MGA Report
As some of you may know, I have an MGA I've been restoring. It seems like
its been forever. I bought the car about 8 years ago, did
a complete mechanical restoration at that time, but it still looked like
garbage. Drove it around like that for four or five years, and then the clutch
blew. Pulled the engine at that time, and decided to "detail the engine
compartment".
That was two years ago. Since then, the car has sat patiently in
my garage while I pulled off all the fenders, doors, and hoods, stripped
everythin to bare metal inside and out, welded out the rust,
etc,etc, ad.nauseum. :-)
The MGA restoration was interrupted by a home improvement project of such
proportions that free time is guaranteed to be limited or absent for the next
year or two. So my wife convinced me to have the body work finished up, and
the car sprayed, at a local body shop.
Now, two months and $1800 later, the car is back in my garage, covered with
a glistening coat of blue paint. All in all, the body shop did a fairly good
job. Their bondo work was very nice, all the curves are what they shood be.
But they shot the paint with mucho orange peel, and then buffed it down. Look
at the paint film slantwise in the light, and you can see the maze of buffer
scratches :-(.
And the thing that REALLY pissed me off, is that they oversprayed the gas
tank heavily. See, I had taken the tank out, stripped it to bare metal, and
painted it glossy black Imron. Heck, you could see your face in it. I even
painted the sender unit cap red, as original. ( there was a scrap of original
paint in a crease in there ). Well, these turkeys oversprayed that beautiful
tank all over with blue paint. It looks awful. If I hadn't done so much work
on it, I wouldn't mind. I called the shop up the next day, and he said "just
drive the car in when you're through, we'll fix it up". Well, we'll
see. All I can say is he better pull it out and paint it like I painted it....
Somehow, a block of "Free Time"( tm ) appeared this Sunday, and I went out
to play with the MG. I approached it in an eclectic manner,
as befits a hobby activity, bolting on whatever hit my fancy at the
moment. So I put on three of the fender pipings, one headlamp, one rear turn
signal, and the rear bumper struts.
Hopefully, more Free Time will appear in the future. Reassembly is
proving to be a slow process, mainly because it's been two years since I took
it apart. And because the boxes of MG parts have been shuttled here and there
in the house, from this shelf to that closet, out to the garage, back into the
house....
For example, I spent a half hour modifying hardware to mount the taillamp
plinth. Then when I took the taillamp lens off, the original hardware was in
there! Sigh. Guess I outsmarted myself.:-)
- Jerry
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