This car is a bit tougher than I hoped (or paid for, really). But it will come together. The entire right side of the car shows various amounts of poorly repaired accident damage, and I’ll be putting that right. I have a new chassis on order, this one is both in tough shape on the side you’re looking at and cracked on the other side.
Category: Current Liabilities (Page 11 of 18)
The current lineup of mouldering hulks
I guess it’s like building a bridge: You can support the weight from below, or suspend the weight from above.
There is a huge chunk of that rear cover missing. What violence happened that led to that? That much force within the car and the whole thing would be splinters. I suspect it was dropped from a bench (or something like that).
On the plus side, the ’55 Morgan does seem pretty solid, for Morgan values of solid. The car is amazingly, amusingly simple–the top frame is comical. I rather like the whole thing.
Having not learned my lesson last time ’round, I have bought another car sight-unseen from across the country, though this one seems to not be a project. (Cue ominous music.) This is my 1955 Morgan +4, which will be picked up soon and hopefully will be here in The Soggiest State in the next couple of weeks.
Photo is from the seller’s website, I will post a full report once the car has arrived.
This project was long, involved, and expensive–but in the end the car runs better and is a lot more responsive, and while I haven’t actually measured it yet, the fuel economy seems better. You can see that the Strombergs are gone, and in their place are a couple of HD8s–in this case partially from a Rover 2000 (bodies, choke linkage) and partially from a Mk. X Jaguar (dashpots and pistons, throttle plates). The inlet manifold is an English-spec SU manifold (in this case from a 2.8) and the air cleaner is a very early XJ6 cleaner which has been modified to allow the engine breather to feed into it.
I am now down to finding a replacement front exhaust manifold. It’s a long story, but suffice to say that late S1 XJ6’s use a different exhaust than earlier cars, and frankly the earlier one is a superior design. I have three front manifolds, none are right for the early system. Sigh.
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Reg the MGB and the BSA just hanging out. I have not yet been out on the beezer this year, I should definitely do something about that. Reg has been getting regular use, but it’s about time to shake off another year of “benign neglect” and change fluids and what-not. At some point soon I really do need to see about the bodywork, he’s an old guy and it’s time, I expect.
While I was going to wait until later in the year to do needed work on the XJ6 rear suspension, my hand has been forced: the bodged exhaust system wouldn’t allow the rear brakes to be bled, and had to be sawz-alled off. And with the exhaust off, taking care of the numerous issues in the back makes sense now.
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Just a few quick snaps to show some in-progress of the XJ6 front suspension rebuild…after 41 years, it was probably time. I’m taking the opportunity to reseal the rack, replace everything rubber, and generally make things ship-shape.
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My poor MGB, victim of my lack of grease-gun attentiveness. The latest protest came from the parking brake cable; it siezed due to 51 years of use– with about 41 years of regular greasing. I was able to free it up off the car, and now, freshly greased and relatively clean it’s ready to go back in.