An MG Affair From Both Sides of the Pond

I returned to the UK in 2012 after living for twelve years in the U.S.A. Besides bringing my family, I also brought back a memento of my third MGA (as well as becoming a proud U.S. citizen). I’ve always loved MGs.

I have previously owned a 1971 Sprite (which I never quite finished putting back on the road after a full resto) and a 1980 MGB GT, but one of my favourites was a two door 1970 MG 1300. I would love to find another of those for sale! However, the car I want to tell you about is none of these. Instead it is an MGA Roadster, though I took a rather roundabout route to getting it.

I have been lucky enough to have had a wide and geographically diverse career so far, working in telecoms over the two decades following university and travelling extensively. In fact, my love affair with the U.S.A. started in the mid-1990s when I worked for six months in California, a place not exactly unknown for its car culture. However, after returning to the UK and having more fun working in the other weather extreme of Sweden (doing things like driving a Volvo 240, with its steering rack reversed, around a figure of eight on a management training course), I returned to the States and emigrated to North Carolina. This was at the time of the fuel blockade in Britain, but the first thing I did to celebrate was buy a brand new V8 Mustang convertible. Well, gas was under $1 a gallon, so I thought this was entirely sensible and a great car in which to take my driving test.

I had almost finished rebuilding my 1971 Sprite before leaving the UK, but hadn’t quite completed it and sold it for probably half of what I’d spent on it to that point. Although I thought I had old MGs, Sprites, and 1100/1300s out of my system, I soon spotted an MGA 1500 for sale locally. Well, you never really get over MGs, do you? My 1500, although presentable, had seen better days. I enjoyed tinkering with it, but hankered after something a little nicer, and perhaps a 1600. I ended up selling the 1500 to a very nice chap in Denmark, who bought it for his dad. He later sent me some pictures of it in Copenhagen when it came off the ferry.

Several months later, and just before a trip to Turkey to get married, a rather straight white 1961 MGA 1600 found me! It was barely ten miles from my home and as I explained to my fiancé, I really needed to have another fun car. It ran, but needed re-commissioning. It had whitewall tires and they were bald, the carburetors were out of tune, the brakes were soggy, and the wiring behind the dash looked like a rat’s nest. But the body was rust free. Oh, and it had a wooden dash that made it look like a boat.

On the other hand, I really wanted a 1600 with the disc brakes, and I do prefer the rear lights and proper indicators on that model. I’ve made that 1961 MGA sound pretty bad, but what really made me buy it was the fact that the body had no signs of rust and it was very straight and clean. I knew it had tremendous potential, and though I’m more than happy to do a bit of wrenching now and again, I’m past the stage in my life where I want to do any welding. This car was just right for me, and I managed to convince my wife-to-be that it was a good deal at U.S. $7000. I bought it in 2001, a week before getting married.

I ended up going through it and doing all the little jobs that needed fixing. One of the jobs I did was to completely rewire it in a weekend. I wasn’t intending to do that – I just wanted to refit the metal dash that came with the car, but when I saw the state of the wiring behind it, I bought a new loom from Moss. I also rebuilt the suspension and added a front anti-roll bar.

By the end of that I’d got it running great, but my son had come along and I had other things to think about. I still don’t really know why I sold the car, I just decided to advertise it and before I knew what had happened, somebody from Tennessee had bought it. I realized right away that I’d made a mistake. Yes, I was travelling a lot on business and with a young family the car was not being used much at all, but I would have had more time in which to enjoy it eventually and I had plenty of space at home to store it

So then I had a gap of two years, in which time we had another child, Oscar, and one day I just thought: I want another MGA. I did contact the chap in Tennessee to see if he would sell me back my old car, but he didn’t want to part with it. So any car I did buy had a lot to live up to. I looked at a lot of cars before I found one that I wanted. I remember also one particularly ugly car where the chassis had been welded to the sill structure – and it’s always the case that the owner thinks it is worth a lot of money because they have spent a bit on it here and there. What they don’t realize is that they have been throwing good money after bad, and I didn’t want to have to pay for the privilege of undoing all those bad repairs. In the end I looked for several months, and even considered getting a TF1500 that was for sale just down the road from me in Maryland, but it was just a little bit too expensive (driveable, which was fun, but needing too many cosmetics) for me and they couldn’t move on the price. That did get me thinking that perhaps I could switch my allegiance to the T-Types, but at the same time this MGA came up in Pennsylvania.

