MGB History - The car that changed the automobile industry.

in the beginning sports cars were only for the very rich but after World War Two Along Came mg and are not so very rich discovered it today's MTB as rack and pinion steering races and suspension for speed gearbox and hefty 1798 cc engine a few reasons why the mg B is the most popular mg ever built mg the sports car America love first way back in 1922 Kimber who Morris had installed as manager of the old Morris garages had taken standard Cowley's and Oxford's and horrid them up for competition news the cars were called after the firm mg Morris garages [Music] they were enormous ly successful among enthusiasts but Morris knew his cars had built a reputation because they were cheap and reliable racing cars then as now are neither yet the achievements of the MGS could not be denied [Music] in the event Morris relented and cut the apron strings mg's were given their own patron Arrington where they were to develop their own distinctive breed and mystique [Music] manufacture is a little bit of a misnomer of ours everyone's concerned we've got to assembly shop we screwed things together we bought the car in in partly manufactured chunks we want the power at power unit in assembled tuned and ready to go in the car we bought the body trimmed possibly even with instruments and electrics in it I think about the only thing we made in in ours was the chassis frames we had the quality control on the thing that's really what it amounts to we bothered the governor and we Road tested them and made sure that they were good and right right from the earliest days there had been something quite intangible but they're a a spirit in the place which was almost tangible you felt it the moment you walked in all sorts of people told us this is what they will walk into the bath they felt that the place was alive so I regarded as number one charge to keep that going come with me the other way of course to keep the factory going here come what may through its various crisis etudes in the fact that the design authority was elsewhere and it didn't seem to regard our problems with it that's in any way urgent and those were the sort of battles that I was fighting to try and get the successor to the TD designed by County but they didn't so we knife and fought the TF from the TD purely to buy time while we got the mga going and then when we got the mga into a producible form they're not shut on it because he had just bought the austin-healey one was very much like the other to him who took it they both two sports cars he wasn't going to be in business making two sports car but during the ensuing couple of years from America was such that he had to change his mind and give us permission to go ahead when I first went there of course John thorny was the gaffer and he was a he was a very good director he let he just let you get on with it but he always knew what was going on she never my direct and boss chief engineer was one of those guys that you never knew the lie his line of thought he was always jumping about his ax he always thought that everything was there had been written or was known about if you knew where to look for it and he was very much a self-taught guy but he would go off home and come back in and you would get a piece of a sugar packet or one of his kids homework pages torn out of a book with let's try so and so let's do this and he was ordered author of dimension by 1/64 or 1/32 or something like that and he always got a pretty good idea what you were doing but once he had said do that and he was happy he would let you get on with it and like the MGB said do it and I just got home and did it no and he didn't alter any lines at all he was 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 no question about him for the automobile he had a sixth sense what did is he gonna have a flair I put Sidney in the same category and I'm not saying that Sidney was educated to the same level that is a cone is what but the fact remains that from an engineering standpoint I put them very much on level pegging [Music] mg for 35 years a magic name to all who love thoroughbred sports cars a name with a tradition but a tradition that never rests on its ro it took another great stride forward in 1955 at Lamar that unique event where quality consumers and black police here the public saw for the first time a new and remarkable product of the mg stable the prototype of the car which was soon to become world famous as the mga [Music] the new mg known as the e^x 182 for itself well the predicts have been curious the new mg is always a major event and because to run a prototype at the mom takes courage which some might call restless but this was no gamble DX 182 proved it two mothers competed the 2,000 mile course at HS six point one seven miles an hour and eighty one point nine seven miles an hour respectively and more was to come no sooner was the new thoroughbred in production as the mga and the prizes began to roll in the 1956 Alpine rally saw the mga winning the first lady's prize the coupe de Dom and it captured the same honor in the Mille Miglia of that year also in 1956 at the year's Romney age event the mga is put up the best British performance won the newcomers Cup and the second latest prize and came second in the team prize not a bad record for a production model in its best yeah the market was due for an update which is what what's the mga was out of the way CID actually started straight in on the on the MGB except that in between whiles he