Classics: Late Model MGBs in Blue. Louis Shalako.

(For illustration only. This is not from any current Kijiji ad.)

 

Louis Shalako

In a previous post, I spoke about a vehicle that is available within a few blocks of my home in the Sarnia central city area. It's not running, and it needs a fuel tank.

I'm not too interested in a vehicle if I cannot hear it run, for example, (red 1973 MGB locally, $5,000 asking price), but parts are available. There is a fuel level sending unit, there is an electric fuel pump, there is a hardware kit, which begs the question of rust...what if the bottom of the vehicle is really rotten? What if you break off bolts when removing the tank, or if they come out nice and clean, why not just re-use the bolts that were there in the first place. If the fuel tank is still in this vehicle, then the sending unit would also be there…it might not work, in which case, you put fuel in it and the gauge reads zero. Still, at this point, the vehicle should run—and if you can get it started, look for blue smoke and listen for rattles and knocks from the engine.

We are assuming the engine has run at some point in the last few years—hopefully. Many experts advise not starting such an engine, and simply pulling it out and sending it off to professionals for assessment and hopefully a rebuild. Finding a fairly fresh, used engine, is somewhat of a remote possibility. Other than that, try not to spend too much.

The question here, on my budget, is risk. 

There are better gambles out there.

You can find out all kinds of things with a quick internet search. Here is the fuel pump location, for example.

Here’s a Youtube video that takes us through a step-by-step description of the necessary parts, and then the installation, of the MGB fuel tank. (Maggie’s Makeover)

In a previous video, the gentleman talks about a rebuild of the engine, transmission, and an overdrive unit. He also does cost breakdowns for both the fuel tank and the rebuilds. The figures are accurate enough, bearing in mind U.S. dollars, (I live in Canada), the fact the video was produced some appreciable time ago, and also, the fact that he may have used a different supplier—I do a quick check, but some entries are fairly exhaustive in the sense there are a lot of suppliers, and that’s a good thing in terms of competition for your, and my, dollars.

This is one of two available late-models in medium blue...it presents well in pics. 

It is also true that prices vary by quite a margin.

The next video is about the rebuild of the MGB four-speed manual transmission. Getting it apart is half the battle, in a video I watched some time ago…the average owner will probably not attempt to do this work on their own.

Anyhow.

***

Back to Maggie’s Makeover for an engine and transmission rebuild. I don’t anticipate purchasing a vehicle with the electric overdrive, that’s one point. He spent an extra $1,000.00 U.S. to gain an estimated 30 % horsepower. He spent something like $7,500.00 U.S. on that engine and transmission. So much better, if we simply didn't have to do that.

Some of that comes down to our attitudes. This is not a muscle car and why treat it like it should be one...??? I do not have an automotive shop, I don't have an engineering firm. I do not get any write-offs on my income taxes for this one. It is not a promotional cost...

Other videos I have found discuss the earlier 3-synchromesh gearboxes, common to the MGA as well. Also, we might learn just how to take the thing apart and pull the guts out of it, and the techniques may feature a certain commonality. Assuming you have a spare gearbox, and time on your hands, it’s hard to say if you would save any money by full or partial disassembly, (and then turning over a bunch of parts in a box to the rebuilder), or whether it’s worthwhile to rebuild it at all. If you can take it apart, you should be able to put it back together. You'll need oil seals, but the videos are pretty clear. You need tools and a place to work, which I do not have. 

The gearboxes are pretty robust to begin with, and the average driver shouldn’t have too many problems with it, assuming it’s in good shape to begin with.

This is like a really severe update, added in two or three days later, but this 1963 Florida car is listed at $39,000.00 Canadian dollars on Kijiji. It's a creamy white colour with a red interior.

I hate to go out on a limb, here, but that car is just effing gorgeous.

(This just goes to show how dumb Louis actually is, but the colour is 'pearl'. - ed)

This MGB Historic Racer claims 155 bhp and seems like a lot of fun to drive.

