Project MG Midget

REPORT: SIMON GOLDSWORTHY As explained last issue, we are rattling through the build-up of our long-term Midget project, condensing many weeks of work down to the bare bones to fit in the final two instalments.

We are nearing the end now, as attention turns to the interior, the underside and the fuel system on our Mk3 Midget.

We would hate to overstay our welcome, so this is going to be the Readers Digest of builds. However, alongside a condensed version of the work, we will also highlight some difficulties we had and the solutions we came up with. Therefore, please do bear with us if we bounce around a little and if an item that is fitted in one picture is no longer there in a later one!

Last issue we had the engine rebuilt and the front suspension, brakes and steering back on the car. In the meantime, I had also finished off the paint – the all-important outer panels were done professionally, but I still had to do the interior and underneath. These were jobs I was not looking forward to. In truth most of the interior panels will end up being covered by insulation and carpet anyway, but having gone this far I wanted to know that the bodyshell was all fully protected both inside and underneath.

The exterior has been painted in twopack, and while there was some paint left over for touching up, I don’t have the necessary breathing equipment for spraying this safely. So, rooting around in the garage I found a large tin of Pimento Red cellulose paint left over from a Skoda 1000MB restoration some years ago. I also had some cellulose high build primer from the same job, plus a tin of red oxide primer. To these I added a tin of bright red Hammerite Smooth paint that I picked up from my local hardware store, and a tin of brushable seam sealer.

Starting with the interior of the car, this was a mixture of the original orange paint, primer blown on to protect the most recent repairs, the remains of some original factory bitumin and – on the gearbox tunnel – enough fibres from the original sound deadening to make it look like a small Labrador. All of this had

to come off with wire brushes in angle grinders and drills, a horrible job that I find is best tackled in stages – get the worst off one night, return the next to clean up most of what remains, then go back later for a final stint to clean up the last details.

The metal underneath these layers was clean and sound, but it would have been near impossible to bring it back to the shiny state required for regular paint. That was where my Hammerite plan came in, because this is designed to go over metal that has surface rust. (Note that this means sound metal with surface rust, not crumbly old iron that is substantially weakened or covered with flaking rust.) My plan was to brush the seam sealant on all joints, both original ones from MG and those created by Alan when welding in new metal. When this had dried, I covered the entire interior with two coats of the bright red Hammerite Smooth.

Moving then to the front wheelarches, these were already clean as they had been included in the grit blasting escapade some months previously and then protected with primer. So I sealed up any joints with the seam sealer, then painted it with the Pimento Red paint – I used cellulose paint here rather than Hammerite because it is softer and more resilient to stone damage. However, I wasn’t happy with the way the texture of the seam sealant was visible through the paint, so I covered it with stonechip then painted them again.

I chose to line the interior with Dynamat.

As well as sound insulation advantages, this creates a 100% waterproof barrier. That may seem counter-intuitive in a convertible that is bound to leak a little water now and then, but I have thought it through. I don’t want felt sound deadening material under the carpet because this can soak up water like a sponge and hold it next to the metal – I still remember how difficult it was to dry out an MG ZT with a leaking sunroof drain some years ago! And besides, I think a cheap fun car like the Midget feels all wrong if it is too sumptuously trimmed with deep pile wool carpets and thick felt etc. The Dynamat will give a slightly softened feel under thin carpet, which is all I want. And because I bought a cheap nylon carpet, this will be easy to dry out if it ever gets wet.

The only downside of buying cheap carpet is that it doesn’t fit particularly well. The flat sections of floor were no problem, but the carpet sections that had to glue over the curved rear wheelarches and chassis rails were quite impossible to shape accurately over the metal. Rather than end up with a mess, I re-used the old sections for these areas that were properly shaped, either by design or through years of being in position. Fortunately these areas were not as dirty as those that go on the floor, so I shampoo’d them, hosed and rinsed

them down and left them on the radiator in the house to dry while I ordered up a tin of contact adhesive.

Now I could finally start building the car back up. This was quite a daunting prospect, because I had not taken most of it apart. I was faced with several boxes and tins of unidentified hardware and had to figure out what went where. The only way I could approach this without getting overwhelmed was to sift through the boxes, find something I could identify, check that it wouldn’t obscure another part if I fitted it now and if not, put it on the car. That way, when I next went to the pile of bits, there would be one less item to sift through. The trick was never to look too far ahead, but plod away one bit at a time knowing that however small progress was each time, it was still progress.