designed and built a x.18 one the record breaker five world records all broken by about twenty percent and five American records into the bargain veteran record breaker George Iceland applauds the brilliant young man was maintained the fine tradition that Iceland and the mg experts began when sterling Moss was a year old baby a tradition that has been built up by a blend of creative genius and painstaking labor a tradition which has kept mg cars in the front rank for more than a quarter of a century yes this is a great achievement but the mg people are already thinking about the next it's that refusal to be satisfied which makes the name of mg second to none in the world [Music] the shape of the X 181 Anna Burke took as the basis for the MGB now that sounds a bit of a long shot but if you look at an MGB with the X 1/8 one in mind you can see that it is the X 1/8 one but with the essentials of bumps and inlets and windscreens goodness knows what all stuck on to it but the basic shape is there several times I we had a look-see at a replacement for the mga and we sent a chassis out to Italy on in Harriman's instructions and the frua bodied thing came back but that is a big American styled sports car flashy with chrome dreadful face you a great big steering wheel and very very heavy and nice though it was in its own way we realized it wasn't the route for an mg to go so Jimmy O'Neill had already had a look-see of putting a new body on the mga chassis using the very curved lines of the record-breaker ex1 81 as the theme if you like for the body and it was very fat and bulbous and probably a good shape with little fins because fins were then in we went from this body to several other streamlined some versions if you like know whom look right and it became obvious that if you put a good body with more space in you are and you want more space you're limited by a chassis width and the mga chassis was restricting us on what we can do it was just there beautifully strong but it you couldn't keep low and get wider and so we realized we had to change our method of construction and that's where of course some of the expertise I'd got from the body plant came in because we decided we'd have to go monocoque well that let us in fact put a stressed under frame in because you don't have all the duplication of outer sill in it and chassis frame you put it all into the sill and we designed a sylph section first of all one of the first things we did which was very torsionally stiff alongside a very deep central tunnel and I then sat down with a fresh piece of paper and just did a new body shape still trying to use some of the curves of the record-breaker but making the car wider lower and a bit more compact and the MGB shape just came out just evolved on paper a very interesting exercise is to get a roadster open both the doors fully and then look at it sideways on with your eye down near the ground level and you've got two large chunks of motor cars joined together by very nearly nothing no and into that nothing else inner design all the beam strength and torsional rigidity very nearly as good as if you got a top on a stress top Harry Haring was the model maker who worked down in development and I gave him the lines of two one four and he turned it into a model very very quickly and you could see it was going to be a nice looking shape I mean I always felt it was reasonably right John corn me and the management looked at it and said okay let's go to a full-size and we were straight off then translating the lines onto a full-sized draft and we did it in six weeks to get it completely skinned shaped and up to Quinten Road in Coventry and they built us a wooden model exactly reproducing the quarter scale everything joint lines and everything and that was approved very very quickly everybody seemed to like it and the next stage was to get them in Coventry turning out a set of panels using the model as a base so that we could build the first prototype all the work on the MGB was started using a 1622 unit as basic a two litre austin engine was put in there but a lot of work was done on the v4 and this v4 went in very well because they decided not to proceed with that engine so fairly late on we were in a position of having to make our mind up what we wanted and it looked like it was going to be the 1622 but luckily the 1,800 the land crab Charles Griffin was doing which was going to have a bigger version of the b-series engine in a transverse form and so we were able to pick up 1798 CC as it became engine for the MGB fairly late on but of course it went in absolutely easily because we have allowed so much room under the bonnet of the MGB there was no problem we didn't even have to change the engine mounting positions rear suspension was designed to be training arm coil spring and panhard rod location and that let us put the spare wheel in a incline position immediately behind the passenger bulkhead and the fuel tank across the car low down behind that and the first prototype was completed by press steel came over to us and was built that way and went straight on to pave and road work and two things happen number one the panhard rod locating bracket tore off the chassis fairly quickly because of the corner stress we were putting on the car because Tommy Hague was our test driver and he he really pushed a car pretty hard the other thing of course was that the panhard rod gives a steer effect from the rear because the car actually feels the radius of action of the panhard rod and therefore the axle is moving