MGB History - The car that changed the automobile industry."},"lengthSeconds":"3276","ownerProfileUr

At first, sports cars were only for the very rich, but after World War II the mg arrived and they are not so rich, they discovered them. Today's MTB's like racing rack and pinion steering and suspension to the speed gearbox and powerful 1798cc engine are some of the reasons why mg B is the most popular mg ever built. mg the sports car that Americans first loved back in 1922. Kimber, whom Morris had installed as manager of the old Morris workshops, had taken the standard Cowleys and Oxfords and horribly presented them for the competition news in which were called cars.

The MG Morris workshops were hugely successful with enthusiasts, but Morris knew that his cars had earned a reputation for being cheap, reliable racing cars, then as they are not now, but the MGS's achievements could not be compared. deny in case Morris relented and the mg were given their own pattern, Arrington, where they were to develop their own distinctive race and mystic manufacturing is a bit of a misnomer for us, everyone is worried, we have to go to the assembly shop , we bolt things together, we buy the car in partially fabricated chunks we want the power in the power unit assembled, tuned and ready to go in the car we buy, the body trimmed, possibly even with instruments and electrical systems.

I think the only thing we did on ours was the chassis frames that We had quality control of what it really means, we bothered the governor and Road tested them and made sure they were good and correct from the first days, there was something quite intangible, but they are a spirit in the place that was almost tangible, you felt it the moment you walked in, all kinds of people told us this is what they would walk into the bathroom, they felt the place was alive so I took it as charge number one to continue, come with me.

Another way, of course, to keep the factory running here, no matter what happens through its various crisis studies, in the fact that the design authority was elsewhere and did not seem to consider our problems with it, which are somehow urgent and those were the kind of Battles I was fighting to try to get the County designed TD successor, but they didn't so we stabbed and fought the TF of the TD just to buy time while we started the mga and then when we got the mga. a producible way, they are not closed because I had just bought the austin-healey. one was very similar to the other to him, who took it, they were both two sports cars, he was not going to be in business making two sports cars, but during the next two years outside the United States it was such that he had to change his mind and giving us permission to move on when I first went there, of course, John Thorny was the boss and he was a very good director.

I let you get on with it, but he always knew what was going on. She was never my direct chief engineer and boss. She was one of those guys you never knew the lie about. Her train of thought was always jumping on her axe. She always thought everything was fine. It had been written or known about him if you knew where to look for it and he was a very self-taught guy, but he would go home and come back and they would give you a piece of a packet of sugar or one of his children's homework pages torn out of a book with let's try this and that, let's do this and he was ordered dimension author by 1/64 or 1/32 or something like that and he always had a pretty good idea of ​​what you were doing, but one time he had said do that and he was happy that I would let you get on with it and like the MGB said, do it and I came home and did it, no and he didn't alter any lines at all, he always had his own. ideas, but once you were going in the right direction he let you develop it yourself, sit down a bit Virginia, there is no doubt about him for the car, he had a sixth sense, what did he do, will he have talent?

I put Sidney in the same category and I'm not saying that Sidney was educated to the same level that he is a cone, but the fact is that from an engineering point of view I put them very much at the level of linking to mg for 35 years , a magical name for everyone who loves thoroughbred sports cars. name with a tradition but a tradition that never rests on its ro, took another great step forward in 1955 at Lamar, that unique event where quality consumers and the black police here the public saw for the first time a new and notable product from the stable mg. prototype of the car that would soon become world famous as mga the new mg known as e^x 182 by itself, well the predictions have been curious, the new mg is always a major event and because running a prototype in the mother takes courage which some might call restless, but this was no gamble DX 182 proved it two mothers competed the 2,000 mile course in HS six point one seven miles per hour and eighty one point nine seven miles per hour respectively and more was to come as soon as the new thoroughbred in production when the mga and awards began rolling in the 1956 alpine rally, the mga won the first lady's prize, the Dom coupe, and captured the same honor in that Mille Miglia. year also in 1956 in the Romney of the year. age event, the mga had best british performance, won the newcomers cup and most recent second prize and came second in the team prize, not a bad record for a production model in its prime, yes, the market needed an update, which is what it is. the mga was out of the way.

