" page. Also, the BBS will soon be about 100x faster when loading after I switch to the new server hardware. I've got some big plans for this site over the Fall and Winter, so stay tuned!

Spent Labour Day finishing up the teardown, disconnected the steering column, then removed the whole front and rear suspensions from the tub and hit them with a pressure washer to clean off the grime. Joe had to fabricate some mounting plates for the car since I didn't leave on the front bumper bracket, so we didn't get it on the rotisserie, but it's mounted as of today. I also removed a few more bits and pieces from the car after consulting the "restoration bible", aka "Original MGB", and making a careful list of all the pieces that are supposed to be painted black, not body colour. Joe can go full-bore on the bodywork now, and we expect it to be ready for paint in 60-90 days! At this point I don't have anything more to do on the car until its painted and its time to put the suspension back on. Just got an update, the bottom of the car doesn't look too bad, so that's good. The whole unibody gets sandblasted on the rotisserie this week. Also got some more news on the engine, turns out the machine shop got mixed up, my block is already 40 thou overbored and so I've decided to go with a new block (not very expensive), instead of flirting with disaster by going 60 thou over. The engine mods I'm having done (see below for the list) are carefully selected to increase mid-range power while preserving reliability and street drivability. From what I've read in the excellent "How to Power Tune the MGB". I'm expecting to get about 75 bhp at the wheels (15% gain from ~65 stock) after finishing tuning on a rolling road.