sideways rub the body all the body's moving relative to the chassis and you can feel it and that wasn't really a feeling that he liked said tried it and Roy tried it and they all agreed that the in fact this was in fact not acceptable so fairly late on when the body tooling was well armed it was decided we would go to semi elliptical rear springs which meant that we had to stretch the back of the body and lay the spare wheel down as well so the car actually finished up an inch longer just an inch longer and so I had to redo the body lines very rapidly as well the training arm car although it was never sealed with was the best moves much quicker around the corners but the when we went to the cart spring it was slightly worse but still much better than the mga on the corners and so we had succeeded in the criteria that the car was drivable yes understood very slightly initially but overstated fairly safely tattoo on shoulder said look I'm going and let you take your foot off and then nothing happened you just saw straightened up the aficionados would like to have seen it several hundred ways lighter but the girl said if it have been several underweight slight have been so many more hundred pounds more expensive it was that almost ideal compromise between sporting appeal and reliability and cast after time the octagon spirit seizes pedestrians as well and you find yourself surrounded by ardent admirers get the optimum speed get an mg B the B got good reception in 62 and production club just went up and up and up until we were producing about 40,000 a year to America and only about 5,000 for the UK something different something exciting that's what made mg the sports car and there mg still one come ahead the MGB achieved a lot of success in this time but of course you have to keep in mind that at the time although the competition to bomb was based at Abingdon and therefore was in an mg environment I mean the table mats were octagonal-shaped I think if they could found the Machine the fishing chips would have come in off tack in all shapes it was all very much mg biased but the money was coming from the BMC competition committee which was fed and led by George herring with Alec Issigonis a major player on it and to some extent therefore any energy activity was almost a sideline don't I sound pattern i it was an important sideline but the main thrust was very much once we got a winning car with the mini and to a lesser extent with the healey 3000 the mg was just something rather and Sebring is a classic example to go racing in Florida once a year because almost we almost chose the drivers and a something of an end of term treat their marvelous days to go to see because Donald and Jeff Healey used to take sprites for the three ares and then we take mg B's or previously MJ's for the 12 hours but we put drivers in partly on their ability as racing driver so we didn't take total incompetence but there was an element of so-and-so has done pretty well for us this year with minis or whatever on rallies well let's take them to Florida and have a race in the MGB because let's face if you're up against Ferraris and Porsches at 12 hours on an airfield it didn't really matter who's at the end Juby it was only going to be going for its class wins it wasn't going to win outright and therefore there could be a an end of turn party element about it routine pit stops for tires fuel and driver change begin team managers flag in their cars and mechanics snap to low oil pressure is plaguing the MGS number 48 is already out with run bearings Cobra and Corvette activity is furious both makes are bothered with minor ailments adding frustration to the intense Chevrolet Ford rivalry the reason that the MGB had the success it did I think was quite simply because of its simplicity it was a very simple girl therefore it was easy to prepare it was therefore very reliable it was a very forgiving car it was very easy to drive it was a fairly Vyse Lascar whereas people would get into the mini and some people would struggle with the front-wheel drive the more you put the power into the mini the more they struggled they healey 3000 I mean what did you say about it was just a marvelous glorious thunderous smelly beast but there were lots of people and I was one of them if it was a hint of rain on the road it should never have been hired out without a special license I me but it was a unique animal with a lot of character the mg just sat there was a safe manageable simple effective car never going to win things outright but eminently capable of picking off enough things to hang advertising that in two seconds now the race will be on from its running start [Music] [Applause] [Music] 22 that sparks Ferrari which this time tomorrow is to finish them but don't imagine 24 hours of Lamar is devoted even principally to motor racing by the hundreds of thousands who come here for this great Jamboree [Music] a night limo I could see its importance but it was again a side issue but there was far more input from said you remember that one of the M Jews have got the special front end on and their photographs around of Sydow never involved in that sort of design of the car 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 people but it was not of major importance we were all very thrilled when it was the best British car at the mall but I mean to some extent the fact they could finish in the teens and still be the best British car at the mall said more about the number of car British cars at Lamar than the MGB patty Hopkirk