CID actually started directly with the MGB, except in the meantime he designed and built a record-breaking x.18, five world records, all broken by about twenty percent, and five American records on top of that. Veteran record-breaker George Iceland applauds that the brilliant young man has stuck around. The excellent tradition that Iceland and the mg experts started when Sterling Moss was one year old. A tradition that has been built through a combination of creative genius and painstaking work. A tradition that has kept mg cars in the front row for more than a quarter of a century yes, this is a great achievement, but the people at mg are already thinking about the next one, it is that refusal to be satisfied that makes the name of mg is the second in the world.

The X 181 shape that Anna Burke took as the basis for the MGB now sounds a bit far off, but if you look at an MGB with the one, but with the essentials of bulges, intakes and windshield, God knows what got stuck on it, but the basic shape is there several times. We took a look, saw a replacement for the mga and sent a chassis to Italy in Harriman's instructions and the frua body came back, but that's a big flashy American style sports car with a terrible chrome face, a big steering wheel and very , very heavy and pleasant, although it was in its own way, we realized that it was not the route. to be an mg, so Jimmy O'Neill had already taken a look at putting a new body on the mga chassis using the very curvy lines of the record-breaking ex1 81 as a theme, if you will, for the body and it was very fat and bulbous and probably a good shape with little fins because back then there were fins, we went from this body to several other streamlined ones, some versions if you like, you know who looks good and it became obvious that if you put a good body with more space you are and you want more space, you are limited by the width of the chassis and the mga chassis restricted us what we could do, it was there wonderfully strong but you couldn't stay low and widen so we realized we had to change our construction method and that's where, of course, some of the experience that I got from the body plant came because we decided that we would have to go well monocoque, which allowed us to actually put a stressed lower frame because we don't We don't have all the duplication of the outer sill and the chassis frame, you put everything on the sill and first we designed a sylph section, one of the first things we did that was very torsionally rigid along with a very deep central tunnel and Then I sat with a new piece of paper and simply made a new shape of the body, still trying to use some of the curves of the record, but making the car wider, lower and a little more compact, and the shape of the MGB just It emerged, it just evolved.

On paper, a very interesting exercise is to have a roadster open both doors completely and then look at it from the side with the view near ground level and you have two big chunks of cars joined together by almost nothing, no and nothing but internal design. all beam strength and torsional rigidity are almost as good as if you had a top over a tension top. Harry Haring was the model maker who worked on the development and I gave it the two-one-four lines and it turned. We turned it into a model very, very quickly and you could see that it was going to have a nice shape.

I mean, I always felt it was reasonably correct. John spoke to me and the management looked at him and said, "Okay, let's go to full size" and We immediately translated the lines to a full size draft and did it in six weeks to get it completely skinned into shape and up to Quinten Road in Coventry and They built us a wooden model that exactly reproduced the quarter scale, all the joining lines and everything. and that was approved very, very quickly, everyone seemed to like it and the next step was to take them to Coventry to produce a set of panels using the model as a base so we could build the first prototype.

All work on the MGB began. Using a 1622 unit as a base, a two liter Austin engine was installed, but a lot of work was done on the V4 and this V4 worked very well because they decided not to continue with that engine, so quite late we were up to it. We had to decide what we wanted and it seemed like it was going to be the 1622 but luckily the 1800 that the land crab Charles Griffin was making that was going to have a larger version of the B series engine in transverse form. So we were able to acquire 1798 CC, now which became an engine for the MGB quite late, but of course it came in with absolute ease because we left so much space under the bonnet of the MGB that there was no problem, we didn't even do it.

We have to change the engine mounting positions. The rear suspension was designed to train the arm coil spring and Panhard rod location and that allowed us to place the spare wheel in a canted position immediately behind the passenger bulkhead and the fuel tank on the other side of the car, behind from that and The first prototype was completed with steel press and he came to us and built it that way and went straight to paving and road work and two things happened: first, the Panhard rod locating bracket tore off the chassis quite quickly due to the tightness in the corners we were under. put the car in because Tommy Hague was our test driver and he really pushed the car pretty hard.

