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Our restoration stories

Divide and conquer

chassis repair The MGA has a separate chassis and bodyshell, unlike all the modern cars you can see in the regular traffic jams. While working on the bodyshell we kept the bodyshell attached to the chassis for the latter to provide the necessary support. Now with most of the rust damage on the body repaired and replaced with new sheet metal, it is time to remove the shell from the chassis. We asked a couple of strong neighbours to assist and lift the bodyshell from the chassis and placed it on a wooden frame so it can be moved around without too much effort. After that the bodyshell is transported to an expert to blast off the paint using glass beads and coat it with an epoxy primer.

battery tray With the bodyshell removed working on the chassis becomes much easier. I cut out some dented parts in the frame to hammer it straight on the bench and weld it back in. Compared with the thin sheet metal of the bodyshell these chassis parts weld much easier. The battery tray was badly rusted. After glass bead blasting the bad parts were cut out and replicated in new sheet metal.

The chassis was in a much better shape as compared with the bodyshell. That is understandable given the much thicker sheet metal used in the chassis. A local paint shop blasted and painted the chassis with the fresh layer of shiny black paint. Once back we could not wait to put the first parts of the rear axle back on the chassis. Cannot wait to start the re-assembly. During cold days we collected all the bolts and nuts for a particular part to make assembly easier and faster. Just like putting together a new car with these clear and newly galvanized bolts and nuts.

re-assmebly

How to eat an elephant

right top How to eat an elephant: One bite at the time. Vegetarian readers as well as environmentalists do not need to worry. I am not going to hunt and slaughter one of those magnificent creatures. It is just a way to express how the body work on the MGA is progressing. We already found numerous dents on all places of the fenders and body shell. Some of those dents were so bad that I decided to cut out a section, reshaped it on the bench or sometimes just to remake it altogether and weld it back in.

Post Repair The A-posts both left and right were in bad and required some pieces of new metal. I sometimes used soldering tin to smooth out certain areas. The top left corner of the window frame had an interesting shape. We are still wondering how that was accomplished. In normal life filler is generally used to smoothed the surface prior to the paint coat, but in this case it was more like shaping. It looked like a sculptor has recreated the window frame.

tank The next bite concerned the fuel tank, but then the interior of it as the outside was blasted and painted already. In the old days fuel also preserved the tank and prevented corrosion. The modern day fuels are not that friendly to the sheet metal of the fuel tank. Coatings are available to seal the inside of the tank. There are several brands of tank sealants. I choose the Fertan Tapox epoxy sealant. Before applying the epoxy sealant several cycles of cleaning, rust remover and convert. I carefully followed the instructions. The summer sun helped to elevate the temperature of the tank to expedite the drying process which was further assisted by a little fan in the opening of the tank sender. In all several litres of chemicals are needed to complete the process. It is going to take another half a year before we can fill up the tank, which is may more than the cure time as recommended by Fertan. In a couple of years time I will have some first hand experience with Fertan. So if you think about purchasing it and you can wait until I gather the experience, send me a note in 2 years time....

front When I'm writing this I am enjoying the warm summer evening contemplating the next bite in elephant. All that is left to chew on is near the front of the body shell. Again it was amazing how much filler was applied. Every time we remove the filler we are again shocked. But then again we are no longer surprised. The the good thing of doing such drastic repairs as a hobby is that one can use the free hours of the week to consider and plan the next bite.

Inner sill repair

right Sill With the MGA the inner sills are not visible once the car is completely assembled. Still dirt and moist knows how to get there. The fenders covering the inner sills showed some rust damage and indeed as almost always in such cases, the rust damage was much worse than it seemed at the first glance. Both inner sills were so bad that they had to be replaced. First remove the old sill by drilling out the spot welds. On the right-hand side the panel, which the sill was welded on was also in bad shape and needed replacement too.

left Sill We painted the inside and the outside of the new sills to protect it from rust. The areas where the welds will come were covered with tape to prevent epoxy paint from coming too close to the welds. The welding area themselves got a coat of weld primer. The 5mm metal punch was a great asset when punching 5mm holes for the welds in the sills: Over a 100 plug welds per sill. I'm getting better at it and so the 2nd sill hardly needed any grinding at all. Enough wire speed and current to fill up the holes nicely. After the sill was fitted to the car, the lower-end of the posts needed to be reconnected. Formed a new piece from a 1mm thick piece of sheet metal.

On the left-hand side the A-post was bend due to a collision. It could not be straightened out while still on the car. So all the twisted parts were cut off and drilled out, hammered out on the bench and welded back in. The inside of the posted will be spray painted prevent further rust damage. The outside is painted with a 1K epoxy primer and few layers of paint. The paint layer does not have to be perfectly smooth and shiny, as long as it keeps the rust out. I did paint it in the final colour just to get a impression how the new colour will look on the car...

The story on the Upholstery

old Although it is going to take a while before the seats can be installed in the car, we could work on the frames in the garage in the winter time. We had to clean the frames and make some modifications, because it turned out that the back of the seats were not the original ones. The ones in our MGA coupe came from a roadster. The roadster seat back has a vertical seam pattern, whereas the coupe has as pattern of 5 horizontal seams and 2 vertical seams on the sides.

modified Also the frame is a bit different: A coupe has a horizontal top while the back of a roadster seat is slightly sloped down towards the sides of the car. The leather was too old and damaged to be preserved anyway so we decided to discard the old upholstery and modify the back of the seats to turn it into a coupe seat again. Since the leather seats had to be redone, we wanted the seams to match the original MGA coupe pattern again.

seats ready Sewing leather requires a special sturdy sewing machine and so we looked around for a person that could do the leather upholstery for us. After some research we contacted Bekleding Totaal in Ede to do this work for us. We could select the leather ourselves as well as the colour of the piping. Once it was done we were very eager to fit the new seats in the car. Instead of putting the new seats in the car as it is now, use used Photoshop to test fix it. Much easier to move around, the comfort of a nice cup of coffee nearby and no risk of damaging the new leather on the sharp edges of the body shell under construction.

Nice One of the first things we noticed on the car while it was still in San Francisco was the cracked and damaged steering wheel. I was almost at a point to discard the steering wheel and get a new one. A bit of research on the internet learned that some MGA fanatics were able to fill the cracks and make the steering wheel look like new again. While I was in the US for work I picked up the 2 component putty several people used to do the job. What do you say? Much nicer to have a wheel in your hands that lived through all those year. If only this wheel could tell the tales of all the accidents it lived through...

Nice

Making new floor panels

B post restore Up until now we have been removing badly rusted metal from the car body. It is time to turn that around at start adding metal to the car. The top of the B-post is now straight again. It was badly dented and filled with loads of filler. To be able to access it from the back, I cut away some sheet metal at the inside. Ather flattening out the outside panel, we could weld in the inside sheet metal again. At the same time pieces of metal are welded into the B-post. All that is left on this side is replacing the inner sill and the lower part of the B-post.

B post restore Time to take on another part: Repairing the floor boards. These are all plywood boards. So we picked up a large sheet of plywood at the local wood shop, used the old boards as templates to cut out the new ones. We took plywood that is a notch thicker and copied all the holes and cut-outs. After that several layers of paint on all sides to make them able to live through the Dutch climate. Well, to be honest, it will only be the summer dry weather part of the Dutch climate... The right B-post is up next. That is in a much worse condition, so I have removed the complete B-post from the car and separated it into the original components, repairing the separate parts. When a part is easy to replicate we may want to just take a fresh piece of sheet metal and remake it all from scratch.

B post restore