It had come from the Midwest and was in excellent shape after a body-off restoration. It was a real show queen and when this guy showed me all the trophies he had won with it, I was blinded by the glare! I think that after two years he had done all of the local show circuit and couldn’t really do anything else with it, which was why the ‘A’ was for sale. It looked lovely, but being a show queen it was not particularly well sorted mechanically. When I took it for a test drive I wasn’t particularly happy with the oil pressure, the suspension was poor, and the bushes were worn…. Here I go again making it sound worse than it was, but this was all work I could do, and really the body condition and panel fit sold it to me. So at last, my current and treasured red 1960 MGA came into my possession and once again I’d bought an MG, only to then go through it with a fine tooth comb from front to back getting it to run properly.

The next thing I want to do is fit a five speed gearbox, but the cost of that does not currently fit the spousal approval board. I did put a dual Monza exhaust on the back because I think that sounds better (which, of course, is a euphemism for louder), and a different gear knob which will upset the purists (but I have kept the original). I’ve kept it positive earth, but fitted a Petronix ignition, polyurethane bushes, and new lever arm dampers all around. It also has front and rear anti-roll bars. I also put in a load of extra fuses and I’ve polished it. A lot! My 2011 Valentine’s present came in the form of Lucas lamp covers now that is a proper February 14th gift!

This car lived with us in Virginia and survived another job promotion that took us to Georgia. Georgia, wit its heat and humidity, is another matter. The biggest problem was the heat in the summer, so I did fit an oil cooler and though I never had any major overheating issues, I did come close a few times. The heat in Georgia may be one thing, but the sudden rain storms we used to get in North Carolina were quite another – it would find you and pour down, then half a mile up the road it would be bone dry. We got pretty quick at putting the roof up in a hurry, but I do remember one time when we got caught at a light and the heavens opened. We got soaked, and the only place we could pull into to get out of the rain was a car wash. Not many people go into a car wash to escape from the water.

I got the MGA in 2010 and went to a lot of car shows in the States, before we moved back to the UK in July 2012. On the day I bought this car, I said that it was a keeper and that it would be coming back to the UK with us. Once over here, I got it MoT’d (UK’s dreaded safety inspection) right away on the chassis number and registered it with the DVLA. I was allocated a less than desirable registration mark first of all, one that spelled YUK. So I went into the office the next day and explained that I had put a lot of effort into the car and thought it deserved something a little better. A rather nice lady rang me up a week later and said she’d found me a more suitable one, reading the letters out one by one, slowly just to tease me: Y… U… M! What a difference one letter makes. I did write her a letter of thanks for a job so well done.

The conversion to RHD cost about £600, or at least that’s how much I have admitted to. A lot of the parts could be moved across, but I bought a new steering rack from Moss, with other bits such as pedals, brackets, cables, and so on being a mixture of new and second-hand. I already had a RHD dash, which I’d seen on eBay while I was in the U.S., bought and had shipped to my father’s house here in the UK. That dash had been copper plated, though I didn’t know when I bought it, so I had to spend a lot of time rubbing that down ready for repainting. The fact that half of the copper plating was already peeling off did not make the job any easier.

The accelerator pedal is completely different because on the LHD car you have a bar that goes all the way across and you can actually operate the gas as a passenger, which is none too safe. On the RHD car you don’t need the bar, but I had a bit of a problem getting the new bracket to fit my second-hand pedal. I also had to shave a little metal off the second-hand clutch pedal to get it to clear the steering column – I guess there was just some variation in the parts even at the factory in those days and a bit of fettling required to build them. Overall it was a pretty straightforward conversion. I’ve since fitted a new master cylinder and filled it with silicon fluid. I also had to reposition the wipers to sweep the area in front of the driver on the right, which required new arms and the repositioning of the gear wheel in the wiper motor to get them to park correctly.

I’ve always had a lot of friendly advice on MGAs from Barney Gaylord, who runs the website www.mgaguru.com (you can see me at http://mgaguru.com/mgtech/care/cf201.htm). I can’t thank him enough or recommend him too highly. He also helped me with the LHD-to-RHD conversion with information on his website. The MG was only completed and back on the road in February 2013, and driving it again felt great. The only thing I have found hard to adjust to in the new format is the indicator switch on the right of the dash, and I am toying with the idea of a chrome column stalk. But for now I am just getting back into the show and club scenes. I’m not interested in the trophies, but I like to park up and chat with other owners. Mind you, I am keeping all my lefthand drive parts for when we go back to the States – this car is definitely a keeper and my sons will take the wheel after me. I learnt my lesson about selling too soon with the white car. And of course I’ll need another MGA for my younger son when we come home to the U.S.A.

This article originally appeared in MGA! magazine and was written by Craig Allinson.