MGBGT PROJECT.
In 1988 I bought my first LBC (little British car) a 1974 MGB convertible. I restored that car, drove it every day for 11 years and then parked it for another10 years. I’ve recently started restoring in again but it won’t be done for a while.
Since I missed driving an LBC, I decided to get a Triumph Spitfire. They are not too expensive, easy to work on and a load of fun. I picked up a 1979 Spit that seemed like it needed a little bit of work to put on the road…boy was that wrong. Basically, I wound up with TWO British restoration projects at the same time with an additionally restoration coming up on my 1995 Corvette. The earliest I could get the Spitfire on the road would be spring of 2011, ten months after I purchased her. It was even worse with the MGB since that would be fall 2011 at the earliest, if I was lucky.
What to do, what to do? Well I did what any other logical intelligent person would do in my situation: I bought another MGB!
Not just any MG but a 1967 MGB-GT. This is the story…
Shortly after I bought my 74 MGB back in 1988 I found a blue 1971 MGB-GT sitting in the parking lot in an industrial park-area one afternoon, I stopped and took a look at it and it truly was a total piece of shit. Not a body panel wasn’t rusted or dented and the rear fenders had so much surface rust that I thought he car was half covered with brown primer. It also ran like the cylinders were filled with hamsters. The only thing it actually had going for it was that it was the very first GT off the assembly line for that model year.
Well the asking price was $150.00 which I was not about to pay for a car like that…mostly because I didn’t have $150.00. What can I say…I was a poor twenty-something year old.
So I waited and I kept my eyes open. I wound up getting married, starting a family, buying a 1995 Corvette and, as my MG was relegated to storage duty, the GT-dream was pushed to the back of my mind like my B was pushed to the back of the garage. (Wow, what a amateurish analogy)
So time passed, new wife, new home, new life but same MG. She sat there and screamed at me to finish her. So I started working on her again. A friend of mine even helped me get her running again for a while. But there was so much to do on her that the 1-year plan to finish her turned eventually turned into a 3-year + plan.
By summer 2010 I was pretty tired of not having a British car to play around in so, after careful consideration and much research, I purchased a 1979 Triumph Spitfire off of eBay.
When I brought it home, I was not amused. To say that it was not as described in the listing would be a colossal understatement. Let’s just say that the previous owner wasn’t exactly accurate in his description in the eBay listing In fact, it was junk…but it was my junk!
When I bought it I told my wife that it would be on the road in 2 or 3 weeks…yeah, that’s it. December rolled around and it wasn’t even close. Rotted floorboards, messed up electricals and the ugliest giant black plastic bumpers in history. It was a mess.
So I continued to play with the Spitfire while my MG roadster sat and sat.
I finally started looking for another British car, this time a GT. I wasn’t really serious about buying another one but I always look.
I found one every week or two online that I liked but always too far away or too expensive or needing too much work.
Then in December of 2010 I found two on Ebay that were in North Carolina. One was out towards the coast, the other one a bit closer in Louisburg, just north of Raleigh.
I low-ball bid on both and was outbid...had my laugh and put it out of my mind…for about two days. Both cars looked good and seemed to be daily driver candidates. The one in Raleigh looked in better shape than the one out at the coast. I watch them and the auction for he one out at the coast ended a day before the other with the final bid being around $4000.00.
I knew the one in Raleigh would go for more so, and I’m still not sure why I did it, I bid $3200.00 on it…and, of course, I won it…exactly how I won the Spitfire.
I knew that wifey might kill me or cut of a vital body part of mine but you win an auction and you have to pay for it.
Here I go again!
