All’s Well That ends Well

With a long list of niggles sorted, the Midget is match-fit once more and ready for action

1977 MG MIDGET 1500

Regular readers may recall that PCB returned from

CCW’s Drive-It Day visit to the Peak District with a pretty comprehensive list of jobs to attend to, not least of which was getting it through an MoT test. Hall’s Garage in Morton once again did the honours, and I’ll confess to feeling pretty confident that it would sail through.

It was a bit of a shock, then, when a cursory check online revealed that the old stager hadn’t just failed its MoT

– it had positively flunked it. The list of reasons given looked depressingly long, with excessive CO emissions right at the top, but closer inspection revealed that the brakes were the main culprits. I already knew that the handbrake had no reserve travel (they all do that, sir), but discovering that the brakes were applying unevenly and imbalanced across an axle made my blood run cold when I thought about how exuberantly I’d driven the Midget on the Peak District’s tight and twisting roads.

The other jobs I asked Hall’s to tackle were mostly a hotchpotch of long-standing minor irritants that I simply hadn’t got around to sorting, together with a couple of more recent issues. The most serious of the latter concerned the alternator, which was no longer charging the battery, judging by the perpetually glowing ignition light. Hall’s concurred, binned it (it was a cheap emergency recon fitment several years ago, so no loss there) and fitted a brand new one. Job done.

Replacing the mysteriously disintegrated carburettor heat shield is a job that I’m glad I didn’t have to do, likewise getting the stiff windows to operate without feeling like I was about to snap the winders clean off; better still, I can now lower the driver’s window all the way down without it jamming. The cause of the oddly localised bonnet rattle, meanwhile, turned out to be a broken weld.

I’ve also finally got rid of an annoying niggle that’s plagued the car since the day I bought it. Opening the boot when I went to collect it revealed the new MoT certificate being held down by the knackered old driver’s door mirror. You could adjust it until the cows came home, but it was so loose that it only provided a couple of minutes of correct rearward vision before the slipstream knocked it out of kilter. The new one, on the other hand, only moves when I want it to.

And finally, the seatbelt that necessitated me calling out the AA towards the end of the Peak District trip turned out to be repairable, but while it hasn’t jammed since, I have noticed that the belt itself is now twisted. This irritated the hell out of me straightaway, so I grabbed my socket set, intending to unbolt the inertia reel assembly, turn it round to straighten the belt and reattach it. Annoyingly, whoever refitted the retaining bolt last had either biceps the size of rugby balls, or a seriously powerful air socket, because I simply cannot budge it.

When I subsequently tried – and failed – to reattach the dislodged brake pedal rubber (from what I can see, you need to be built like a fuse wire and have both a double-joined spine and the manual dexterity of a brain surgeon in order to do this simple job on a Midget), I harrumphed a lot and gave the MG a thorough valet inside and out instead.

Next up: getting my other MG through its MoT…

Owned Since September 2003 Mileage Since last report 28 total Mileage (1)15,039 latest costs £350