This did mean that the order in which the bits were fitted may be slightly eccentric, but there is rarely a single correct way of putting a car back together. I did have one massive help in this process when Alan leant me his 1973 Midget to use as a reference. Without having this to hand, I would certainly have struggled more and taken even longer, especially where bits on my car were missing. Two of the few items to be AWOL were the dash support brackets. I assumed that they had been taken off when the

previous owner had fitted an extra dial unit below the dash. Unfortunately they are not currently available new. Trawling the secondhand market, I found a pair for £10. Naturally I later found one in my pile of parts and expect that the other is lurking somewhere, but that is pretty much inevitable. I had also mislaid my carburettor heatshield support brackets, items which are also NCA. Again the secondhand market came to the rescue – two heatshields (which I don’t need) and a pair of brackets for another £10.

I had bought and fitted a new wiring loom, but the rev counter was a wiring puzzle because the terminals on the back did not match any of the wiring diagrams, and the old loom had two white wires joined together rather than feeding the gauge as expected. I asked Roger Parker at the MGOC about this, and his reply was most helpful: ‘Between 1964 and 1972 MG used an electronic rev counter of the RVI type, then moved to the more reliable RVC type. The RVI electronic tacho operated by monitoring the small pulses in the power feed to the coil as the points switched it on and off. As soon as electronic ignition conversions started to appear in the 1970s, it was found that the RVI tacho would either not work, or work inaccurately. The wiring of the RVI tachos sees the white wire power feed from the ignition switch to coil routed via the tacho – that is the male and female bullet connection you have found connected together. On the back of the early RVI tachos is a loop of wire that is secured to the body in an insulated metal ‘shoe,’ and the ends of the loop wire are terminated in a male and female bullet. The intended connection is that the power feed which

you have connected together is separated and each end connected to this loop, which is how it measures RPM.

‘Later versions of the RVI tacho moved that wire loop inside the body of the tacho, so you then only had a single male bullet sticking out from the exposed circuit board on the back of your tacho. This now monitors coil switching directly via a separate wire connection from the switched side of the coil on its negative terminal. The main wiring loom was reconfigured, and the power feed between the ignition switch and coil (positive) was fully enclosed in the wiring loom, and went directly between those two points. On the back of the tacho there was a quite similar look with the same green wire power feed spade terminal and subordinate light connections, but now just a single male bullet connection for the new extra wire from the negative side of the coil. This is the format you have on your tacho.

‘RVC tachos work perfectly well with electronic ignition and so it has become quite a common conversion for earlier RVI equipped cars (Midget, MGB etc). The usual conversion format is to join the wiring loom’s white wires with the male and female bullet connections together, as is the case on your car, to restore the power feed to the coil. Then a new wire is added between the negative terminal of the coil and the single male bullet connection on the back of the tacho.’

Thanks Rog.

3 Simon painted the inside with Hammerite – their Bright Red is a surprisingly close match to the Flame Red of the exterior. Virtually all traces of the original orange are now gone, just a few traces left under the dash for posterity.

2 All the seams – both factory and postrestoration – have been closed up with brushable seam sealant. The same approach of cleaning back and applying seam sealant was carried out underneath the floorpan too.

1 This is the interior after the overspray had been scraped off the passenger side, though the driver’s side is still to do. Any loose or flaking factory coatings have been scraped off. Note the insulation fibres being scraped off the gearbox tunnel.

7 The interior was lined with Dynamat sound deadening. This has a really tenacious grip, so pulling it off will remove the paint. But that’s not a problem as the only reason to remove it would be to carry out welding repairs, and that would need to be cleaned back to bare metal anyway.

8 The boot was cleaned, painted and lined with Dynamat in the same way. It was then finished off with a boot carpet kit from the MGOC which will stop things rattling against the metal. It also contains closing panels that will stop items getting lost behind the wheelarches.

6 While he had the spray equipment out, Simon injected wax into both sills, the jacking points, the door bottoms and the section behind each door where the rear wing meets the sill. Well, he doesn’t want to do this again in ten years’ time!

9 Although the carpet set was new, Simon baulked at paying a further £270 or so for new trim panels. Vinyl is easier to clean up than carpet anyway, and this is going to be a working car rather than a show pony, so a bit of aging here and there is fine.

5 Happy now with the finish, he finally covered it with two coats of Pimento paint. Again this was a surprisingly good match for Flame Red – not if painting two panels side by side, but virtually invisible when applied inside the arch.