in the ng beam number 39 reckons this is the only interesting spot on the circuit the Rover BRM crafted the 2-litre has built up only a fire black lead on the Spitfire both tramps are still virtually on the same left and the pitch reports everything under control the MGB 1,800 of Hopkirk and hitches has stolen one lap on the front and the three now split the Alpena pari of course we'll have a go with anyone with the mini it was very much factory led we were calling the tune with the MGB outside influences like the private owners tended to play more of a part because it was so reliable there might be a car in the workshop that had done a sort of six hour something or other but not quite just with an oil change but very nearly with an oil change was capable of doing another six Harrod in the Ford GT is Andrew hedges mg joins the Spitfire how to eat and with the mg beating slaughter marker and Turner let the opposition make the ruckus for one Andrew hedges with the mg leave the bigger car I think the philosophy of mg always was built to build a car which was a drivable handleable motor car which was safe and and nice to drive which anybody could drive and go into a moderate form of competition if they really wanted to and go into a more severe forms by using special development and that was the way it always was it was a 42 hour - from Kabul to Bombay and now the principal hazard was not so much the terrain as the people from the Pakistan frontier to Lahore the red sidelines of spectators was almost unbroken and grew thicker with every mile and econ and the hunter were handily placed and Jean Denton was still fresh despite a hard ride in her Nova rented MGB eyes was at Silverstone for the regression car race and there were three db2 for Ashton's running as a team one behind the other and I was very smitten by this shape I said that that's the shape that we ought to go after and from that moment on that that's what I set my eyes on the MDA didn't quite work out that way largely because I was I wasn't looking at the time I think really and anybody Sydney had his own ideas and I wasn't gonna stop him midstream but we got around to it finally when he designed the MGB he had in mind that I wanted to put a top on him and then having got the Roadster into P into a commission we tried so hard to put a top on it in it every time it looked wrong and so finally we sent the thing - it's a beautifui nough when it came back we that's it you know once we had tried to R it in the ordinary roads - windscreen so that we wouldn't have to repress the windscreen surround and all the rest of it in there have special screen grasses and goodness knows what all sorts of costs would follow that remains they've made the difference between the hideous-looking about a car and a beautiful one and everybody fell for it then it was exactly right and he raising the windscreen to inches made all the difference of course to the amount of light in the car beautiful looking machine it's an MGB GT that's really taken sure to us but it's racing suspension hugs the road beautifully what made it go race proven 1798 cc engine and a fully synchronized 4-speed stick shift I'd love to look inside go ahead see full instrumentation bucket seats that recline and a back seat that folds down for extra luggage space it's almost a contemporary classic MGB GT is one-of-a-kind [Music] traditional luxury with sports car performance living this is living [Music] when we were designing the B we didn't think in terms of the v8 power unit but we did think in terms of the 6-cylinder and that is why partly why on the the mg B you'll find such a big space between the front of the engine in the back of the radiator that was allowed for the other two cylinders when the time came because we reckoned that the MGB would be replacing the big ely john Thornley director and general manager drives an mg B with Sydney in evert chief engineer of the BMC sports car division their job is to build or for the BMC sports cars austin-healey 3000 mg B austin-healey sprite and MG the assessment Customs Works manager they have been building sports cars down at Abingdon for well over 30 years their slogan safety fast is known throughout the world and it is something more than a slogan high-performance with safety has become a tradition just be attached to all the products and having them when they were talking about replacing the big Healey so they said to me can you do a Healey version of an mg V and which is also an mg C so in fact there is a lot of rationalization in there and I did a do 51 with a Healey type radiator on but Donald Healey did not want a car which was an MGB design running around with his name on it now he said of hylia Healey said I never went to as agonies and said yeah okay with a six-cylinder engine but it is about an inch and three-quarter inches too tall here's a layout using so that we can get it into the mg v much more nicely but it you'll get a bit more chance to make it breathe but is he gonna stood not alter it one little bit and so we were given this great big heavy six hundred power unit to get into thee hence the big bulge for the mg C and the very forward radiator I felt sorry in a way because Alec Issigonis total genius think about the many things are simple I was uncomplicated as MGB don't say that there but beneath him but there was not a lot of enthusiasm there maybe if it had a three wheels or there's been front-wheel drive would have been four-wheel drive or whatever his eyes might have left up but it was something