Classics: Buying an MGB, Part Two. Louis Shalako.

Image stolen from the internet.

Louis Shalako

Buying an MGB, part two.

Okay, ladies and gentlemen. In a previous post, I have mentioned two MGBs in the Sarnia area. A red 1966, a southern car, in fairly nice condition, $12,000.00, (and a 12-V positive ground, and a generator, assuming it has not been converted, also, the three main-bearing engine), and a black '78 not nearly so nice and a price of $9,998.00 or so. That car has the rubber bumpers and it is jacked up from the factory 1.5" to meet North American headlight and bumper regulations of the day. It also has the gold coloured pin-stripes, which are not all that desirable from my own unique point of view...

(You will note the ’66 has two wiper blades and the ’78 three; due to required square inches of ‘sweep’, of 100 squares). It also has the 67-bhp engine. The dreaded pollution control engine, although it would have five main bearings, assuming the original motor or an appropriate replacement unit. Back in the day, I could buy a good motor and gearbox for two, three, four hundred dollars. You could literally drop that in and it would run fine, it was the car that had rusted out, or been totalled in an accident. A real enthusiast collects, and some guys just had more stuff laying around than they could ever use, and some of them were undoubtedly married as well. 

(Always a factor. - ed)

Ah, but there is this one 1971, (already sold), split rear bumper for $8,500.00 and it has a ridiculously low mileage. The car looks fairly clean. The only real problem is that it is in Mississauga. How in the hell do I get to Mississauga, safety check and register the vehicle, get insurance, and somehow get the thing 200 kilometres down the road to my own home town. There would be some logistics, and therefore, costs, involved in that transaction.

So, here we are, scrolling through ads on Kijiji and one or two other websites…just doing the research, ladies and gentlemen.

I just saw an '84 Vette, $5,400.00 or so. That one's in pretty rough shape, with uncompleted body work, needs paint, the interior is very rough. Its condition tells its own story...one wonders what we would find underneath, also, you had better have a budget and some idea of what you are getting into. As for a '71 MGB with less than 17,000 miles, ah...not making any accusations here, but you can simply unscrew the speedo cable out of the back of the gauge and make it look lower mileage than it really is. I could tell with a good inspection underneath, especially if it truly has never been winter-driven. I would have to read the ad again. This engine would have 94-bhp. Ideally, you get in and drive it for the summer and no major repairs required...

Well, we can always dream.

There are some cheap and simple performance modifications for the MGB, and vintage technical bulletins from the factory on the subject are available.

From the blog of Ian Cooper.

When I bought a 1971 MGB roadster in about 1978, I was an eighteen year old kid. Lots of guys liked sports cars back then. There were a lot more of them, and even as fourteen and fifteen year-old kids, naturally we dreamed of the day we would turn 16 and get our beginner’s license.

The cleaner, the better in my opinion. Yet you can see the panel, the sill under the door is problematical. There should be a little round tube below the door, the original jacking point. It's missing. This vehicle, does not have side marker lamps...those are aftermarket alloy rims, 14" four-bolt pattern. Panel lines are notoriously difficult to align on some of the British cars. The door has sagged a bit, and yet this one seems kind of exceptional. Things to look for: I see bumperettes on the front, yet they are not visible on the back end...

Over the course of the seven or eight years I drove the car, I blew the engine, burned out a clutch, scored brake rotors when the brake pads wore down to the metal and I was a hundred and forty miles from home. I had all sorts of adventures in that car.

The car was modified to some degree by the time I was done with it.

The original motor had an air pump for pollution control. On someone’s suggestion, a guy with an M.G.B. G.T., I removed the air pump, the separate pulley belt for it and then used five-eighths national coarse pipe plugs to fill the holes in the head.

Purists hate to see you do that sort of thing. I'n not saying they all smoked pipes, wore chirper caps and had leather elbow patches on their tweed coats, it was just a different philosophy. I was also flat broke most of the time...the circumstances were also different.

I even liked working on cars, and maybe they did not...right? My old man got all As in auto shop in high school, my girlfriend's old man was a mechanical engineer. You ask them a question, trust me, you're going to get an answer.

I wanted to race. It was my big dream in life. I read Road & Track, Rob Walker’s F-1 coverage and all the road tests—we read tests of cars we could never hope to own, but guys of a certain age drool over a red Countach.

