Took fuel tank to Dave at Brown's Radiator and had it cleaned and treated.
We now have the hydraulic systems bled and they work fine. Also the clutch disc is not frozen to the flywheel, good news. We did find the rear brake shoes were delaminated, so put on new shoes. Vince fixed the hand brake lever by installing some springs inside the handle to make it work right. We were given a used SU fuel pump, which turns out to work just fine. During installation of the fuel pump though we removed the fuel line between the tank and pump and found the following:
The fuel line was rusted completely through where it touched the bottom of the trunk floor, seen in the middle of the above picture. Good thing we took it out, we would have struggled to find this reason for not getting fuel. Bought generic metal line from Autozone and formed is as a replacement, worked just fine. We now have fuel to the carbs and no leaks (well, one more VERY small leak at the fuel pump, we'll fix that later).
Checked compression again, got about 150 for the first three cylinders but the fourth drops down to about 100. This is good enough to run the engine, and we are hopeful that it's crud on the valve seat that will clear after running.
Our main issue right now is we have no spark. Even swapped the cap, wires, and coil from another car with no success. Have 12 volts to the coil and distributor. So we get to work inside the distributor now. Once we get spark, we should have a running and driveable car.
We've also done more checking into the rocker panel and structural issues. At some point in the past a beefy piece of angle iron (2 inch legs, 1/4 inch thick) was installed in the area of the inner sills that passes from front wheel well to rear wheel well. This replaces the structural integrity you get from the box section of the rocker panels. We have measured the deflection of the car with doors open and find it has the same stiffness of our two other MGB's. So we are very comfortable in replacing the rocker panels on the outside without completely recreating the inner box section from the car's original design. Put another way, once we are done with the rocker panel and lower fender repairs we think the car will look completely stock and probably be stronger that stock. We also have found a friend that has a welder and expertise who will weld in our new panels for us this winter.
After driving the car and fixing whatever that turns up, we will start removing paint. We are very curious what lurks under that crappy paint job!
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