More Progress

I've made some significant progress over the last few weeks. Paint was sprayed in the engine bay. It looks great. Funny how what looks just acceptable on the body of a car can look great in an engine bay. It's no show car, mind you, but I'm pretty satisfied with the work I've done. Besides, the intent is for this car to be my driver, not a garage queen. I'm planning to put some miles on the car and I don't want to be afraid to do that for fear of scratching expensive paint. Nevermind that I've already put more into this car that it was sold new for back in 1971 or 72. Granted, that's not much money when you think about how much value the dollar has lost since then.

So what have I done beside paint the bay? I have my brake hydraulics hooked back up, along with the clutch master and slave cylinder. I've been cleaning and painting all of the small things that are going back into the bay. I sanded, steel wooled, and then clear coated all of the brake, clutch and fuel lines that are visible. Clear coat was to keep them from corroding so quickly in the future.

I made my big parts order last week from Moss Motors via The Autoist. I picked the parts up a couple days ago. This included my complete interior, main engine bearings, rod bearings, motor mounts, lots of miscellaneous MGB specific hardware, seals, gaskets, and the oh so important heater core (this is going to be my year round daily driver so I have to have heat!). Everything looked great and service at The Autoist was excellent as always.

I have already received my clutch kit from Bob at Brittek and some exhaust paint from Eastwood. I have a friend at work that is going to sand blast my exhaust manifold for me, then it will get a couple of heavy coats of Eastwood stainless steel gray high temp exhaust coating. If nothing else the engine will look pretty.

Here are a few pictures of the progress to date, and my lovely newly rebuilt carburetors.

Here's the picture of the engine bay before. I had started work at this point but you can tell how nasty things were.

Here's a picture after much degreasing, cleaning and sanding and some reassembly. It's not perfect, but it will be much more of a pleasure to raise the hood now than it was before.




Here's the engine that will fill the large empty hole in the picture above. New bearings started going in last night and will hopefully be completed tonight or tomorrow. Then I can start buttoning the unit back up to get it ready to drop back in.



And here's what will deliver the air/fuel mixture to be burned in healthy quantities as I cruise around with the top down. They were professionaly cleaned and rebuilt. Once I install them and find out how they work, I'll post the rebuilders name and a review.