By the time I was done, the car had an aluminum hood. Once you’ve taken the motor out once or twice, you quickly realize that the sealed and bonded ends of the oil cooler hoses are a pain in the butt because the hoses go through flared or rubber-ringed holes in the radiator cross-piece. You had to take it out sometimes. In the M.G. it's easily removable with a few bolts. The solution to this was to cut the metal part of the pipes, and then substitute Aeroquip hoses. The oil pressure in that car was good, fifty to seventy pounds per square inch depending on engine speed. Not knowing all that much about such things, I used double hose clamps. I used a fairly big clamp which meant that it had a fairly big screw to tighten it. I could use a fairly big screwdriver to tighten it properly. Some guys told me that oil pressure was wrong. They were seeing thirty to fifty psi on their gauges. I didn't care if it was right or wrong. What I wanted to see was consistency. As long as it behaved the same way, all of the time, that was good enough for me. Oh, and if the pressure seems down a little, you might want to check the oil level...

The two dials down low, (#9, #10),  are heater and air controls. #11, a map light. This is probably a '68 or so. So, you've got a brake test light, headlight switch, fuel gauge, tachometer, oil pressure, speedo and coolant temperature in the top row. #6, charging, #7 high beams. This one might have had the horn on the centre of the steering wheel, later models, on a stalk on the control column, later models an airbag front and centre. (Research shows the MGB never had an airbag. - ed) I always thought these steering wheels were dangerous, if not downright ugly. I have no idea what #5 is, (the turn signal indicators? - ed.) the molded vinyl dash is definitely familiar. Do the research.

Another modification happened by accident. I was in Delhi, working at the News-Record, and the car had charging problems. The alternator was shot. I needed it for work, M.G. parts were expensive. More than anything, it took time to get them. A guy at the Canadian Tire store in Delhi suggested changing it for a Chrysler alternator. I thought he was nuts until he took me out in the parking lot and showed me how he had done it to his red Triumph Spitfire. It took a piece of flat-bar, a couple of holes, used the same belt, and now produced seventy amps where the little M.G. unit would do thirty-five.

On that car I put Hooker tube headers. I had a Supersprint free-flow exhaust. When you look at the ads in magazines, (online nowadays), they make claims. Guaranteed increase in horsepower, anything from ten to thirty-five percent. It’s probably best to assume lower numbers. You’ll talk about it and your friends will try and shoot you down. It’s best not to make extravagant claims. The combination sounded good and the engine probably did rev higher and produce more power. The engine blew one day at over a hundred miles an hour, and that’s how I ended up with an engine from a 1969 M.G.B. that I pulled out of a back yard on Pine Street and we towed home on the end of a rope.

What I did next, before sticking that old motor in my car, was to pay a little machine shop, just down and off Vidal Street to rebuild the block properly. Then I did a little porting and polishing on the cylinder head.

Air cleaners removed, the 1 1/2" S.U. carbs...there's something a bit funny about the angle on these carbs.

I had never done it before and I’ve never done it since. I didn’t go too insane. Going mad in there will create thin spots. Coolant flows through the heads and uneven thicknesses in port walls leads to uneven cooling and heating cycles. The M.G. head is cast iron, which is somewhat more forgiving in an overheat situation. Overheating is often the death of cast aluminum heads. This will result in hairline fractures and eventual failure. I just tried to match up the profiles where the exhaust ports met the manifold. I smoothed it up, not to a mirror-like shine, but matte. I used little stone grinding stones similar to what you stick in a Dremel-type tool. I did a similar process on the intakes, which were round—the exhaust ports were little rectangular holes inside the larger round tube of the header. I just made them rounder and flared in terms of the casting…I basically just cleaned up the intakes, of which there are two, and continued using the stock manifold, which also got a quick polish inside using a wire wheel on a cheap 3/8 power drill...this is an overhead valve, solid pushrod engine. The MGB has an electric fuel pump. I suppose I could talk all day.

***

When doing the cylinder head, we milled her down about 0.030”, something rational like that. That was three passes of ten thou each. A typical clean-up cut would be ten thousandths back in the day. If you were absolutely certain the head had never been done before, you could try it. If you are not certain, the basic cut is your best bet, otherwise there is the possibility of the valves hitting the top of the pistons.

I took the heavy and boxy old M.G. air cleaners off and made my own. There are small, flat but cylindrical filter elements. Back then, they were for a Pinto or a Maverick or something. I took two round plates of one-sixteenth hard aluminum. The outer plate needs a couple of holes for the bolts, and the inner plate had the hole to match the carb plus the same two holes for bolts. I had to use shorter bolts, that is true.

The other thing with the M.G. or any small car is weight. On a roadster, the roof comes right off along with a little folding frame-work—the stays. You can leave that at home. The bumpers were easy to remove. That saved some weight. The air pump weighed a few pounds. You might have to go to a smaller diameter V-belt. You can switch out the thermostat housing/bracket combination to an older type, if you're obsessive about such things and I was. When the rug was shot, I took it out. A rotten old rug weighed something. I switched from two six-volt batteries to one twelve-volt. I got rid of the original three-blade wipers and used a two-blade system from the ’69. I paid a guy down in Chatham, Ontario to do that work for me. If he thought I was nuts, so be it—I blanked off the one hole, and we might have moved one hole, and we used the sort of crank cable assembly from the '69.