The other thing, of course, was that the Panhard rod gives a rear-steering effect because the car actually feels the radius of action of the Panhard rod. and so the axle moves sideways, rub the body, the whole body moves in relation to the chassis and you can feel it and that wasn't really a feeling he liked, he said he tried it and Roy tried it and everyone agreed that this was in fact not acceptable, so quite late, when the body tooling was well put together, it was decided that we would use semi-elliptical rear springs, which meant that we had to stretch the part rear of the body and place the spare wheel also so that the car.

In fact, I finished an inch more, just an inch more, so I had to redo the body lines very quickly and the training arm car, although it was never sealed, was the best, it moved much faster in the corners , but when we went to the cart. The spring was a little worse, but still much better than the mga in the corners, so we met the criteria that the car was drivable. Yes, I understood it very slightly at first, but I exaggerated it for sure. The tattoo on the shoulder said: look, I'll come and let you take it. you took your foot off and then nothing happened, you just saw it straightened out, the fans would have liked to see it several hundred times lighter, but the girl said that if it had been several underweight, it would have been many more hundreds of pounds more expensive , it was that almost ideal compromise. between sporty appeal and reliability and cast after time, the spirit of the octagon takes over pedestrians too and you find yourself surrounded by ardent admirers get the optimal speed get a mg B the B had a good reception in 62 and the production club simply It went up and up and up until We were producing about 40,000 a year in the United States and only about 5,000 in the United Kingdom.

Something different, something exciting, that's what made mg the sports car and there's still one that comes out ahead. MGB achieved a lot of success in this time, but of course it has to be done. Please note that at that time, although thebombing competition was based in Abingdon and therefore was in a mg environment, I mean the tablecloths were octagonal in shape, I think if they could find the machine the fishing chips would have come out of tack. In every way it was all very skewed but the money came from the BMC competition committee which was fed and run by George Herring with Alec Issigonis as a major player and to some extent therefore any energy activity was almost a secondary activity.

It sounds like a pattern, it was a major side hustle, but the main push was very much once we got a winning car with the mini and to a lesser extent with the healey 3000, the mg was more of a good thing and the Sebring is a classic example to compete. Florida once a year because we almost chose the drivers and kind of end of course we tried their wonderful days to go see because Donald and Jeff Healey used to take sprites for the three areas and then we took mg B or formerly MJ for the 12 hours , but we put the drivers in partly because of their ability as racing drivers, so we didn't take total incompetence, but there was an element of so-and-so we've done quite well this year with minis or whatever in rallies Well, come on.

Take them to Florida and race the MGB because, let's face it, if you're up against Ferraris and Porsches at 12 hours on an airfield. It didn't really matter who was at the end, Juby, I was just going to go for wins in his class, he was not going to win outright and therefore there could be an end-of-shift party element over his routine pit stops for tire fuel. and the driver change begins, the team managers falter in their cars and the mechanics rush because the low oil pressure is affecting the MGS number 48 is already out of service Cobra and Corvette activity is furious both brands are upset with minor ailments adding frustration to the intense Chevrolet Ford rivalry I think the reason the MGB was successful was simply because of its simplicity.

It was very simple, therefore, easy to prepare. Therefore, it was very reliable. It was a very forgiving car. It was very easy to drive. a pretty Vyse Lascar while people were getting into the mini and some people were having problems with the front wheel drive the more power you put in the mini the more they struggled they healed 3000 I mean what did you say about it it was just wonderful? glorious thunderous smelly beast but there were a lot of people and I was one of them if there was a hint of rain on the road it should never have been rented without a special license me but it was a unique animal with a lot of character the mg just stood there it was a safe, manageable, simple and effective car that was never going to win things outright, but eminently capable of capturing enough things to hang advertising that in two seconds the race will now start from its start running 22 that turns on Ferrari, which is Perhaps tomorrow is to finish them, but do not imagine that the 24 hours of Lamar are dedicated mainly to motorsports by the hundreds of thousands who come here for this great Jamboree. a night limousine.

