From: Larry Colen
On Oct 18, 2012, at 10:15 AM, John Sessoms wrote:
From: Larry Colen
Rubber bumper GTs are fairly rare in the U.S. I've only ever seen
one up close & personal.
I'm not sure I've ever seen one. I think a friend had a grey market
one, which was more interesting because of the factory aluminum block
motor. Said V-8 put out about the same power as I'm hoping to get out
of my motor.
Something in your previous post gave me the idea that yours was a rubber
bumper GT.
British Leyland brought 50 factory MGB-GT V8 cars to the US as a
marketing test. I think at least some of them were left hand drive cars,
and I don't believe all 50 of them made it back to the UK. When fitted
with the factory V8, the MGB-GT weighed something like 40 pounds less
than cars with the stock 4 cylinder engine.
Unfortunately, the MGB-GT V8 was sacrificed in the US market in favor
the the Triumph Stag & TR8 cars.
Shame really. I bet there are a hell of a lot more MGBs of all flavors
still running in the US than there are Triumph TR7s, TR8s & Stags. If
they'd done a MGB V8 Tourer it would have been a hit in the USA.
And the V8 conversion using the rover engine has been just about as
popular in the US as it was in the UK.
Cracked cylinder heads are pretty common. I don't know if it was a
flaw in the design or just that no one knew the proper way to
torque them. In the early 90s a complete brand new replacement with
valves, springs & hardened valve seats installed was $199 from
Victoria British.
I ran into an unfortunate combination of failures when I first got
the car running with the blower. There was a small water leak, and
there was a crimp in the mechanical temperature gauge so that it
would read "uncomfortably warm" but not "you're going to blow up your
motor hot".
That is what probably caused the cracked head, and the broken ring
etc.
I have a couple of MGB Tourers sitting around waiting for the day my
financial situation improves enough I can find the money to get them
running again. I think I've told the story before how I got one as a
parts car that was too complete to part out & the other was my daily
driver until it was vandalized. I hadn't looked at Victoria British for
a long time.
Their catalog is now on-line. Apparently there are no more cast iron
heads to be had, only aluminum, and they're about a $1000 more than the
cast iron heads were.
Back in the day, the cross flow head was about $1000 more than the cast
iron head. But, it looks like it's only about $500 more than the
currently available aluminum head.
The Miata doesn't have the leg room of an MGB. I test drove one,
and quickly got tired of my knees hitting the steering wheel
whenever I lifted my foot to apply the brake & clutch.
The seat in the miata has too much padding in the cushion so that
even a relatively short person like myself (5'8") sits way too high
in the car. A quick and easy fix is to pull the set cover and using a
serrated bread knife, take a bit of the padding out.
They were very definitely designed for shorter people than most
American men.
Seat height wasn't a problem. There just wasn't room to move the seat
back far enough. I think the Miata was designed based on the MG
Midget/Austin Healey Sprite, which I also found to be a bit cramped.
Anyway, by the time the Miata came out, I wasn't interested in a $20,000
sports car that I couldn't comfortably drive.
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