More For Sale Pictures

We've had some requests for more pictures from potential buyers, so thought I'd add them here.

Interior shots:

Shot of engine bay:

Shots of rocker panels:

Please note some minor repairs were performed on the rockers, then Ray did a great job of blending in the paint.

Shots of floors:

The drivers floor did have some small holes patched, too small to really show in the pictures.  Passenger floor has not been touched.

Inner sills are all solid.  The car was stored for over 40 years in a dry garage on a lift. 

For Sale Pictures

Here's some pics we took today, I think Ray did a great job on the touchup painting.  We have the car listed on Craigslist, plus will have it on the local British Car Show on September 21.

Getting ready to sell

Found a spare tire, connected wire to make wipers work.  Found speedometer root cause (sticky speedometer itself), now it works.  Vince did a little cleanup work on the dash, looks ok:

Ray's been doing great on touchup painting the many spots that needed it.  As mentioned before, these pictures look much better than the car in person, but it definitely looks acceptable for a driver:

So we are sticking with the plan to put it up for sale at the September 21st SIR Brit British Car Show in Newburgh!

Got to Drive It to Find More Problems

Vince drove the car home, about 15 miles.  Good news - engine ran fine and stayed cool.  Bad news - front brakes got super hot and made awful noise when pushing on pedal.  We've seen this before - the pistons in the calipers have corrosion on them, making them stick and apply pressure on the pads while driving.  We got new calipers and brake pads from Autozone at a very competitive price, no shipping.  Also found the clutch slave didn't have the flexible line installed on the correct port, putting the line in a bind (saw same problem on our club project car, line starts leaking in about 2 years).  So Vince was able to install brake calipers/pads, then bleed clutch and brake systems.

The seats were still not right.  We had bent the frames to remove some of the excessive backward leaning from the rear end collision.  But it was not enough, esp on the driver's seat.  Here's what it looks like now:

This looks and feels normal.  The driver's seat back was simply not hitting the lower seat frame correctly.  Normally there are two 5/16 inch bolts that screw into the bottom of the seat back and their heads engage with the lower seat to allow adjustment of the rear seat angle.  Where the bolts thread into the seat back was out of position enough that the bolts did not hit the seat bottom frame.  So we fabricated a bracket which bolted to the bottom of the seat back using the original mounting nuts, then installed new 5/16 inch bolts in the bracket at a new angle so they hit the seat bottom.  Lot cheaper than new seat frame, and seems to work very well:

Ray's been out of town, Vince has had a lot of small trips, need to drive the car some more and see what else we need to address.  We know the speedometer doesn't work, root cause is a 90 degree drive that is stripped (we got a used replacement, it was stripped too).  Steering system seems to have too much slop - might be wear in the U joint in the steering column, need two people to diagnose this correctly.

Summer heat and travels make this a slow time of year for progress, but we feel confident it will be ready by our local club's annual car show in September!

End in Sight

Vince has been doing a lot of traveling, plus Ray had a fishing trip, so progress slowed some.  Got new tires installed, replaced leaking water pump.  Changed engine and tranny oil.  Rear diff fluid was super thick, replaced temporarily with automatic tranny fluid then later with 90W gear oil to make sure it's cleaned out.  Interior back together.  Got a good quote from our friend Darrell for welding and body work - passenger dog leg and rocker plus typical cracks in both door skins by wing windows.  Here's what it looks like after Darrell's body work, which will then be painted by Ray:

In general the paint looks much better in pictures then in person.  We have had rattle cans of custom paint made to closely match the original color, but that process is not perfect.  We are ending up with a nice looking "20 footer".  So the buyer can either just drive it as is and enjoy a nice early MGB, or they can disassemble the car and paint it and make a REALLY nice car out of it.  Or do both - enjoy for now and paint it later!

Was fun watching Ray driving the car to Darrell's, a trip of about 6 miles, it ran like a champ.  Just a few more parts (choke cable, weeping fuel sending unit), then just drive it until we find other things that need to be addressed.  With luck, it should be on the market soon!

Carb Repairs, then Driving!

Car must have been stored with gas in the carbs, because there was varnish packed all around the jet bodies which prevented them from moving up and down.  This means you can't adjust mixture, plus there's no choke effect.

Took a while to figure out how to get it all apart, here's a picture with the jet assemblies disassembled:

The black things with flexible tubes on them are the jet bodies.  The one on the right came apart, had to destroy it to get it out of the brass threaded piece lower in the picture.  Luckily I had an extra used one that was in good shape to replace it.

Then checked valve clearances, dwell and timing on ignition, and finally adjusted carbs (air, then spark, then fuel mantra we hear about in MG seminars).  Installed the drivers seat, then ready to drive!

This video is Ray backing off the lift.  It looks like he kills the engine in the street, but actually the battery laying loose in the trunk had become disconnected:

Then here's Ray driving around the parking lot by the shop.  We both drove the car - this thing clearly benefits from the high compression pistons and the header.  I would not be surprised to find it's got a more aggressive cam in it too.  Listen to it as Ray circles the lot:

Got about a dozen or so smaller things to finish up, but considering we've had the car for about two months we are very pleased with the progress to date.

It Runs!