when the engine derived it was 70 pounds heavier then we had been told put that into the car and it probably knelt down [Music] so the way out of that was to stiffen the torsion bars why not the suspension but it produced a motor car which had a very marked tendency to go straight on but corners hands are marvelous things they can put together something as rugged and reliable as a front of disc brake or as precise as a carburetor they can assemble a four-speed all synchromesh gearbox or guy to race proven engine into an all steel monocoque body there are over a thousand pairs of hands and Abington England together they build the MGB mg the sports car America loved first obviously the American regulations from 69 always got more and more severe and really it's those which affected the MGB right to the end of its production that 30 miles an hour to zero as it happens with the tech election taking just under one tenth of a second vehicle crash tests are complicated affairs and preparation of the vehicle begins on the floor of the experimental Department up to two weeks before a test the vehicle tests Jay 81 is scheduled as a complete vehicle test with airbags in both driver and passenger positions initial preparations complete the car is trailed to the mara crash facility nanami with the car at the concrete block in its initial impact position the high-speed cameras can be positioned to ensure complete coverage of the crash impact speed 30.4 miles an hour not fast you may think that the results are dramatic and intensely interesting this is what the highest speed camera is recorded [Music] a deployment that meets the allotted time schedule of 30 milliseconds and from the electronic readout a low level of dummy deceleration I had to do that's very special car SS v1 safety systems vehicle they just said we're going to do a car which will show the British attitude to safety and our particular brief was to get safety systems into a very small vehicle it's already one doing it in a great big car but can you do it in a confined space so they just gave me an MGB and said we want to do several things in terms of padding and safety we have a suggestion from the brake people that they have got a ride leveling system which is very very safe and very very good and this is the locking people at lemming ttan and they would have a ride leveling system they were using on ambulances but they said they could do it on a much smaller motorcar we built that suspension all onto a Rover one of the last 2000 TCS or something like that and did the comparison of handling with a with a Chevrolet so we had front and rear suspension completely different to the MGB built into the car crash padding everywhere we filled the sills the outer part of the doors and the outer part of the wings under the and behind the splash plate and the rear and up to the pillows with a crushable stiff foam and we actually did a side impact test and did a film for the exhibition well we ran an MGB into an MGB sideways on at 15 miles an hour and we did an ordinary car and the intrusion was about four and a half inches at the inside door panel face we modified the car with all this foam and the intrusion was half an inch so obviously an enormous improvement one of the routes you could go we also did the big rear view mirror the idea was that you should have our absolutely panoramic rear vision and there isn't any way you can do it for the normal mirror so you have a periscope system up onto the roof for this great big unsightly mirror which added about a couple of square feet to the frontal area as well working with Smith's we did head up speedo reflected in the windscreen so you can actually see the speed in the windscreen under a reflective patch and I see that in the paper this week they're talking about doing exactly that and we actually did it in 1972 we also had a triumph system in the car which cut out the ignition and that you had to key four numbers in but you had to do them in a certain time as well before the cue could actually make the car work so you put the key in turn it and key in this number and the car would go it had the first of the soft low bumpers on the car that the idea was we have a bumper which hit the pre people way below the knee so that it tips your over onto the car at a car having a big long clean bonnet if you hit the panel you'll dent the panel but you won't hurt yourself too much there is a kind of man who wants more than basic transportation in a car he wants something quick and responsive with reflexes that match his own [Music] and responsive the kind of qualities that made mg the sports car America loved first mg still one jump ahead first of the bumpers of course was the great big over Ida so you could run into a wall at five miles an hour into a just purely a forward impact of five miles an hour and that was that what we called the Sabrina bumper is a great thing rubber things added onto the override in a big casting bin behind to take the road that only lasted for one year and not in the next year you had to have a bumper which was between 16 and 20 height you had to swing a great big pendulum nose into it on the corners at 45 degrees as well as forward and the car had to run into the block at 5 miles an hour with no mechanical damage to the car major operating partner as the engine must still operate ok and not touch anything and all the lights must be ok car must be drivable and so that's when we went to the great big molded bumper inside every MGB is a beautiful surprise at no extra cost