MG Magnette ZA
Tom’s year begins with a concerted effort to make some progress with the interior of his MG Magnette project
1956 MG MAGNETTE ZA
There has been plenty of head scratching and bedtime reading of diagrams and parts lists to keep this project moving, but every week my MG looks more like a car.
Balancing a return to education while trying to earn a living has restricted pottering in the garage to weekends and Mondays, but there has been some progress and I’ll even risk admitting that it’s been fun.
The car came back to me from an extensive round of bodywork with a list of jobs to be getting on with, including refitting the interior and having the fuel tank refurbished.
One way of making an old car full of plastic tubs of bits look less intimidating is to call a friend, so for the past few weeks a former colleague and I have had a routine of spending Monday mornings together doing little bits before
I do a pie run to get us through lunch time.
We’ve tested the strength of the boot floor by my climbing in to remove the fuel tank and pump, and in doing so I’ve discovered just how fiddly both of these are to get at, and how many places there are to bang your head in a 63-year-old car boot.
As far as the interior goes, a lot can be said for labelling things up
OWNED SINCE February 2014
MILEAGE SINCE LAST REPORT 0 TOTAL MILEAGE 112,000 LATEST COSTS £0
properly and keeping a photographic record while everything is taken out. Thanks to this, the carpets went in with little more than a decent squirt of glue and a rub over after a session with the vacuum (a new wedding present, so don’t tell Mrs Mc).
The seats were a different story. The back bench seat went in without a problem – obviously, as you just slot it into place, give it a pat and admire it. Otis, my Labrador, was also quick to test it for comfort by leaving his lookout post at the back of the garage and jumping in at the first opportunity.
So far, so good. To say the driver’s seat was a little more difficult would be somthing of an understatement. The seats are fixed onto a rail by six screws, and there isn’t enough clearance to slide the seat in from the front because of the steering wheel. But when we tried to do it from the back the driveshaft tunnel got in the way.
Having decided to call it a night before losing a finger or damaging the seats, which are not being retrimmed, a solution only came a few days later while sat at my laptop.
Why I hadn’t checked my ‘ before’ photos until then I will never know, but they revealed that the seat should sit neatly on six collars over the screws that raised it up the couple of inches needed to get it past the driveshaft tunnel.
I could hardly wait to get home and fix the problem, and concentrated on my studies with the same enthusiasm as I did at school in 1998 when I knew a PlayStation was waiting when I got home.
Sure enough the collars were in one of those plastic tubs, and after making sure the rail was greased and the lever had been given a liberal dose of WD40, the seat slid in without a problem. After that, the passenger seat was a formality.
While the fuel tank still deserved a clean and the pump needs attention, I took the opportunity to give my complete-looking car a good wipe over, before getting to work on the chrome and treating the seats to a thorough dose of leather care. Like the rest of the car, I’ll leave the chrome as is because it isn’t overlypitted and I don’t want it to look new once the car is finished.
The wiring loom still needs replacing. I’ve found evidence on the old one that it has overheated at some point – because the wire’s sheath has melted – and after that we need to concentrate on getting the engine started. In many ways there isn’t very much more to do, considering how far we’ve come with this project. But in in other ways, there’s still a lot more work ahead.