It was late 1978 and I was living in Columbia Maryland which is a southwest suburb of Baltimore. I was 25 and for the first time in my life MG-less!! If fact, after buying my first piece of real estate, a condo, I was also car-less. Van pools to work and no girlfriends. Life can be tough without wheels.

I started (for fun) looking for my next MGB and low and behold found a tempting “B” in Washington DC. I went down, checked it out. The “B” had a cam knock but a perfect body with absolutely no rust. A bargain for $700! I got the car back home and began the process of a poor man’s restoration. The engine did check in decent shape. I had a friend drive me down to Rosie’s Junk Yard in Laurel, MD to look for a cam shaft and cam buckets (or lifters). There were 4 cam shafts sitting on a bench so using my best scientific method held each one up to the sunlight and took the one that looked cleanest. Not a bad deal for $20!!

The car ran OK for about a year giving me sometime to recover financially from being a real estate tycoon. I rehabbed the Mongrel using parts from different cars and learned as I went…. mostly the hard way! It has been 43 years since that golden time and only had Mongrel worked on by a real professional twice.

OK, present day 2022 (Wow, how time flies!!) and during those years in between I married and had 2 daughters one of which likes MGs and is darn good with a manual transmission. She lives in Minneapolis which has a good MG club and a former CMGC member, Gene Cooper. Rachel also has a 2-car garage to keep the Mongrel dry and tight during those Minnesota winters. I am also beginning to think about buying a MGBGT. Put the 2 together and it was time to prep Mongrel for an “eventual” transfer north.

Susan and are blessed here in east Tennessee with not 1 but 4 British Car Clubs and several well qualified British car restorers. I had previously written a Driveline story on Richard Lockhart who owns "English Auto located on the north side of Knoxville. Richard does a good deal of higher end work on these cars and at the time of the Driveline story he was working on a Jaguar XK120, an E-Type and a 106 Healy. Richard is tasked with a makeover for Mongrel and didn’t waste time getting the engine out and disassembled.

As you can see by the pic Mongrel is in good company with a V12 in the background. Driving up to English Auto from the house takes about an hour and Mongrel ran well at 70mph. At my own last tune-up which was 18 months ago everything checked out fine except for a little smoking probably from a leaky side cover gasket. Welllllllllllll…! A compression test revealed bad rings in the #1 cylinder - more than just a leaky side cover and gunk that had accumulated over many, many years. I also had a leaking brake manifold junction under the hood and a number of smaller items that simply need replacing. Yikes!

Richard makeover is well under way and with my own work to make Mongrel a more long-distance driver ( wrote an article for the Driveline on that too) Susan and I just might make a trip to Chicago in it for an event in the future.

~~Ralph Arata