Today we started the car up, as far as we know it has not been run for 38 years.  Had to clean the points on the fuel pump to get it running, clean points in distributor to get spark, and use ether to get initial running due to jets not dropping for fuel enrichment, ie choke.  But here's video proof:

We also checked compression again after running, dropped to 190 to 210 after running.  We also killed quite a few mosquitoes when it started, lots smoke due to oil in the cylinders which we think had created those extremely high compression readings.  So compression is still high, but believable.

Bled hydraulic system for brakes and clutch, they both appear to be fine.  The engine does seem to "run on" quite a bit, ie diesel, we need to confirm timing before getting too worried about this.

Good progress!  Few more details and we'll have it on the road!

Sledgehammers and Boroscopes

From very low tech to high tech, using the right tool is important.  In our case, this includes sledgehammers and boroscopes.

Ray and I commented today it seems like we use the sledgehammer an awful lot on this car.  Got a lot of swings in on getting the sheet metal back in place, esp on the rear.  Here's the latest picture of rear end, not perfect but acceptable:

Then here's a view of the two seats after we used the sledgehammer to bend the seat frames back into position:

Reinstalling seats needs to wait until we finish the minor rust repair and apply POR15 to the floors to prevent future rust.

Meantime, we've been wanting to start on the engine.  We had removed the plugs and poured about an ounce of Marvel Mystery Oil with motor oil into each cylinder.  After sitting for a few days, and using a more effective socket and breaker bar on the front of the crankshaft, we got the engine to turn over freely.  We then decided to use a boroscope to inspect and take pictures of the inside walls of the cylinders.  So here's the four cylinder wall pictures in order from #1 to #4:

It's a little hard to see, but in each picture the left hand side is the top of the cylinder wall (we had the piston at bottom position of each picture).  The wall surface is shiny and in most pictures you can see where the piston and rings stop on the wall.  So no gobs of rust on the cylinder wall that need to be removed.

We then did a compression test.  We had spun the engine some to get excessive oil out from on top of the pistons, but apparently not enough - all four cylinders maxed out the compression gauge at well over 200 psi!  Think we need to let that oil soak back down the side walls and try this again later.  But the key points is there is no evidence of cylinder wall corrosion or valves stuck open with crud, we may get lucky on this engine!

Ray's Been Busy

Vince has been out of town, but Ray's been having fun while he's gone.  We had ordered a bunch of parts and Ray's been installing them.

As we always do, the brake hydraulic systems get replaced including the flexible lines.  Ray's about ready to re-install the wheels and finish this job.

Rear:

Front:

Master cylinders:

New radiator with all new hoses:

Ray had a rattle can of paint made to match the color and has done some filler work and touching up of paint, not perfect but serviceable:

The grill installed covers up all of the straightened sheet metal at the front:

Fuel tank refurbished and lined by Brown's Radiator:

Ray is focusing on finishing up bodywork and brakes.  Vince put oil in cylinders (mix of motor oil and Marvel Mystery Oil) to soak.  Engine only turns a few degrees, we think it's got the typical corrosion on the cylinder walls, hopefully we can work that loose without removing the cylinder head.

Ray took off the top and cleaned up the interior some.  This view shows how the seats lean back pretty far.  We're sure this is from the read end collision, Jan and her Mom's bodies did not accelerate as quickly as the car did, causing the seat frames to bend during the collision.  Vince saw this same phenomena in his MGB that had been rear ended.  We'll remove the seats, straighten the frames, and reinstall and it should be fine.

Fourth Project for RayVin Enterprises

And so it begins again.  To review, RayVin is a partnership between Ray and Vince which so far has refubished three cars - a 1974 Triumph TR6, a 1964 MGB, and a 1958 MGA.  The first two were sold to others, Ray bought the MGA.

So we were made aware of another 1964 MGB which has been in storage for many decades.  It belonged to Tom and Jan, who have extensive history in autocrossing.  It had been wrecked many years ago, the last plates on it were from 1981.  Tom and Jan were very gracious in their price of the MGB, we look forward to them following the work we perform!

First, here's a picture of Jan saying goodbye to the car when we picked it up on February 19:

Then here's several photos that Tom had taken a couple of months ago to baseline the condition of the car:

Rust is not too bad, passenger side rear dog leg is the worst for corrosion.  Both doors have the "crack of doom" by the vent windows, very typical.  But the wreck damage is pretty significant.  The car was rear ended while it had a trailer hitch.  The rear sheet metal down low on the passenger side was shoved back about 1.5 inches, buckling the trunk floor.  Amazingly, the bumper and trunk lid were fine. 

First task was removing the fuel tank and radiator, very typical for bringing a dormant car back to life.  Both those pieces are now at Brown's Radiator to be cleaned, refurbished, and tank coated to prevent future corrosion.

Using a bottle jack, several big pieces of wood, and a hammer/dolly set we've been able to move the rear sheet metal back about 1.5 inches and gotten a lot of the buckle out of the trunk floor:

We removed the front valance and straightened out the bent sheet metal there:

I'd describe our sheet metal work so far as the rough stage, getting the metal back to within about 1/16 inch of where it should be.  We are convinced we won't need to replace any of this sheet metal, we can make the original stuff work.  Our challenge is we'd prefer not to repaint the car, so we'll need to be creative in how we repair many areas of the body.

After a little more hammering, we plan to start on the mechanical issues (brake/clutch hydraulics, bring engine back to life).  But so far, this car looks like it's definitely worth refurbishing!