Project MG Midget

With basic structural integrity returned to the Midget’s bodyshell after our welding marathon, we feel brave enough to risk uncovering and exploring new areas of corrosion in and around the engine bay.

A visit from the grit blaster strips the front end, and reveals more corrosion lurking in the chassis rails of our MkIII Midget.

We have completed quite a lengthy list of repairs to our Midget in previous instalments, including new inner and outer sills both sides, A-post skins, repairs to the heel board, toe board/ bulkhead, spring hangers and floorpan. Unfortunately, we knew that we were still far from finished with the cutting grinding and welding.

This should be a salutary warning to anybody contemplating a similar project, because it is all too easy to underestimate the amount of work required. Certainly, we hadn’t expected to be quite this far into a total restoration quite so quickly. After all, the Midget was complete when we bought it, looked presentable enough from a distance if you squinted, and actually drove really well. But ultimately you can’t fight the march of time, and there is no getting away from the fact that our MkIII Midget was built with an expected life of around ten years, yet is now more than 50 years old.

And with any project of this vintage, it is not just the gradual but inevitable decay that you have to reverse, because there will also be previous repairs to be put right. All too often these repairs will be condemned as bodges, and I suppose that technically this is correct. However, it does rather miss a couple of very important points. One is that most cars follow a similar pathway through life – they are a major investment and so treated carefully by the initial owner for the first few years, then they start to move slowly but inexorably down the automotive food chain. As their age rises and their value drops, maintenance gets skipped to save a few quid here and there, while major repairs become uneconomic given the resale value of the car and so cheaper options (such as body filler rather than welded metal) are considered instead.

The other point is connected with this first one because years later, when the car is viewed as a classic hobby and we are both willing and able to invest more money into its restoration than it will ever be worth, we huff and puff about the state of these earlier bodges. Yet it is those bodges that may well have saved the car from taking its final drive to a scrapyard, keeping it hanging together – if only by a thread – until you could come along to do the job properly. So when you uncover a bodge, don’t be too hasty to judge; instead, remember some of the things you did when you first started driving and use this as an opportunity to do penance for the worst of them!

As mentioned last issue, we had decided that the next step along this restoration path would be to have the engine bay grit-blasted. To prepare for this, I had to remove the steering and front suspension. The rack looked fine and just needed a clean. The anti-roll bar could also do with a clean and paint, but I will need to check the drop links more carefully when I get to that stage, as well as the dampers. The springs look pretty new and the kingpins feel OK, but I will only know for sure whether these are fit for reuse when I get around to cleaning off all the accumulated muck and grease so I can see just what we are dealing with.

I also removed all the brake pipes to ensure they could not get contaminated by grit. The pipes are all copper and so in theory could have been cleaned up and re-used, but despite cleaning around any joins, they twisted when the unions were undone. That will have weakened the metal, so they will be replaced.

Finally, we had to clean off any underseal or soft coatings before the blaster arrived. We used a scraper and a heat gun for this, then wiped off any residues with some old petrol that had been sitting in another project for 20 years and was truly foul-smelling stuff!

13 The payoff for all this mess is that you then know exactly how far the rust extends, and you have clean metal to which you can weld. This was the state of play in the offside front wheelarch where triangular reinforcement panels run back to meet the toe board...

14 ... and this is the same area, but viewed from the other side in the engine bay. We had known that this area had been subject to a number of patch repairs in the past, with welding that looked rather suspect. It didn’t look any better once the paint, underseal and accumulated grime had been removed.

15 In fact, after Alan had drilled out its spot welds, he hit it with a hammer and the whole section fell off virtually in one piece! Since this is fundamental in helping locate the front suspension and replacements are only £40, replacing rather than repairing the entire section was the only sensible option.

16 On the other side of the engine bay, the triangular panel itself was in better shape, but the splash panel and side flange underneath the longitudinal chassis rail had been crudely bent over to hide rust (there was hole in the bottom of the bulkhead), though not welded to anything.

17 The odd thing was that with the bent sections returned to their proper positions, it was no big deal for Alan to then cut out the rust and weld in a small patch repair to the join between the bulkhead and the splash panel. Having said this, we did have the benefit of working in a stripped out engine bay that had been blasted clean. It would have been a whole lot more difficult if we had been trying to work around the engine and ancillaries, which is presumably what happened in period.

18 This undertray is welded below the crossmembers in the engine bay, but is just a sheet of steel and does not have much internal strength. However, it is a tempting looking place to put a trolley jack, which probably explains why this panel was bent and buckled. Those bolts are in the anti- roll bar mountings, and were left in to protect the threads on the captive nuts from the blast media. They can stay in there to protect them from paint too, though all threads will need to be tapped clean at the end.

