sarge wrote:Look what the Lady of the Manor ordered up for my birthday, the dear! Four of these:
Just the beginning, Sarge...with those you should be able to put three more cars in that cavernous garage of yours.
A bit of history...the Sprite was recovered from the back of a garage in Mt. Washington, just on the edge of Baltimore City on the north side, roughly twenty-five years ago. The car had a lot of corrosion damage from the "A" posts back, a broken rear axle at the differential and collapsed front coil springs. It had been sitting dormant for five or six years. Oh, and it looked like wolverines had been living in it because the interior was shredded. Other than that it was in fine condition, and was purchased for the princely sum of $750.
Turning wrenches was not foreign to me. My father bought second-hand cars like he bought beer...the cheaper the better. Frequently the towing charge to haul it home was in excess of the book value. We went through a stream of British, German and Swedish iron over the course of my and my brothers' teenage years. No American cars, other than a '63 Falcon...last American car I ever saw with a choke on the dash. The Old Man had a masochistic streak. I think he figured the more time we spent laying under them the less time we spent driving them, which had the benefit of him knowing where we were, and it kept his insurance rates down. Oh, and no self-respecting woman would be seen in one of these things, and most had no back seat, so that was another problem solved. Got Chilton and Haynes guides out of the library and figured stuff out. Then off to college.
So university is done and I'm working. I sold my '70 Opel GT (purchased from a recycler for $500 in 1976 after having been wrecked) and bought a new '79 Capri (Mustang derivative) with a 5.0 liter V8. The Old Man just shakes his head. This is like driving a loaded gun. I'm thinking life doesn't get any better than this, and then in 1986 my youngest brother hauls home a '71 MGB for a daily driver.
That was an eye-opener. Not the B, as we'd encountered one of those earlier during the dark years, but we found out that unlike then parts were now widely available. One could phone-order stuff and have them on the door-step three or four days later. Moss, Victoria British and a few others. Hell, you could buy an entire new body tub if you wanted one. Without breaking the bank we patched up the B and my brother drove it for two or three years back and forth to work.
This got me to thinking. I'd always wanted an older Spridget or a Mini, figuring that with my 6'4" frame that was as close as I could get to "wearing" a car. I started watching the papers and damn if this one didn't turn up a few months later. With a bit of cajoling of the wife (oh, yeah, I got married somewhere along the way) the Sprite was now stuffed in the back of my garage.
Now the beauty of the late-model Sprite/Midget (Spridget) is that it has virtually no collector value (as Sarge has so painfully pointed out, lol). Any expenditures should be exclusively directed at maximizing fun as they are most likely unrecoverable in the long-run. The late-model Sprite is not investment-grade. I wanted the car to run well, be presentable and to shed water, nothing more.
I worked crazy hours throughout most of my career with a fair amount of travel, so fun time was limited. My brother bought a Toyota MR2 and needed a place to store the B...it too ended up in my garage. Sitting in the rain on parking lots had revealed a lot of poorly repaired body damage and corrosion...he decided he wanted to deal with that.
So whenever I could find time we started tearing down the B and the Sprite. We dropped the rear-end of the Sprite and got the broken axle out and replaced, then spent a few weeks tearing down and rebuilding the carbs. Had to rebuild the S.U. fuel pump, which I should have just replaced with a solid-state unit, but I stupidly insisted on using the original which has a point-set similar to the distributor. This would be problematic for years. New exhaust installed and the Sprite was running. The B was mechanically sound.
The following spring we started the body work. The first thing we did was remove all of the trim, the windshields, the luggage racks, gutted the interiors and then stripped the outside of both cars so we could get a handle on where the issues were.
The Sprite had corrosion damage on the front valance, the bottoms of the "A" pillar skins, the outer sills, the bottom half of the rear fenders and the rear valance. The trunk floor was holed at the back. The cockpit floor was thin but serviceable. The wheel wells had a couple of holes. Other than some damage on one rear fender there was very little Bondo.
The B had Bondo on the hood (bonnet), front wings, "A" pillar skins, door skins, outer sills, rear fenders and rear valance. The cockpit and trunk (boot) floors were intact (probably due to a badly leaking rear main-seal which kept the underside of the car liberally coated in engine oil).