We are still watching the Kijiji ads for MGBs. Today there were 36 ads. There are two late-model vehicles, both in a sort of medium blue. They do have the detuned and pollution-controlled engine. Yet they are nice looking, whole and complete, and seem to be driveable.

Many of these ads have been up for about a month, and I have to admit to being a bit of a bug on this subject lately…

As stated in a previous post, there are issues of logistics. How in the hell do I get a car from Ottawa or Oshawa, back to Sarnia. To pay someone to pull that onto a flatbed and bring it here, that's an easy thousand bucks in my quick and dirty estimation. Then there is the question of where in the hell do I park it, how much does it cost to insure, when do I get to actually drive it anywhere, and all of that sort of thing

At this point, the whole thing remains in the realm of fantasy.

It’s a nice colour, though…these are both in the $8,500.00 range.

The ad caught my eye, and it's in fucking Ottawa...

 

END

Buying Low-Budget British Sports Cars.

Classics: Buying MGB (or other) Sports Cars.

Classics: Buying an MGB, Part Two.

Classics: On Buying an MGB. Part One.

Using High-Ethanol Fuels. (Driving)

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromGoogle Play in ebook and audiobook format.

 

See his works on ArtPal.

Illustration purposes only.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Professional and Artistic Goals for 2016.

Louis Shalako

While we never quite know what the future holds, it’s not a bad idea to set some professional or artistic goals for 2016.

It would be a very good idea to write at least one, and probably two books in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Series. With six already out, a couple more wouldn’t hurt the passive discoverability of the series.

This year I wrote five novels ranging from 60,000 to 70.000 words. With effective time management, simply by working on a project, (any project), every day, we can probably do the same again. I published four of those myself and the fifth one is currently under submission.

With five pen-names, it isn’t always possible to go strictly by the roster. If I had an idea for a Harold C. Jones story, and maybe Constance ‘Dusty’ Miller’s turn is next, I would probably go with the idea I had rather than stall and delay and wait for inspiration to hit just to keep things in proper rotation.

I read something recently on boredom, and how a writer might reveal it in the work without being properly aware of it themselves. There might be something in that.

There are times. Having taken the exciting leap, and having written some erotica in various sub-categories, it no longer feels risky to write for heterosexual women, gay men, or the more macho, he-man stuff that Ian Cooper is known for.

It’s just not that hard to write military fiction. Not once you learn how to produce routinely, not after reading history all my life, and watching a thousand documentaries over the years. The ideas are there. You just have to create some fictional characters and put them into play and see what happens. Zach Neal has been doing pretty well for us, outselling all the other pen-names and the thing to do is continue to support that side of the operation. (That’s not exactly the same thing as saying I have a production schedule.) Over the course of the last year, I regularly wrote one or two thousand words a day, and yet getting much more than that was pretty rare. In that sense, writing has come down to a routine. Being retired, it gives me something to do, which isn’t always the best motivation. Also, for me it’s more of an end-of-life thing. Look, I’m not dying, but I have a place to live, a car, a bit of food in the fridge. I’m not a youngster trying to break into a tough industry—and as far as the industry goes, I can kind of take it or leave it. 

That kind of objectivity is a new thing.

Rejection isn’t nearly so bad as when I first started submitting stories and there were rejection slips in the inbox, ah…several times a week. Back then we had some pretty high hopes.

The other thing is sales. To write a novel, and then see it quickly die, only to sell a handful of copies a year is very un-motivating. How do we stand it? I don’t know, but some of us are stubborn enough to find other reasons to do it. Even then, yeah—there are days when it’s definitely drudgery, sheer misery in some of the administrative jobs like pricing, proofreading, blogging when you have nothing to say, or whatever it is, that one job that really sucks.

The risks are still the same, but nothing really bad has happened, and maybe it’s just a matter of perception. It might be a good time to load up on some additional risks. That’s probably one reason why I wrote a novel to submit this time. It ups the ante if nothing else. Being productive gives us that luxury.

There have been times when it seems as if I have lost some of the early enthusiasm. Let’s be honest, sometimes it really is work to write a story. To work at it is the only way to produce anything.

Way back when, I was jamming them out just as fast as I could. I was also submitting them. 