19 More to tidy up the undercar visuals than for any structural necessity, Alan cut out the damaged undertray panel, welded some of the angle iron across the crossmember as a strengthener then made up and welded on a new cover plate.

20 Of more structural concern were the areas on the ends of the longitudinal chassis rails to which the front bumper brackets and the anti- roll bar mount. We knew these were going to be bad...

21 ...but replacement end sections are only £25 each, so we bought a pair. The rusty originals could then be cut off flush with the crossmember. Fortunately the rot had not spread further back.

22 Because the anti- roll bar mounts to these end sections of the chassis rails, they can be subject to quite a bit of pressure. As a belts and braces approach, as well as seam welding on all four sides when they were fitted to the chassis rails, Alan first welded some 1/8in thick 1in angle iron into the new pieces, then fed the other end into the remains of the original chassis rails by about 6in.

23 Before welding these new end pieces on, Alan weighted some string across them to ensure they were level with everything else, then fitted the front panel and bolted the radiator uprights to that. He also refitted the wings and bonnet – it was all very time consuming, but it was also essential to check the overall fit and adjust anything where necessary.

24 Finally, to protect the bare metal and stop flash rust from forming, Alan cleaned the whole of the front end and sprayed on a coat of two- pack primer. This is the offside after its repairs...

25 ... and this is the same area on the nearside. Note that bolts have been temporarily fitted here too in order to protect the threads of the captive nuts and fixings from blast damage.

26 It was a great mental boost to have the front end of the car all one colour at last, rather than the previous mix of orange, red, rust, grease and general grime!

1 The main front to back brake pipe has been routed through the propshaft tunnel, when it should have been clipped to a strengthening rail under the floor. Perhaps this was done with motorsport in mind, to protect it from flying rocks and grounding out?

4 The fuel hoses to and from the pump look pretty ancient, much like the braided ones in the engine bay had done. They will all need changing anyway for modern hoses that are resistant to ethanol.

3 The fuel pipe had been crushed against the lip at the back of the floorpan. We are not sure if enough fuel would get through this for the car to run, so perhaps it was something we’d done in the workshop.

2 Because the Midget floorpan closes off the bottom of the propshaft tunnel, undoing the clips that held the pipe to the side of it was a two person job, one reaching into the tunnel and one in the car.

5 When first driving the Midget, I had noted that the steering felt a little stiff. Both track rod end rubbers were badly deteriorated, so it is quite likely that the balljoints inside were seized, or at least sticky.

6 The suspension had felt pretty good, and closer inspection did not reveal too many immediate problems. However, one detail was that the nearside lower bump stop was missing entirely, and there was little left of the offside one pictured here.

11 In an ideal world we would have prepared the entire car for blasting and taken it all back to bare metal, but we were having to fit the work around multiple other projects and so we had to break it down into manageable standalone chunks. It was well worth the mess and the cost of having the front end done though, as it took maybe 30 minutes to strip the entire engine bay back to this state, but it taken had us much longer than that just to scrape off the muck by hand during the initial clean- up.

12 Although blasting is an excellent way of getting back to bare metal, the downside is that you tend to get dust trickling out of the crevices for a long time afterwards, even after blowing off the worst of it with a leaf blower and then vacuuming the car. Fortunately, we only needed to apply a holding coat of primer at this stage to stop surface rust from forming, something that will happen with depressing speed if you leave it standing for any length of time in this bare state.

10 When the blasting is in full swing, it really does create a veritable dust storm. So much so that the blaster had to stop periodically to let it clear so that he can see what still needed to be done. We also checked it over at each pause and indicated any bits that had been missed, keen to make the most of his visit.

9 Different nozzles and different pressures could be applied to suit the location. This made it possible to remove all coatings even from such narrow confines as the flange across the scuttle panel. It is also why a skilled blaster can remove paint without distorting a panel, while a poor one can wreck a car

7 With the suspension, brakes, steering and everything else removed from the front end, we fitted a pair of slave wheels to the back and hung the Midget off an engine crane so it could be wheeled outside. Note the remains of orange paint in the engine bay, which had been this car’s original colour.

8 The mobile blaster brought with him a massive air compressor and sacks full of blast media, not to mention an air-fed mask and full protective clothing. It quickly makes you realise the limitations of DIY blast equipment. It also quickly became obvious that it is a very messy process that must be done outdoors.