I could see its importance, but again it was a secondary issue, but no. There was a lot more input than they said: Do you remember that one of the Jewish M's has the special front end and your pictures of Sydow were never involved in that kind of car design? Everything we did, I hope, was important because we were trying to create pegs for the marketing department and we were trying to create technical lessons for the engineering staff, but it wasn't of great importance, we were all very excited when it was the best British car at the mall, but I'm referring, to some extent, to the fact that they were able to finish. in the teens and still be the best British car in the mall said more about the number of British cars in Lamar than the MGB patty Hopkirk on beam ng number 39 thinks this is the only interesting place on the circuit where the Rover BRM designed the 2 liter has accumulated only a black fire on the Spitfire both drifters continue practically to the same left and the field reports that everything is under control the MGB 1,800 from Hopkirk and the hitches have stolen a lap to the front and the three are now divided Alpena pari of course we will try anyone who has the mini, it was very factory driven, we were setting the tune with the MGB, outside influences like private owners tended to play a bigger role because it was so reliable there could be a car in the shop that had worked for sort of six hours or something like that, but not just with an oil change, but almost with an oil change, was capable of doing another six Harrods in the Ford GT.

Andrew Hedges mg joins the Spitfire. eat and with the mg surpassing the kill marker and Turner let the opposition make the fuss for one Andrew hedges with the mg leave the car bigger I think the philosophy of mg was always built to build a car that was a driveable car and drivable that was safe and pleasant to drive, anyone could drive and participate in a moderate form of competition if they really wanted to and move on to more severe forms using a special development and that was always the case, it was 42 hours, from Kabul. to Bombay and now the main danger was not so much the terrain but the people from the Pakistan border to Lahore, the red bands of the spectators were almost unbroken and grew thicker with every mile and economy and the hunter was comfortably located and Jean Denton was still fresh. despite a tough ride in the MGB rented by Nova, his eyes were on Silverstone for the regression car race and there were three db2s for Ashton racing as a team, one after the other and he was very much in love with it this way.

I said that's the way we should. go after and from that moment on that's what I set my eyes on, the MDA didn't work that way largely because I wasn't looking at the time, I think really and everyone Sydney had their own ideas and I wasn't going to stop it halfway, but we finally made it when he designed the MGB. He had it in mind that I wanted to put a roof on it and then, having gotten the Roadster P on commission, we tried really hard to put a roof on it. on top every time it looked bad and we finally sent it - it's quite beautiful when it came back, that's all, you know, once we tried R on ordinary roads - windshield so that I don't have to repress the windshield frame and all the rest it has special screen grasses and God knows what kind of costs would follow, that's still, they've made the difference between a horrible looking car and a beautiful one and all.

I fell in love with it, so it was exactly the right thing to do and raising the windshield by inches made a difference, of course, in the amount of light in the car. A beautiful looking machine. It's an MGB GT that's really taken us seriously, but its racing suspension handles the road beautifully. What made it tick Race-proven 1798cc engine and a fully synchronized 4-speed shifter. I'd love to look inside. Go ahead and see the full instrumentation. Individual seats that recline and a rear seat that folds flat to provide additional luggage space. It is almost a contemporary classic.

The MGB GT is a one-of-a-kind traditional luxury with sports car performance. This is life when we designed the B, we didn't think in terms of the V8 power unit, but we did think in terms of the 6-cylinder engine and that's why in the mg B you will find such a large space between the front of the engine and the rear of the radiator that was allowed for the other two cylinders when the time came because we calculated that the MGB would be replacing the great ely john Thornley director and general manager drives a mg B with Sydney in evert chief engineer of the sports car division BMC their job is to build or for sports cars BMC austin-healey 3000 mg B austin-healey sprite and MG the evaluation Manager of Customs Works have been building sports cars in Abingdon for over 30 years their slogan fast safety is known throughout the world and it's more than just a slogan high performance for sure it's become a tradition just attach it to all the products and have them when they were talking about replacing the big Healey so they said to me can you make a Healey version of a mg V and that it is also a mg C?