Some of those submissions were inappropriate to the magazine, the market or the genre. 

Some of them were just plain shit stories. They weren’t going anywhere, and maybe that’s the difference a few years later. I’m still spending just as much time sitting in the chair, but (possibly) putting more time into the quality of the original idea. If you don’t have an idea, you have essentially nothing to write. Where would you possibly begin, right?

Our goals for the year are guided by a few years of experience.

In 2016, it might be a good idea to write more short stories. Generally, I finish a novel, and then write short stories for a while until I get another substantive idea, something that might come in at book length.

Last year, I didn’t place a single short story, although I have sold some small ones in the past.

While the professional markets are one thing, very competitive, with thousands of submissions a month, picking off a few stories for one or two or three cents a word wouldn’t hurt my feelings too much. All you have to do is to wait until their publication license expires, and then you can submit it elsewhere as a half-price reprint or use it yourself, in which case I make a cover worth about $8.00 and publish it. Once you have the stories in the can, they are your property and you can do anything you want with them.

We answer only to ourselves.

I see lots of people having fun with their poetry, and I have been sort of neglecting it. No promises on that one, but.

Other than that, we’ll see what happens in 2016 and just try and have some fun with it.

END

Editor’s Note: We need to give Ian a middle initial, and then his author page would have a dozen titles anyway. So just cleaning up certain aspects of the operation is another goal.

Goals for 2015.

ASUS M11Ad computer, Logitech speakers and mouse, HP printer.

Louis Shalako

Goals for 2015 would include something like the following:

Learn how to use, and optimize, my new Microsoft Office 2013 for Family and Student.

Replace image files that got pooched when the old machine crashed.

Reinstall a few doodads and doohickeys, for example Kindle for PC, Nook or Kobo for PC, etc.

So far I can’t get the Blackburn radio app to work. I don’t know much about troubleshooting that, but it is only day two with my new machine. I can listen to albums on Youtube for a while.

Write more short stories and begin a new submissions/rejections list, which we’ll start at ah…#1,023.

Because I knew the old machine was dying, I have published virtually everything on the old list except for one more story awaiting rejection or acceptance.

Essentially, my new submissions list will be all new stories—hopefully I’ll be able to write something, after all, and then there’s no worry of resubmitting something to someone who’s seen it before. That’s why we keep records in the first place. The trouble is, when the list is gone, it’s gone.

That’s not to say that watching old Betsy snap, crackle and spark there on my desk wasn’t a bit traumatic because it was…we go back a long ways, and she helped me write a half-dozen books or so, maybe more than that.

I plan to complete and publish The Conqueror, and I definitely need another book in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery series. If I could publish three 60,000 + word books in 2015 that would be some kind of achievement for one such as I.

I wrote at least 400,000 words in 2014, and I would like to focus that to a finer point if I could. There is something to be said for blogging as well. But marketable stories would take priority.

Other than that, my old computer blew up, taking hundreds, possibly thousands of stories, poems, blog posts, personal photos and of course book covers. The most worrying thing is the POD files, but by downloading .doc files from Smashwords, it only takes an hour and half or so to make another. 

(The author has just downloaded a 4x7” POD file from Lulu, so that’s one less worry.)

On the plus side, I had sort of planned ahead, and had a new machine sitting right beside old Betsy. 

All it took was a pair of 7w Logitech speakers, and what the heck. I had already purchased a 23” flat-screen monitor, and a new wireless mouse. We are all set to get on with our whole new life.

My goal is to keep moving forwards, to keep writing, to keep submitting stories, to keep creating books and stories, and to continue seeking a new kind of success, an independent kind of success as a writer.

In more personal terms, I wouldn’t mind finding an incredibly quiet place to live. I’ve been using a little pocket camera, and a really good one would be nice…we all have our little wish list, don’t we?

A new car, a vacation on a desert island with a beautiful wench, a cat, a dog, and a new jean jacket, some good whiskey…it’s the stuff dreams are made of.

Other than that, we’ll be taking it one day at a time, ladies and gentlemen.

End