Despite the weather’s lack of cooperation, (Typical for New England, really) my MG is ready for this year’s car show season! Here’s the recap on how I got here, from pulling it out of storage, to taking it for a cruise, plus my plans for this year’s car show season! In the beginning of March, we were finally rid of all the snow, and since it seemed abundantly clear that snowmobile season was over, that meant it was time to put them away. After pulling my MG out of storage, It wouldn’t idle so it had to get pushed to the garage. I generally argued with the carburetors for a while, and found out that my float height had been set wrong when I rebuilt the carb over the winter. After I got that sorted, I had to tune it. After getting my mixture more or less dialed, I found another issue (surprise surprise). The carb would idle high after being revved, and then after a while would drop to about 600 rpm, repeating whenever you gave it some gas. I traced this down to the carburetor slide spring, which was too short. It allowed the slide to rest about a quarter of an inch above where it should be, messing with my mixture and causing the high idle. It was quite the project figuring it out, and, I won’t lie, it’s still somewhat in progress. Currently, it is super fussy when cold and idles just *slightly* higher than I’d like it to, but, hey, it drives damn well, so I can’t complain too much. However, I will still fiddle with it to try and get it to 100%. I figure the issue is mixture related anyways, so nothing too difficult to fix. Aside from the bare necessities of getting the car to run, I also did some fun things to it!
If you’ve ever seen a picture of my car, you know that it’s got the Union Jack on the hood. It’s fairly hard to miss. However, one thing not many people know is that it was made up of blue and white masking tape over a red hood! That tape (having been applied several years ago) was starting to show its age, and so I bit the bullet and painted the Union Jack on a spare hood taken off my parts car. It came out quite well, but I haven’t been able to fit the second hood yet, and so the tape gets a few more weeks on the car. The flag on the hood was a huge hit at car shows, but now I’ll no longer have to deal with getting yelled at about how “That’s gonna ruin your paint,” and the like.
Another mod I made was my new headlights. They’re seven inch aftermarket Jeep LED halo headlights, and they are brighter than the sun. They function as a regular headlight/high beam, but also have an LED ring around them that can light up either white, for a DRL, or yellow, for a turn signal. The halo running lights are super nice to have for visibility (a struggle in such a small car) and the higher turn signal is a godsend, as the lower turn signal can be all but invisible from an unreasonably tall modern pickup. They were not very easy to install, but that was largely because of my car, not the lights. Adding wires for the extra running light and turn signal on the driver’s side revealed that my entire front driver’s side fender was a bad ground due to some Bondo repair, so I had to wire in grounds, and reverse some wiring. I also added a license plate frame with an additional third brake light for a touch of extra safety.
I also added a cherry bomb glasspack, because having a loud car is part of the teenager experience. Using my crappy harbor freight flux core welder, I originally tried to run just the glasspack, but it was too loud even for my liking. This led to me running the stock resonator and the glass pack. Now its slightly louder, and has a very nice sporty note to it, which I’m astonishingly happy with. My welds weren’t great but it doesn’t leak so I wouldn’t call it too bad for probably my second time welding ever.
After all this preparatory work, there was just one thing left to do; drive it! After over a hundred miles and several days of running errands or driving to school in the car, I only had one issue, the sudden failure of my (admittedly 50 year old) ignition coil. However, I had a spare, and I swapped it in and it ran fine. However, I’m still figuring out ballast for the new one. I’ve driven it to school, around town, out to dinner, and more, and it’s been driving great! This car is truly such a joy to drive, and it really has a (somewhat temperamental at times) personality to it. Also, I finally tested its 0-60 time! It was a fairly dismal 17 seconds. Not exactly quick. However, I will say that probably half that time was spent between 50 and 60 mph. But now that I’ve done a few shakedown drives, I know what loose ends need to be tied up, and I’ll be more than ready come the first car show of the year. I certainly couldn’t be more excited! Right now I’m planning on a cruise night this Thursday (April 24) in Candia, NH, but we’ll see how the weather pans out for that.
-Max Daigle
Slow Traffic Keep Right 
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