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MG TD TF 1500 - Very special MG-item on ebay

Hi,

Look on ebay nr 360711463011

Is this special or is this special??

Erik

Erik vanHardeveld

Really cool man.

Jim
Jim Neel 53TD28423

Very ...heck just the advert is worth printing.
David Sheward

I showed this to my wife and told her it even has a headlight. She said that it must have been for the midnight shift.
JIM NORTHRUP SR

Erik when I was 12 years old and living in Aerdenhout Holland I got one of those real wheels from our neighbours . The engine / wheel shown in the picture was a simple to swap with your regular rear bike wheel . had a lot of fun with with to the dismay of my mother ( to young to ride it 16 years was the norm legally )
Gerard Hengeveld

Great ad an greag bike.
I really love the little details,
The front brake can be operated with either hand
The saddle with its combination of leaf and spiral springs
The curved front fender struts

Mike
Mike Fritsch

Cool bike and like other people said the write up and the pictures in the add was very informative. I scrolled down to here and this is what I thought gave me a good understanding how our little MG's were made.

In July 1930, the M.G. Car Co Ltd was registered to take over the production of sports cars from The Morris Garages Ltd, in a factory in Abingdon. The Nuffield Organisation and Austin Motor Co. Ltd merged in April 1952 to form the British Motor Corporation (BMC). This brought the Austin, Morris, M.G., Riley, Wolseley and Morris Commercial marques into common ownership.

It's interesting to consider the environment in which this motorised Raleigh Low Gravity Carrier Bike operated. Geoff Armstrong, an MG enthusiast who worked at BMC, explains that whereas Coventry had over 7000 employees, Abingdon had a workforce of 1200. The Abingdon factory was also located in a rural area, with many workers from the surrounding Oxfordshire countryside. Many of their parents had worked on the land or in local service industries. This provided a much more relaxed working environment than in most car factories:

Abingdon was a more relaxed work environment with the employees taking greater pride in their products and quality. It did not go unnoticed either that Abingdon’s MG car works was seen as ... one of the personal interests, or as some would say ‘hobbies’, of Lord Nuffield, of the original Morris Garage.' Another difference was that there were no motorized paced conveyers on the car assembly line. Instead the cars were assembled on a 'buggy' or trolley-like unit. Then, when the workers completed the work at their station, they simply pulled or pushed the car down to the next assembly station by themselves. This gave the work groups a considerable degree of autonomy about who did what and when. As such, the pace was not as intense, relentless nor machine-driven as existed in a traditional automobile assembly operation. This is not to say the workers did not have a quota of cars to be built by the end of the day but how they did it was more up to them than management direction.

Armstrong also mentions that Abingdon had a barbershop at the factory. If a worker needed his hair cut (there were no women on the assembly line) the worker would inform his fellow workers at their assembly station. They would then attempt to work ahead to allow the worker who needed a haircut to jump off of the track to get his hair cut and then rush back in time to not delay production.

So the workers were efficient in their own way and economical production was never given the priority one would expect in mass-produced cars. But part of that phenomenon was because everyone at Abingdon did not see themselves as just making cars ...they were making MGs!
Frank Cronin

Ok, I'll say it... You could buy a running, driving TD for what he's asking for that bicycle! ;)

Neat piece of history though.
Steve Simmons

This thread was discussed between 22/08/2013 and 23/08/2013

MG TD TF 1500 index

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