One shiny car and one major project!
Iam pleased to report that the ex-cw project MGB GT is looking really sharp now. Having carried out the bodywork repairs as detailed last issue, I polished it up and drove down to Peterborough to get the paint scanned and some cellulose mixed up. I'm not sure what paint is already on there, but it rubbed down easily so I expect it is cellulose. I try and use that if I can, but not everybody can supply it, and those that do may have a limited colour palette. I like cellulose because it is so much quicker – five minutes and you can put on another coat. I had all this sprayed up and demasked in an hour!
I'd sprayed some black over the repairs to get an idea of how it looked. With the purple paint, I sprayed the boot lid up to the bottom of the screen, the rear quarter lower sections, the top of the rear wings and up to the roof, the bottom half of the front wings and the front screen pillar/scuttle join. At that point I realised that I should have done the whole side and gone straight through the doors, but I didn't do the top halves of the front wings above the trim. It was probably a poor decision on my part, but you do have to stop somewhere. And the next stage would have been a full respray to take out the microblisters on the bonnet and roof, and also blend in some localised repairs that have been done here and there in the past. You can also see where somebody has tried to polish out the microblisters on the roof and gone through to the primer. Maybe one day I will do the lot, but I thought that on a 50 year old car, I'm not going to worry too much. At least it is usable and nice inside. I would want to repaint the dash next, but that is a big job to do properly, and I thought: 'No, it is not that bad, it is just a good, useable car.'
The only thing I will do is to take it for an MOT in the new year, but there is no rush as I won't be using it much over the winter. In the meantime there have been a few mechanical issues to sort out too. Petrol was leaking from the union that connects the fuel pipe to the pump. That only needed tightening up, but I think that
it might have worked loose because a bolt was missing from the clamp that holds the pump on, allowing that to vibrate. I also found that the exhaust was blowing because one of the clamps was missing, and the downpipe was not a tight fit in the exhaust anyway. So I took the exhaust off, cleaned both pipes (inner and outer), applied some exhaust paste and fitted a clamp. I then started it up and left the car running for ten minutes to harden the paste and it seems to be all sorted now.
I have adjusted the tappets too as a couple of them were a bit noisy, but I was still having the same problem which the car had been exhibiting when it was a project in that it was a pig to start. How the battery doesn't go flat I don't know, because it takes loads of turning over before it starts. Then when it does start, it sounds like it is only running on two cylinders. Since it has twin carburettors, I wondered if one of them was not set up properly. So I got it running, then pulled one plug lead off at a time to see if any of them made a difference. Each one made a difference, so there was no clue there.
However, when I had adjusted the tappets, I'd taken the plugs out to make the engine easier to turn over and noticed that two of them were wet and the other two were dry. Unfortunately, the two that were wet were not on the same port – one was fed by the front carburettor and the other by the rear one! That does suggest that both carburettors need adjusting. It is fine once it gets warmed up so I suspect the chokes are still not working properly, despite the work that had been done previously.
The headlights needed adjusting too, but one of the bowls had a lug that was broken. Fortunately I had a suitable replacement which I could fit. The only thing then was that I thought the horn wasn't working, but I hadn't had time to have a proper look at that before Simon showed me it wasn't wired up to the centre push on the wheel as I had expected, but to the column stalk and was actually working fine.
I've not done anything on the Vitesse for the last few weeks as the 1300GT has grown as a project and taken up a lot of time. It had been previously fitted with floor repair sections that extended to the sills. They had been popriveted onto the floor, but only a couple of small welds applied to join it to the sill flange. They were easy enough to get off as a result, and that revealed a little rot at the front end of the nearside sill, as well as the rot we already knew about at the back. We did think about trying to get a new sill, but that finishes below the rear door and so wouldn't go all the way to the heel board as we needed. Since I would have had to make up repair sections for that anyway, it didn't seem bad enough to bother trying to find a complete new panel.
No doubt the other side will be much the same, but I won't know for sure until I get the floor extension off. So far I have tacked the back panel to the heel board box section, used some pop rivets to hold the top temporarily in place and clamped the bottom with grips so that I have the reference points from which to start building back up.