In fact, there's a lot of rationalization there and I did a '51 with a Healey type radiator on, but Donald Healey didn't want a car that was an MGB design with his name running around now he said of Hylia Healey said I was never that agonizing and He said yes, it's fine with a six-cylinder engine, but it's about an inch and three-quarters of an inch taller. Here's a design so we can get it into the mg v much better, but you'll have a little more chance to get it to breathe, but will it stand up? I didn't alter it one bit, so they gave us this big six hundred heavy power unit to get into you, hence the big bulge for the mg C and the very front radiator.

In a way I felt it because the total genius of Alec Issigoni thinks of the many things are simple, I wasn't complicated since MGB doesn't say that there, but underneath it, but there wasn't much enthusiasm there, maybe if it had three wheels or there would have been front-wheel drive, it would have been four-wheel drive or whatever. His eyes may have raised, but it was something that when the engine shut down, he was 70 pounds heavier than we had been told. Put it in the car and it probably knelt, so the way to fix it was to stiffen the torsion bars, why not the suspension?

But it produced a car that had a very marked tendency to go straight, but in curves hands are wonderful things. They can put together something as robust and reliable as a front disc brake or as precise as a carburetor. They can put together a four-speed gearbox. fully synchronized gearbox or race-proven engine in an all-steel monocoque body, there are more than a thousand pairs of hands and Abington England together build the MGB mg, the sports car that America first loved, obviously, '69 American regulations were always They became more and more severe. and they are really what affected the MGB until the end of its production, that from 30 miles per hour to zero, as happens with technological choices that require just under a tenth of a second, vehicle crash tests are complicated affairs and Vehicle preparation begins on the Experimental Department floor up to two weeks before a test, testing of the Jay 81 vehicle is scheduled as a full vehicle test with airbags in the driver and passenger positions.

Initial preparations are complete. The car is dragged to the Mara accident facility. Nanami with the car on the concrete block in its initial impact position high-speed cameras can be placed to ensure complete coverage of the impact of the collision speed of 30.4 miles per hour not fast you may think the results are dramatic and intensely interesting this is what the highest speed camera recorded a display that meets the allotted time schedule of 30 milliseconds and according to the electronic readout a low level of fictitious deceleration that I had to do, that is a very special car , vehicle with SS v1 security systems, they simply said that we are going to make a car that will show The British attitude towards safety and our particular brief was to install security systems in a very small vehicle.

It is already something that is done in a large car, but can it be done in a small space? So they just gave me an MGB and said, "We want to do it." do several things in terms of padding and safety, we have a suggestion from the brake people that they have a ride leveling system that is very, very safe and very, very good and this is the lock people on lemming ttan and they would have a driving leveling system. system they were using in ambulances, but said they could do it in a much smaller car.

We built that suspension on a Rover one of the late 2000 TCS or something and did the handling comparison with a Chevrolet, so we had completely different front and rear suspension to the MGB built into the car's padding throughout, filled in the sills, the outside of the doors and the outside of the wings, under and behind the splash guard and the rear and even the cushions with a crushable rigid foam and we actually did a side impact test and made a film for the exhibition , well we crashed an MGB into an MGB sideways at 15 miles an hour and we made a stock car and the intrusion was about four and a half inches on the face of the inside door panel we modified the car with all this foam and the intrusion it was half an inch, so obviously it was a huge improvement.

One of the routes you could go, we also did the big rear view mirror. The idea was that you should have our rearview mirror absolutely panoramic. rear view and there is no way you can do that with the normal mirror so you have a periscope system on the roof for this big unsightly mirror which added about a couple of square feet to the areafront and also works with Smith's. We made a windshield mirrored speedometer so you can see the speed on the windshield under a reflective patch and I see in this week's paper they talk about doing exactly that and in fact we did it in 1972.

We also had a trump system in the car that cut off the ignition and you had to enter four numbers, but you also had to do it in a certain time before the signal could make the car work, so you put the key in, turned it and entered this number and the car will be launched. It had the first of the low, soft bumpers on the car. The idea was that we would have a bumper that would hit the previous people well below the knee so that it would tip over the car. have a big, long, clean hood, if you hit the panel you will dent it but you won't hurt yourself too much.

