I'm going to suggest that the way MG assembled the MGB had a lot to do with
the choice of a unibody. This might be a chicken before the egg idea, but if
MG had made MGs with chassis... where the traditional assembly order is
chassis, running gear, body... then they would not have been able to have
ready painted and assembled shells delivered from Pressed Steel to which they
later added the running gear. Just an idea, because I guess the Abingdon
plant was too small tohave a paint plant and a body assembly area and what
not.
My second idea is that the stunning Frua MGA-replacement, which was built
on a chassis and noted in books as being VERY HEAVY, lead them to think about
unibodies to save weight.
Also, BMC was really into unibodies at that time.
Was there some strange deal between Pressed Steel and MG over an MG that
the tooling was "soft die" or something like that, and there was a deal where
MG had to pay for this cheaper experimental soft die tooling but if it ended
up not wroking, PRessed Steel would re-tool in normal body dies... and the
soft dies didnt' make it through the first pressing or something like that so
MG got real tooling on-the-cheap... So maybe PRessed Steel was trying to make
the MGB a show car for thier talents and urged a modern monocoque shell? Was
the MGB that car? I might be mixed up.
Just a few ideas...
John Elwood
Visit The World's Greatest Site Devoted to Farina Magnettes:
http://www.mgcars.org.uk/farina
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