Interior progress and waiting on parts

Did get other half of front suspension dismantled.  Plus Ray's neighbor at PM Maintenance, Danny, was able to use a torch and get the lower trunnion bolt out for us, thanks Danny!

Waiting on parts to put front suspension back together.  Meantime we're moving forward on the interior.  But first here's a picture of a windshield pillar after Ray sanded it down and painted it, looks pretty darn good:

We got some PC-7 epoxy, which is what the pros on old steering wheel restoration use.  Filled in biggest cracks and put a quick coat of black paint on, looks decent in a picture but in person needs a little more work.  But we think it will look very good when done.

Vince brought the two door caps home to start dismantle and recovering using the vinyl and beading from our interior kit.  The biggest challenge is the rusted up fasteners which typically have one end in a blind location embedded in wood.  When the threads will not break free, then the part embedded in the wood starts spinning.

Here's the parts from the first cap after dismantle:

Here's a closeup of a screw anchor Vince recycled from an old MGTD interior door to replace the one he had to drill out to dismantle the assembly:

The plywood at the base of the soft member of the cap was pretty rotted away, and was damaged in trying to get the screw anchors out.  Vince replaced this with plywood from above mentioned MGTD since it's a flat piece with just six holes in it, then glued the foam to the piece.  Picture shows foam, then new plywood piece, then old damaged plywood:

Finally here's a picture of the rebuilt door cap next to the old one from the other side.  Turned out pretty good.

Hopefully with what he's learned, Vince can do the other door cap in much less than six hours!

Exterior is Done, Front Suspension Causes Troubles

The exterior of the car is now done, looks great!  Even let the new owner install the ultimate "bling" on the car, the MG logo in the middle of the front grill.

Next we wanted to replace the front suspension bushings, a very typical failure on these cars that causes the wheels to be "bowlegged".  When we took it apart though we found we needed more than bushings.  The lower trunnions on both sides are supposed to have a bolt connecting them to the front and rear A arms which rotates within the bottom of the kingpin.  These bolts had seized in place, which meant the rotation now occurred between the bolt and the A arm.  The likely reason they seized is lack of grease.  And the effect is "wallering out" of the holes in the A arms:

In addition, on one side this high pressure on a small area of the bolt had caused the A arm to cut half way through the bolt, clearly a possible safety issue.

So the lesson here is - grease your front suspension components!  Not a real expensive fix, but it is time consuming, including waiting on parts to arrive.

Dreaded Windshield is Done!

Installing the windshield with new rubber along the bottom of the frame is one of the toughest jobs on an MGB from our experience.  It wasn't easy on this car, but was reasonable.  We tried a method we read about using fishing line to hold the rubber in place, we weren't that impressed with this method.  Good thing we also did our prior trick of putting a wire inside the rubber extrusion to pull the flap back forward after installation.  Turned out real well:

There is a little bit of graying around the edges of the windshield, actually shows up more than in real life in the above picture.

The front headlight buckets and turn signals are installed plus the front bumper:

And the rear bumper is installed:

Things are lining up quite nicely.