The triple wiper system was in response to improved safety regulations of the era, something to do with having ‘a minimum of 100 square inches of swept area’ or whatever it was back then.

The M.G. was a fun car for a young guy. You could look up under the dashboard and find the four bolts. You could remove the windshield. I took the front fenders off. I propped her up on an angle of forty-five degrees once to do some work to the chassis, which had some rot when I first got hold of it.

I took the engine and transmission out, changed the clutch plate and then put it back in the car again. I stood the engine on its nose on a couple of baulks of timber...I did not have a pilot shaft, I eye-balled the alignment. It worked fine. I was alone, just me, a set of chain-falls, a few tools, some lights, and then there was the car.

I ran mine on unleaded fuel without major problems. Interestingly, with no engine computer, no internal sensors for every little function, running a higher octane fuel also increases power. In the modern vehicle, the machine senses the octane...somehow, and compensates accordingly. The cars were relatively good on fuel, and the systems were so simple, you could just advance the spark a bit, or retard it a bit, and in fact there's a little micro-adjustment on the side of the distributor for just this eventuality. Way back when the vehicle was designed, fuel varied considerably, from place to place in terms of grade or even simple cleanliness. With the cars exported all over the world, fuel standards were very different in different markets.

This is a bit of what I call 'intuitive reverse engineering'. Question. How do I know the modern engine computer can sense the 'octane' of the fuel? Well, I don't. Not really. And even if I did know it, I sure as hell couldn't properly explain it. But if the modern engine computer can't sense the octane of the fuel, what fucking difference does it make, as to exactly what grade of fuel you decide to throw in there. The only difference with the old technology, is that the engine computer is essentially the driver, and the mechanic, the dreamer, if you will. Not just some silicon chip that don't really give a damn either way.

And now we all know how I really feel.

Throw in a little bit of aggression, and that was a pretty quick little car for its time, its place, and its budget.

END

Note. By removing ten percent of the weight of a car, you get ten percent more power for free. It will accelerate ten percent faster, go ten percent faster, and use ten percent less fuel. Not only that, but the tires have to pull ten percent less vehicle through a turn, as well as stop it under braking. Ten percent is a huge improvement in automotive terms. Also, by extension, the springs are now ten percent harder (relatively speaking) and the shocks ten percent more capable of damping out major wheel movements. Braking distance will be reduced by ten percent. This is not an extravagant claim but the result of simple physics. With more modern tech, we can substitute run-flat tires and dispense with the full-size spare in the trunk. We can leave the jack and handle at home. In the event of a puncture, we can slow down and drive it home, in extreme circumstances, we can use the cell phone and call the auto club for a free tow, and bring it on home on a flatbed. It is a sports car. Maybe, just maybe, it takes a certain kind of sporting personality to drive one of these things.

Ah, in the previous post, I advised readers to join a club, an association, subscribe to the newsletters, get out and meet some of the people. I have just signed up at this here website, and I don't even have a car.

The M.G. Experience.

END

Additional Note: two of the cars (on Kijiji) under discussion have sold, literally as I wrote this story. It's a good question as to whether they got their price, but they're gone now and I appear to have missed out...

No bargain at $3,950.00.

You're not going to save any money by buying this one and 'fixing it up'.

What does it take to convert from positive to negative ground?

Jay Leno’s Garage: Moss Motors MGB. (Video)

Kurt Tanner Motorcars. (Video)

Writer Ian W. Cooper is on Amazon.

Classics: Buying an MGB. Louis Shalako.

Poor old Louis is also on Amazon.

See his works on ArtPal.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

Cut the metal tubes on the oil cooler pipes just at the flange, subsitute Aeroquip & clamps...the fenders bolt on. The real problems are underneath, for example the sills, and the roof, the interior...everything. I think you can learn a lot, for example the hose from the fuel filter on the right side actually bends around and goes back to the carburetor, you can see the removable radiator frame, oil cooler, two horns, the coil, the later model oil filter, (upside down), and on the upper left, the charcoal EVAP system, etc. There's a grille just ahead of the windshirld, the chromy bit just behind the hood. There's a black airbox, top, centre, with a squirrel-cage fan, and ducting through a heater core...a little flapper-door that sends warm air to the windshield, the feet, or both. There's a lever way up under the dash to open that door. The hot water is controlled by a valve, connected via cable to a control on the dashboard and there's another control for fan speed. There are large, sort of rectangular rubber plugs, in the far upper corners on the firewall, pull them out and you can get at the wiper assembly.