A Mostly British Obsession
Valuable, if hard, lessons learned
So, er, that’s my ’64 MGB. It’s a beauty, eh? This is what happens when you don’t have a garage or shop to store all of your valuable artifacts in. As an aside, humans are weird creatures, aren’t they? Any rational alien would look at something like this and probably have their brains explode just trying to comprehend why, exactly, someone would want to do this.
Dave was kind enough to give me money and an old band saw for my XJ6. It was a decent car but just not my kettle of fish!
How the “mighty” have fallen. I’m seriously considering trading my XJ6, which I really shouldn’t have accepted in the first place, for the Ultimate Blasting Cabinet. I really dislike the little benchtop cabinet I have and I spend a LOT of time during a restoration using the bead blaster to clean things up. Plus it would be large enough to actually hold the entire cage from a Jaguar rear suspension. Hm.
Of course the reason I’m considering this is that there is essentially zero interest in this car–Chuck will be thinking “I told you so!” along with Paul, my wife, the guy who used to own it…everyone but me. Oh, well.
My friend, neighbor and fellow weird car afficianado Paul was kind enough to help me retrieve my ’64 project this evening. We had previously absconded with the parts and tonight we were able to grab the shell. It’s now sitting in my storage bin in front of my ’63…hopefully Reggie the ’63 will be able to pass some good karma to the poor old beast.
I have the ’87 XJ6 on craigslist just to gauge if there’s any interest. I still have a few things to do to it but really really need to move it along. I shouldn’t have accepted the car and now find myself in my usual situation of essentially giving it away. Oh, well. Lesson learned.
The “free” XJ6 runs! Turns out that some idiot (me) didn’t have the coil hooked up right. Drove it about five miles, and it seems fine. Worried a bit by some smoking under load, but that’s OK for the time being.
Or the car is a hole. I got the head back on the “free” XJ6 and on, and now it won’t fire. I’m fairly certain it’s something to do with the fuel injectors…that, or one of the many sealed little electronic gizmos that control them. Sigh. Give me SU carbs any day of the week!
Taken on Tax Day 2006, in the bed of my truck is the last few possessions we have–an old steel cable and a bunch of half-rotted pallets–on their way to the Internal Revenue Service office in lieu of payment of our debt…
My friend and neighbor Paul was kind enough to help me retrieve the “pile of parts” part of the 1964 MGB today. The various debris filled both our old Fords, and created quite a heap in my storage bin. Found some absolutely huge spiders in the wire wheel stack, too.
Looks like it may not be all that bad in some ways. Lots of mechanical parts to play with. The 3-main engine is stuck but doesn’t look like scrap, and between the two of every other component, there may be a decent car waiting to be put back together.
Hopefully we’ll retrieve the shell in a couple of weeks, and that is where the main misery lies. I hope to paint this car Iris Blue, as shown in the photo…very definitely not this car!
I’m hopeless.
A neighbor was selling this car (what car?) and I had to step in and save it. It’s actually a bodyshell and most of two separate pull-handle cars, including a title for the shell. The shell looks horrible and has no floors, but it’s no worse than other MGBs I’ve seen. And the parts stash includes two of everything (except only a single motor) you’d find on an MGB. This goes into my storage bin for the time being, but the idea will be to use this as an exercise in learning to weld and learning to paint.
I’m a bit skeptical that this is really a ’62, as I think it’s actually a few thousand car numbers later than Reggie.
[Edit: It’s really a ’64]
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