Project MG Midget

Alan Denne finally reaches the end of the welding marathon, before the Midget moves to Hall’s Garage to receive its new paint – and a little more welding!

At long last, we finish the welding marathon and it is time to get some Flame Red top coat paint on our MkIII Midget.

For such a little car, this Midget has been something of a welding marathon. Having initially wanted to tidy up the nearside sill, we ended up moving round the car and finding more and more to fix in terms of rust and poor previous repairs. And as always happens on a project such as this, once you have got one area looking spot on, then the bit next to it which you’d previously classed as ‘acceptable’ suddenly becomes less so.

And so the project grew. Last issue we had it stripped virtually to a bare shell, but reached something of a milestone when we had the entire front end grit-blasted and completed all the structural repairs there. However, if we thought that meant we could put the welder away, then we were sorely mistaken; sanding back the paint ready for primer revealed a few more issues at the back end, as shown below.

The next problem was the bonnet, which was not rusty, but did sit proud of the bulkhead and the wing on the nearside, even though it fitted well everywhere else. Figuring out exactly what was distorted proved something of a saga. First, we thought that the frame on that corner was pulling away from the skin, but dressing it back down made no improvement. There was no obvious sign of anything catching, and if you detached the bonnet from the hinges then it actually dropped too low rather than sitting proud. Not that the hinges were lacking travel and holding the panel up, because climbing into the empty engine bay showed that they would drop away from the bonnet entirely if not bolted to it.

To test things out, we borrowed another bonnet from Hall’s Garage and dropped that into position on our car. When the hinges were bolted up, it exhibited exactly the same problem – all lined up on the offside, but sitting proud on the nearside rear corner. That focused our attention on the hinges. We put our bonnet back on, and I sat in the engine bay with a torch to

see how the gaps changed as we tightened up the hinge bolts while Alan kept an eye on the outside. With the bonnet propped up level, this showed that the offside hinge would move up and sit flat against the bonnet, but the one on the nearside met the bonnet at the back before the front edge of the hinge was in place. In fact, I could get three large washers under the front, and then with the bolts tightened up the bonnet would sit correctly.

What we still didn’t know was whether the panel itself was distorted, or the hinge. Or maybe both – that is the joy of working on a car that is 50 years old and has inevitably had the odd prang in its past. So next we checked across the two hinges using a spirit level. The plates where they meet the bonnet are not flat, but are tilted down at the outer sides to match the curve of the bonnet. Clearly this was not the same on both hinges, and the nearside one appeared to by higher on its outer edge then the inside. Could it have been replaced with an OS hinge by mistake in the past, as they are handed?

With nothing to lose, we decided to try and fix what we had before buying replacements. The hinge itself is a curved U-shaped channel section, so first Alan cut a slot in the two side sections. This left just the flat front section holding it together, and we could bend this to close up the slots, then re-weld the side sections with the face of the hinge at a more suitable angle from front to back. Before making those welds, a bit of twisting took care of the sideways difference and gave us a properly matched pair of hinges.

After this, the bonnet’s fit was better, but still not 100%. It also failed to match the curve of the wing properly along the side of the engine bay, and sitting inside the engine bay with the bonnet closed I could see where the bonnet frame appeared distorted. Pulling this down by hand seemed to improve things, so back off came the bonnet and Alan got physical. First he dressed the frame into better shape with a hammer and dolly. Again this improved things further, but we were still not entirely happy. So he put some carpet on the floor to protect the panel, laid the bonnet on this and pushed down hard along the edge. It looked brutal, but when

he measured the distance from each side to the floor, the two were identical.

Before putting the bonnet back on, Alan elongated the holes in the hinge so that we had a little more adjustment to get an even gap between the bonnet and the bulkhead. It was probably a combination of all these things, but the bonnet was now nearly there. The line down the nearside was still not perfect, but Alan dressed the wing with hammer and dolly – and with that, everything was spot on at last.

After a few repairs to the front wing and a new skin on the driver’s door, we then transported the shell to Hall’s Garage ( www.hallsgarage.co.uk), where they had agreed to do the final prep and painting in the cleaner conditions of their spray booth. Having seen the quality of the finish Jason can achieve under these conditions on a number of other restorations, I thought the car deserved nothing less after all the work Alan had put into the bodywork in his barn.

1 Sanding back the lower corner of the offside rear wing revealed not only traces of the original orange paint, but also some rust holes plugged with filler.

2 Cutting out the affected section of the rear wing showed that the inner wing beneath was not holed, but it was fairly rusty too and in need of repair.

3 It was a similar story on the nearside, where mesh had been put across the rust hole to support the filler, along with a previous patch repair.

4 Again, cutting the outer skin away revealed that the inner wing had been affected too, not totally rotten but still rusty. Rear wing lower 1/4 repair sections are only £40 each.

6 However, Alan made up his own repair sections for the bottoms of the inner wings, as these are comparatively simple forms without the compound curves.

5 These were the sections that Alan cut away from the outer skin initially. The lower piece is approximately the size of the repair sections that are available.

10 Looking first at the OSF wing, it was clear this was not quite so good as we’d originally thought either! This headlight ring was holed, and it was also rusty...

9 We had not prepped and painted the interior, because the plan is that Simon will tackle this at home once the repairs and exterior paint are finished to save a few pennies.

8 With the rear end repairs finished to our satisfaction, a coat of primer was applied to protect the repaired shell, while we turned our attention to the removable panels.

7 And this is the nearside corner with one of those home- made inner wing sections welded in and waiting for the bought- in wing section to go on top.

11 ...where it joined the front lower panel. Alan made up his own repair sections for both of these areas.