We borrowed a mig-welder and started practicing welding. The welds were hideous but functional, so we practiced grinding as well. When we felt reasonably confident we bought the sheet-metal parts we needed and got to it. We measured the door openings, then blocked up the cars and cut out the outer sills and welded in replacements top and bottom. We hadn't removed the doors so we would keep opening and closing the doors to make sure everything was still gapped correctly. When we were done we unblocked the cars and stood on the tunnels figuring if the welds were weak they'd break and the car would collapse. Everything held solid. The hood and wings on the B were just bolt-ons. We uncrimped the door-skins and cut those off and replaced them with new. We cut the corrosion out of the wheel-wells and patched them with pieces of steel we bought at TSC. We left the "A" pillar skins, the bottoms of the rear fenders and the front and rear valances for a professional.
We found a local shop to finish the body work and respray. I remember being disappointed that I couldn't get a lacquer paint job. Apparently that has been banned as the benzene content had killed too many paint-booth guys. We had to settle for clear-coat. I went with BRG for the Sprite which was the original color, my brother went with an antique white (the original color was blue). Remember, only the outside of the cars was being repainted, so when you open the hood of the Sprite you see the original battered BRG, but on the B you see blue...so no concours open-hood display for these. After a few weeks we got the cars back and started the reassembly process. Another winter set in and the budget was shot. We were now pretty well past anything that was recoverable.
Over the winter I took the old interior panels over to The Old Man and he cut new ones for me out of masonite. I bought some heavy vinyl material from one of the local fabric stores and covered them, then I got some upholstery hardware from Lowes and reinstalled the panels. I was short one panel for the driver-side well, as The Old Man had cut a duplicate of one of the others. He'd chucked the old ones so we had no template to use...I'm still missing that one. I bought a pair of seat covers and interior door panels from Moss and installed those. I re-used the foam seat cushions because they were in decent shape and for some reason they wanted stupid money for the molded replacements. I used some baler twine to fashion a web on the underside of the seats to hold everything in place...somehow that seems to have held up. I install a new grille and hood-release.
We got the B interior back in and the windshield reinstalled the following spring. The original interior was black but we redid it in tan...it looks sharp. It took some time to get the electrics all back in place, but then the B was back in running order. It needed some front-end work so we hauled it up to Jack Merryman who was located in Hampstead, Maryland at the time. Jack did some "temporary" repairs, primarily to the steering rack, to resolve those issues. He also showed us how to "true" the wire wheels which we didn't even realize was needed.
I got the windshield back on the Sprite which was a bugger with the shimming and the seal that kept curling up underneath. I put the doors back together with all of the trim, although the driver's side door seal needs some work. I couldn't figure out how to get the window glass back in concurrent with the trim and the panels, so I just left them out (I don't have a top on it anyway). The next guy can worry about getting those back in.
We replaced the springs all around and serviced the dampers.
So then we ran into problems with the Sprite. We replaced the front brake rotors and pads and the rear drum pads. The brake master cylinder leaked like a sieve, so we replaced that with new, but we still had problems. Repeated attempts to bleed the brakes were unsuccessful...air is getting into the lines. The clutch slave cylinder was leaking. We also had problems with the starter engaging the flywheel (apparently a number of teeth had been knocked off the ring-gear at some point). That freaking S.U. fuel-pump that I had insisted on re-using started acting up. The steering rack was loose...way too loose. The hell with it...shove it in the back of the garage and go buy a modern roadster. The Z3 arrives and the B goes home.
Roll the clock forward fifteen years. My kid and I drop the engine and replace the ring-gear on the flywheel and clutch. We drain and slush the tank and I rebuild the fuel pump again, but it still works sporadically. We get the head and tail lights working, except for the brake lights and the turn indicators. We make what further repairs we can, given limited time and expertise. Retirement is looming. Cash will soon be short. I make a laundry list of issues and deliver it and the Sprite to John Tokar at Vintage Restorations to finish making it road-worthy. VR works on it on and off, rebuilds the front-end, repairs the braking system, installs a new solid-state fuel pump, and sorts the electrics.
The sunk cost is beyond anything reasonable. It's still an EPA super-fund site under the hood. But is it a survivor? Yup...some damn fool saved it.
Sarge got me an antenna, but I still need a driver's side mirror...dammit.
Healey