There's a type of man who wants more than basic transportation in a car, he wants something fast and responsive with reflexes that matched his own and was responsive with the kind of qualities that made mg the sports car America first loved. time. mg was still a jump ahead of the bumpers of course, it was the big giant over Ida, so you could hit a wall at five miles an hour in a fair race. purely a five mile per hour frontal impact and that was what we called the Sabrina bumper is a big deal. Rubber things were added to the override in a large cast container behind to take the path that only lasted one year and not the next.

Last year you had to have a bumper between 16 and 20 high, you had to turn a big nose sway in the corners at 45 degrees and forward and the car had to hit the block at 5 miles per hour with No damage mechanics to the car's primary operating partner as the engine should still be running well and not touching anything and all lights should be fine. The car must be drivable and that's when we went to the large bumper molded inside each MGB, it's a beautiful surprise. At no additional cost, MG gives you the sky, the wind in your hair, not to mention a four-speed shifter, front disc brakes, rack-and-pinion steering, and the race-proven MG engine.

It's a very wide world out there and you can see it all in the MGB, the British Leyland open sports car, the Costello obviously started racing, he was getting engines and building the converted B's and Harry Webster got a Costello and sent it to us and said : Well, let me have a report on this car. What do you think about this? Can you make me one? Roy Brocklehurst and Barry Jackson were up and running. We bought a Range Rover engine and put it in the car. In six weeks we had a car ready for them. running and got management approval very quickly and that was in 1972 with the fall of '72, production was scheduled for press release for August of '73 and in July of '73 Roy Brock Lewis said to me oh we have to go to Longbridge and he didn't tell me why he was in the car. and he said ok he said I'm going to work for a long time it was your chief engineer you're going to launch the v8 it went into production very easily there were no big problems it was accepted very well but of course it didn't work that long because number one, we never got more than 48 engines, just one week we just couldn't get engines for it and the insurance and gas issues blew up at that point and all of that conspired against the car so they almost traded it in for a rubber bumper car. in 75 and the model year

changed

and fun in the sun stopped being produced in a topless mg or triumph they are waiting for you now it's your nice sports car dealership Schliemann obviously we knew in 1978-79 that we had production volume almost, but we needed more performance because emissions regulations meant the addition of a catalyst, which meant we only had something like sixty-seven horsepower available instead of about 19 horsepower from the MGB, so the American cars didn't get us.

Fool, the rice pudding, they were believable, so we had to do something. We had the O series engine at the time and in fact the first O series engine was in an MGB GT a long, long time ago, but we started. We worked on what was called the Chrysler lean burn system, which bought American know-how from the Chrysler people and was a printed circuit board that modified your carburetor system throughout the rev range. It worked reasonably well and we were pretty well on our way. Later, when we were told to change course because Lucas could do something even better and Lucas had gotten a 12-cylinder version of an emissions regulation with the Jaguar, but we were able to get four cylinders of this into the MGB, so we had a There is no fuel-injected production car in its standard form, a 2-liter that produces with full mission equipment 112 horsepower instead of sixty-seven, so we have a fairly fast car and again, and because, surprisingly, it was going to be faster. we modified the front brakes we upgraded the front brakes we modified the front springs we altered the anti-roll bars and we actually built a whole series of prototypes for the L Series program and I sent six to the states and the B had the best results ever We received from the North American cars the fastest car they had ever had there, the emissions passed all the regulations easily because fuel injection allows you to do that and we also had a two car retro version running for the European market because I always thought we should go back to Europe if we had a car that was quiet enough and had the right emissions levels and Oh, really, it seemed like it was obviously time to do it at the same time that we had been looking at the and the Production had slowed down, but generally, for Of course, it was a marine engine, which was common with a fast fire and I understood that the Spitfire was going to end, so it was going to end anyway, so our concentration had to be on the MDV.

America is coming home in The Shape of Things to Come, the politicians said they wanted the tr7 to work in the US as well and they had already looked at the tr-8, the v8 version, they were obviously doing parallel work and the rationalization said that They should go. with the last car, so I think at that time the decision was made that the MGB would have to end and if the MGB ended and the and the was going, then there would be no production theft and therefore everything that we could close and the only exercise we did What we had done was the provisional one, which was a do 21, which was the mid-engine car that we did when we tried to do the tr7.

