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MG Midget and Sprite Technical - Back on the road

Finally after 8 months my midget is back on the road. I bought it back in December as a non runner with no real experience of classic cars and more or less taught myself to repair it. My brother in law gave me his old MIG welder and taught me the basics.

The car turned out to be a bit of a lemon with some really bad repairs and a lot more rust damage than first appeared. Underseal and lots of thick stone chip type paint hid holes in the floors, inner wings and underside.

The drivers side inner sill was completely gone at the bottom and a PO simply welded a second floor on the bottom of what remained of the sill to hide the damage.

The regulars on this forum will remember helping me out repairing the threaded holes that the front damper bolts to and repairing the hole that had been cut in the spring cone as part of a horrible bodge fix.

The inner rear wheel arches had a lots of rust holes that had been filled with filler and covered with underseal. There was a hole the size of my first that was stuffed with the Southampton Gazette (Jan 83) and filler.

Both spring hangars had to be repaired too.

Lots of welding, completely new front and rear suspension, new brake discs, pads, shoes, and brake lines. New clutch slave and master. New wheel bearings and seals all round, new diff pinion seal and compression spacer.

The original dizzy had no vac advance, and one of the springs didn't appear to do anything so it was replaced with a 123 and the advance re-instated.

Lots of other repairs, too many to mention.

Fortunately the engine was the best bit of the car with good compression, good oil pressure, and not much in the way of oil leaks. The cooling system seems in good order too.

Its been a bit of an epic to get this far, and a big learning experience, and lots of fun too. There are still a few issues to sort to get the car running properly and a huge amount of work to do to get the body work looking nice (next winters project).

Thanks to everyone who has replied to my numerous questions on this forum, its been a huge help. Thanks to Richard Wale for making me a custom insert and Nigel Atkins for giving me an original 1975 handbook for my car and answering my endless email questions.

Here is my glamorous assistant modelling the car.



C MADGE

welcome to all three of you and well done, always good to see another car on the road.
P Bentley

Great news! That's a very fast piece of work, and well done you.
Judging by the smile on her face, she never found out about the wishbones on the carpet.
Nick and Cherry Scoop

Chris well done.

You spoiled my joke with your last line, I was going to put you look nothing like I expected, but I won't put that now.

Thank you for having the very good sense to see the light and accept the good book into your life.

And thank you for the instant donation for the good book, royalties are very thin these days but I did pass your donation on.

I think many of my replies were I don't know (probably not enough though) and/or ask on the BBS. If I'd had a second copy of your Driver's Handbook I'd have sometimes put "see page x and paragraph x".

Get driving the car when you can and it will improve and I'm sure give you more learning experiences and fun - and hopefully driving fun.
Nigel Atkins

Good to see it back on the road after all that hard work - well done.

Your glamorous assistant might be interested to see this 1970’s ad for the Midget! Can’t believe what they used to get away with back then!




John Payne

This thread was discussed on 15/08/2018

MG Midget and Sprite Technical index

This thread is from the archive. The Live MG Midget and Sprite Technical BBS is active now.