The Webmaster Zone

To celebrate owning the car for a year, I treated myself to something I have wanted for quite a while: a woodrim Motolita steering wheel. It was expensive but it feels and looks so good that I don't regret it for a second. I got the 13" variety, which is a bit smaller than I like and makes the steering a bit heavy, so I will swap it for the larger size when OMG restocks. I did some maintenance tasks like change the oil and set the timing. I decided to replace all the gaskets from the carb to the intake manifold to try and eliminate the air leak around the rear carb. Getting the old gaskets off the heat shield took hours, they were so old they were practically welded to the metal. Of course if I had a good work area I probably could have removed them with a drill in a few minute, but I digress. I reassembled the heat shield, spacers, and carbs and carb linkage and there was a bit of improvement, but not much. I am selling some old computer equipment I have around the apartment and decided to use the proceeds to buy a rebuild set of HS4s. With the tune up I barely need to use the choke to start the car, and it purrs along nicely and has torque all through the rev range. At the end of May I took the car on its longest trip yet, on a camping trip with friends from Vancouver and California in the Umpqua National Forest in southern Oregon. It was a ten hour drive each way and the car didn't miss a beat, although after prolonged high-speed driving, taking off in first would be a bit "jumpy" - I attribute that to superheated carbon deposits in the cylinders but thats purely a WAG (wild ass guess) on my part. I also visited Bryce Mack of Classic Auto Restoration Services in White Rock to get an estimate on repairing the bodywork. Anyway to get the body all sorted out its going to cost a lot of money (as expected) but I'm definately going to get the sills, rockers, and floor pans replaced in the Fall. Everything else is really cosmetic, I'm concerned with the structure at this point. Who knows, I could win the lottery between now and then and have it all done ; ) The annual Van Dusen ABFM was earlier this month, many really great cars and turnout was high (almost too many people IMO). Chatted with lots of nice MG owners and finally met Bill Spohn of the MGs list. As usual the swap meet was a bit lacking, but I managed to pick up two nice heater knobs and some metal door release handles which had to be shimmed a bit with washers on the inside to fit properly. They aren't original, in fact I don't know what car they are from, but they look smart and feel much more solid than the original plastic handles. No doubt a rebuild of the door innards would make the action a bit less resistant as well. Thats all for now!