> On Apr 13, 2020, at 3:54 PM, John <[email protected]> wrote: > > BTDT ... gotta do it again someday. > > I've got a 78 MGB roadster sitting in my basement and a 79 sitting out at my > sister's (which used to be my Mom's) place. > > Short version ... the 79 was the parts car I bought the first time I had to > rebuild the 78 ... but it turned out to be too complete to part out so I had > to find the parts somewhere else.
Would you believe that you aren’t the first person to buy a parts car that was too good to part out? That has happened to me a couple of times. My room mate my last couple of years in college had a RHD BGT that he bought for parts. Somehow that became the daily driver, and the nominal daily driver became a garage queen. Are you familiar with the mailing lists hosted on team.net? http://autox.team.net/ My project car is a ’69 MGBGT, it served double duty as a daily driver and the car I used to teach performance driving: http://red4est.com/jasmine When it was last running, with the supercharger on it, it could keep up with Spec Miatas on the straights. The Ford five speed transmission worked a lot better than the O/D gearbox. Since it saw more track time than most race cars it has a custom SCCA legal roll cage. Unfortunately because of a couple of issues I had to take the motor apart for a rebuild before it took itself apart. By the time I was done with the rebuild, it had a ported aluminum head, custom cam, high lift roller rockers, aluminum back plate, lightened starter etc. etc. I knocked 50 static pounds off the motor, which is good for about half a second a lap on most of the local tracks (carrying a passenger slows me down by about 2 seconds, so I use 100lbs = 1 second/lap as a rule of thumb). I expected the rebuild to take a couple of months. I then ran into an incredible list of issues. Parts being delayed because of wild fires, getting laid off and not having money, getting a job and not having time, building a spec miata to race and having neither time nor money, someone crashing his car into my garage and not having a garage for a year… The last time I started to make significant progress, my then girlfriend came home from moving her elderly mom into assisted living, informing me that we’d need a place to store a bunch of stuff, and that started a three week home improvement project that took three years to finish. Of course, by that time, she had been sitting for many years and it was no longer a case of just slapping the motor back in. Here are some photos from the last time I was able to invest significant time in her: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/collections/72157622346827887/ I used preval sprayers to repaint the engine compartment with real auto paint rather than rattle cans which just doesn’t last. I’ve got some video of her and in her posted here: http://red4est.com/jasvids/ -- Larry Colen [email protected] -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
