So I’m finally getting some time to work on my own cars now the driving season is over.

On Saturday December 13th, I pulled the engine & gearbox out of my B GT. I did have some help, thanks Dave! No issues although 4 hours (even allowing for some interruptions) isn’t going to break any records.

The engine looks like it’s not the original, judging by the numbers it appears to be a 72-74 vintage thought the car is a 1970. I have records going back to 1985 so any change would have been done before then. I did remove the cylinder head once the ‘lump’ was out. It looks like when the engine was rebuild in 1986 it wasn’t converted to run unleaded gas. There are no inserts for hardened exhaust valve seats, so that will get fixed while we are doing all this. It’s only done about 10,000 miles since the rebuild so I don’t think I need to look at the bottom end. The clutch looks brand new so I won’t change that either.

  I swapped some parts over from the old gearbox on to the ‘new’ overdrive one and found the clutch slave cylinder pushrod was worn & generally in pretty poor condition so a new one is on order along with some other stuff, like engine paint, the correct brass manifold nuts & various other assorted bits & pieces.

I spent the remaining week and Saturday getting everything ready to put the engine back in on Sunday, 12/21.

Well as expected things were quiet with other things going on — family visiting and so on. I hope you got something MG related in your stockings on Thursday? I did -- a buying guide for MGB’s. It made interesting reading on Saturday as I spent the day recovering from a 19 mile run in the

morning. I don’t think much will be happening at the ‘Fix-it’ garage on Saturdays for the next couple of weeks, until my body gets used to these longer runs. The marathon is only 9 weeks away……..

Sunday I did get back in there & made an interesting discovery on my B’s heater. As I have the center console out for recovering as part of the A/C project I thought I would check out the heater controls while it was still accessible. Just as well I did. I found the air control flap cable was working but the flap wasn’t! Turned out the bracket the cable-end mounts to had broken away from the flap. So you can turn the knob on the dash, the cable moves but nothing else happens. Might explain why the PO (Previous Owner) was having trouble. Only way to fix it is to remove the heater………. Agh!

As the cylinder head is still off the car and thus the water is drained it made it a good time to do. Of course the bolts were rusted and needed to be chiseled off, but I got it out of the car in an hour. Now comes the job of fixing it and then putting it back into the car. I think the only other way of diagnosing this fault without visually seeing the flap would be to drive the car to see if the air movement changed in response to the knob having checked the cable etc. was ok. Bottom line is the B is going to be on the lift for a few more weeks.

This week I have Jan 2nd off so will be working on the B then and the coming Sunday. 1/4. Per the above I wouldn’t bet on much happening on the Saturday.

Drop on by if you want to see what’s going on.

Cheers,

~~Steve Skegg