They asked us to look at a new mg and we weren't allowed to use a x2 3 4, which was the platform frames a stock car, which Roy Brockman did, I think that was the idea of ​​competition in those days, they said, ok, triumph, go ahead with a conventional car, let's make mg look at the mid-engine or because that was the name of the game in Grand Prix cars, if you remember, so we took an MGB GT, cut the middle of it and put an e-series on it the rear, so we were actually pushing the car along with a big daddy and we actually built a prototype and it handled reasonably well, it had all the problems of the long radiator tubes in the front and the throttle linkages , but this guy and Paul Hughes did the design for a '21, so the design is completely impractical for a road car in my opinion and we weren't very happy we did it because they told us to do it and we could have made it work reasonably well, but it didn't even take much more development time than we were allowed, it was a great family, I mean being an avid Dhoni, I was deployed from before the war during a school where you knew everyone, We had three or four generations of families in the factory and we simply did not have a strike, something that people got along well, at least we have raised.

I think they all did, but they all said no, that you could go buy the cars, in the end you saw, take your own problems, you know, and that's what the management talked about with the juries of the stores, any opportunity and every opportunity. I only had one meeting with a union representative. Eric Brenda, senior shop steward the entire time I was there, was an issue that needed to be resolved about the mechanics leaving and the level of pain they would suffer when they were outside the factory because of what was happening in other factories. Something we generated ourselves was a comparison that was resolved in about an hour, so it was a good place to work.

People talked and came and everyone was always interested in what was happening everywhere at all levels. Oh, I'm horrible. The important thing was the fact that we never had production lines with hours of conveyor belt, the cars were always pushed up by hand and when they finished a section, some of you seemed slow, you could hear a lot of pushing, pushing them up and down. down, and the cars moving a little faster down the line was easy because we were building one car per man a week when we were going at 1100 cars a week with people drawn per lemon, it was that kind of size operation there are four basic ingredients in the building a car body The tools that make the panels, the jigs to hold them together, the equipment to weld them and the people who know what they are doing are gone from the starting point and that was a Christmas holiday.

I took home the PPN sheets like me. You would meet them with production parts and assembly detail sheets and break them down armed with this list. I came back to Swindon mainly because that's where most of the tools were and we started looking around there. The parks died looking for these tools. Once we established that most of the dies were present, it was a logical step to say, well, we should really produce a body, but the other thing is to have the parts that make the car, the presses that They make the car from the dies you need. the jigs and fixtures that keep the various parts in the correct relationship with each other, we were lucky again to find some of the jigs, some of the main jigs, not all within the original producing factory either and those jigs that we brought to find and restore your After we have the dies and jigs, the equipment we borrow and procure from the various plants, again it is enormously expensive each of the transformers and timers we need and we have 18 at the MGB costing £12,000 new, so you need get all the K. all the power, both high voltage and ordinary 240 volt water-air, for each of the guns and it takes steel to hang them in the world on the guns, so it is a very expensive business to do the welding operation as we have done.

We were lucky because we deliberately positioned ourselves halfway between Oxford and Swindon, which is where the skills we needed to produce a body mainly existed at the beginning, there were people who had retired after 20, 30, 40 years in the trees, they retired in advance and We have tempted them to come out of retirement. We pursued the idea of ​​building a car, but it was decided that Heritage was not in a position to produce a car itself. There will be difficulties within Rover in one of its companies producing a car. For that reason it was stripped, we do the full body rack and for our V8 we send it to Cowley for final assembly painting and final assembly and the body that comes out of here is prepped and ready to go straight to their paint shop without any other work in it. so it is an important task for us that we have also reintroduced for our v8, but they will also be able to be used in previous mg Bs the main front cross member to which the entire front suspension is attached the gearbox cross member the pedal box are the window regulators, so A number of things that will benefit the Heritage MGB if I can call it that, apart from the last ones, are the v8