The Webmaster Zone

Home Page: Skye Nott
Kamloops, BC, Canada

Total Posts: 107

Update IV

Skye Nott — Posted on The MG Experience
Saturday July 13, 2002 12:00 AM

This is my third trip down to the shop of Joe Aros' "VIP Auto Restorations" to finish the teardown, and now the car really is a rolling shell. I got a new digital camera, so the pictures are much much better than before. Just click on the thumbnails to see how things went, captions are below the full size pictues. (I'll have the thumbnails up shortly) At this point, all that needs to be done to get it on the rotisserie (aka body rotator) is to take off the four nuts holding the crossmember to the body, disconnect the u-joint in the steering column, and disconnect the four bolts holding the leaf springs to the body. The tub can then be lifted right off. My engine rebuild is being handled by CB at "British Sports & Spares". The transmission is working fine, so it's just geting a good cleaning and some new seals. The engine gets a total rebuild though, stripped down to the bare block, tanked, bored, everthing blueprinted and balanced. The head is getting the unleaded conversion with Stellite valves and a 3-angle grind. The camshaft will be re-profiled to a slightly hotter "fast road" spec. The flywheel will be lightened by a few pounds, and last but not least the head and manifolds will be ported and polished. These modifications were chosen to provide a good solid street engine that is easy to live with but has a little more poop than the stock specs. Stock 8.8:1 CR is being retained. I already have free-flow K&N air filters, the stock exhaust manifold will be kept (ported and hi-temp powdercoating) as the early manifold is actually pretty good. I will probaby fit the ANSA twin tip exhaust when the car is done, and of course richer needles in the twin SU HS4s. If you're interested in modding your engine, I highly recommend the book "How to Power Tune the MGB" by Peter Burgess. Its very important that you look at the engine with the intake and exhaust as a system, rather than just changing one thing and hoping it will increase performance. I will post dyno numbers when the car is complete, early next year... Enough talk, on with the pictures!

Its nice to have some nice weather to work on the car outside. Fenders and doors are off, to the left is a pile of scrap including the fender that isn't worth saving, to the right is one of the doors sans door skin and the front valence that might be fix

Close-up of the door shell without the skin and the front valence which may be repairable... we have the new door skins now, so they should be on soon. Joe does a perfect factory-style fold & weld with the new skins.

Scrap. I pulled the door handles off (one screw, one nut) but the locks are frozen so they go to the junk heap. I'll probably get a whole new key set anyway, as I currently have a key for the ignition, a key for the trunk and a key for the glovebox!

Joe replaced the entire rear quarterpanel from near the hook for the soft top, down to where the dogleg attaches to the sills, and back around to the gas filler hole. The previous repair work was crap, the new metal that was put in was not welded to anyt

Time to dive in and start taking stuff apart. Out came the pedals, then the clutch and brake master cylinders as a unit with the bracket. Drilled out some stripped screws and removed the hi/low beam foot switch and the gas pedal stop, and the washer flui

Brake fluid really does a number on the bodywork. Looks like the car was never painted behind the heater, not suprising. Next comes the removal of the fuel line, pump and tank. At this point the front of the car is totally bare.

All sorts of crud in the heater, I'm sure it hasn't been cleaned in ages, maybe never. I'll backflush the heater core, strip all the old paint off, and reassemble with all new seals and repaint. There's several layers of paint on the box, you can barely

The pedals and MCs that I pulled earlier. Everything needs to be cleaned and painted. The MC's are being tossed and replaced. The early MC's are cheap and I don't want to take any chance of dumping brake fluid on the new paint when it's done. Actually

Off comes the handbrake lever. One of the screws was stripped, almost all the large phillips and pozidrive screws are stripped on this car. Apparently it was too much effort for the DPO to use the right sized screwdriver. You can see the beautiful fibre

Rear end sans gas tank. The tank has a little rust near the back, but looks solid and clean inside so I think I can restore it rather than replacing. Some of the bolts are undone from the top inside the boot, some from the bottom. I put a second jack un

Member Comments on Journal Entry: Update IV ↵

No comments have been posted yet...

Want to leave a comment or ask the owner a question?
Sign in or register a new account — it's free