4 Initially Simon used an aerosol can of stonechip in the wheelarches, but that gave a very flat finish. He had to buy a regular tin of stonechip and use a proper spray gun with a compressor to get the textured finish that looks right.

12 This wire to the rev counter caused some confusion initially, as it had previously been connected together without reaching the gauge. As Roger Parker explains in the body copy, this is no doubt because of the fitment of an electronic distributor and RVC rev counter.

13 There was a problem with the new wiring loom when the plug on the connection to the wiper motor was too big to pass through the hole in the bulkhead. Simon had to file a section out to one side of the hole as seen here, then protect the cut surface with paint.

14 The oil pressure gauge feed pipe had a similar problem. The original fitment had been a very thin pipe connected to a rubber hose, but this new braided pipe had a nut on the end that was bigger than the bulkhead hole.

15 The answer once again was to enlarge the hole, but this time by making the circle larger rather than adding a cut- out to one side. With a grommet to match the new hole, it does at least look like a factory fitment rather than a bodge.

16 If you are replacing an oil pressure feed pipe or gauge, be sure to order a new leather washer that goes between the two. With oil being fed to the gauge hopefully at pressure, you don’t want it spraying around behind the dash.

17 Another problem was that these green plastic discs over the indicator tell tales were discoloured to the point of being totally opaque. No wonder the flashing lights had been invisible, even at night on the initial drive home.

18 Those green discs are no longer available, so thinking laterally, Simon bought a sheet of green polystyrene sheet. This is the kind of stuff that is used by model railway enthusiasts, and it only cost £6.50 for a 6in x 12in sheet.

19 Rather than cutting individual discs out of the thin sheet, a single large section was cut instead and this was clamped against the back of the dash by the binocular- like affair that houses the two warning lights. It works a treat!

11 He also made up this link so that the light switch would turn on the dashboard illumination too. MG fitted a separate dash light switch, but there seems no point for that, and Simon could use the hole for a separate heater valve cable.

10 However, Simon did splash out £75 for a refurbished dash from the MGOC, plus a new wiring loom. He also fitted LEDs to the warning lights, which meant he had to add this resistor to the ignition warning light so that would work properly.

23 Perhaps the most tedious part of this stage of the job was how many brackets and other items needed to be thoroughly cleaned back and painted. This pedal box needed doing, before new clutch and brake master cylinders were fitted.

26 The old fuel pump had also decided to stop working during its long layup. One of the vent pipe stubs was broken anyway, and the pipes to and from the pump were historic artefacts...

25 The new tank is made from Ni-Terne steel, on which a coating of nickel is applied followed by hot- dip to apply a lead-tin alloy coating. This provides better corrosion resistance than traditional galvanizing, protecting both interior and exterior surfaces.

24 After removing the old petrol tank to clean it up, the metal seemed to be sound, but when Simon turned it over, a couple of damp patches showed where the dregs of the petrol was seeping through pinholes in the top. A new one was bought from MGOC for £115.

20 The horns were not working either, and so a new pair was needed. These came with rather flimsy mounting brackets, and Simon was not keen on having the horns potentially able to move and short out the constantly- live wires.

21 The original mounting brackets were altogether more substantial, so these were cleaned back up and painted with Hammerite to smarten them up – a laborious process, but new ones cost the best part of £30 each.

22 We are sure it is not factory correct, but the horns will be hidden behind the front grille, and when fitted this way around it means that water can’t get in to affect them. They still sound suitably loud and imperious, though.

27 So Simon bought a new electronic SU pump and fitted ethanol- resistant R9 rubber hoses. For some reason the pump had 8mm outlets but the rest of the system requires 6mm pipe, so an 8mm- 6mm reducer was needed.

30 You then need to use a hub puller to get the hub off. That will finally give you access to remove the brake backplate and take it to the workbench. New backplates are another item that are no longer available new.

28 After the rest of the braking system had been renewed, it made little sense not to replace the rear wheel cylinders too. The one on the offside was easy enough to do, but the adjuster on the nearside was seized up solid and snapped.

29 Unfortunately, removing the brake backplate to get access to the remains of the broken adjuster is not a simple process. First the axle has to be drained of oil, then the halfshaft extracted.

32 Be sure to order a new gasket for the halfshaft, as otherwise you run the risk of oil seeping out and onto the brake shoes. Of course, the backplate was another item that had to be laboriously cleaned and painted.

31 The adjusters on the Midget work by having a four- sided cone between the shoes, and a square adjuster protruding through the backplate to wind it in and out. This is the broken end of the old adjuster, and a new one waiting to go in.