mg gives you the sky the wind in your hair not to mention a four speed stick front disc brakes rack and pinion steering and the race proven mg engine there is a big wide world out there and you can see it all in the MGB the wide open sports car from British Leyland the Costello obviously started that ball running he was doing getting engines and building the converted B's and Harry Webster got hold of a Costello and send it to us and said well let me have a report on this car what do you think of it and can you do me one and Roy Brocklehurst and Barry Jackson were up and running we got an engine from the Range Rover and dropped it in the car we in six weeks we had a car up to them actually up and running and it got management approval very quickly and that was in 1972 with the autumn of 72 production was scheduled press release for August 73 and in July 73 Roy Brock Lewis said to me oh we've got to go to Longbridge and he wouldn't tell me why I was in the car and he said ok said I'm going to work it long was your chief engineer you gonna launch the v8 that went into production very easy there were no great problems it was accepted very well but of course it didn't run that long because number one we never got more than 48 engines only one week we just couldn't get engines for it and the insurance and petrol problems all blew up at that time and that all conspired against the car so it was just about changed into the rubber bumper car in 75 and the model year change and it went out of production [Music] [Music] fun in the Sun in a topless mg or triumph they're waiting for you now it's your pretty Schliemann sports car dealer [Music] we were obviously aware in 1978-79 that we were holding volume of production just about but we needed more performance because the emission regulations with it were the addition of a catalyst that meant we'd only got something like sixty seven horsepower available instead of about 19 horsepower over the MGB and so the American cars wouldn't fool us cannot the rice pudding they were they were credible so we had to do something we had got the O series engine coming along at the time and in fact the first O series engine was in an MGB GT a long long time ago but we started work on what was called the Chrysler lean burn system which was buying the knowledge from America from the Chrysler people and it was a printed circuit board which modified your carburetor system through the whole rev range it worked reasonably well and we were fairly well on the way down the road when we were told to change courses because Lucas could do something even better and Lucas had got a 12 cylinder version of an emission regulation with the Jaguar but we were able to take four cylinders worth of this in the MGB so we had a no series fuel-injected car in standard form a 2-liter which is producing with fully mission equipment 112 horsepower instead of sixty seven so that we've got a pretty quick motor car and again and because the be astounded be was going to be quicker we modified the front brakes improved the front brakes we modified the front springs we altered the roll bars and we actually build a whole series of prototypes for the L Series program and I sent six out to the states and the B got the best results we never received from the north american cars quickest car they'd ever had over there the emissions were passing all the regulations easily because the fuel injection lets you do it and we'd also got a twin car retro version running for the European market because we always thought we should go back into Europe if we had a car which was quiet enough and got the right emissions levels and and the Oh serious seemed to be the obviously the time to do it at the same time we had been looking at the the and the production had gone down but that was usually of course a marina engine which was common with a swift fire and I understood the Spitfire was going to finish so the was going to finish anyway so our concentration had to be on the MDV [Music] America is coming home in the shape of things to come politics said that they wanted to get the tr7 running in the States as well and they'd already looked at the tr-8 the v8 version of that they were obviously doing parallel work and rationalization said they ought to go with the latest car so I think the decision was made at that point that the MGB would have to finish and if the MGB finished and the and the was going then there was no production robbing and therefore everything we could possibly close and the only exercise we had done was the interim one which was a do 21 which was the mid mid-engine car we did when trying for doing the tr7 we were asked to look at a new mg and we weren't allowed to use a x2 3 4 which was the platform frame a series car which roy Brockman's did i think it was the idea of competition in those days they said ok triumph go ahead with a conventional car let's get mg to look at mid-engine or because that was the name of the game in the Grand Prix cars if you remember and so we actually took a an MGB GT and cut the middle out of it and put an e series across the back of it so we were actually pushing the car along with a big Daddy and - we actually built a prototype and it handled reasonably well had all the problems of long pipes from the radiator at the front and the throttle linkages but here'sh man and Paul Hughes did the styling for a year 21 which was why I of styling completely really impractical for a road car in my opinion and we weren't too happy we did the car because we were told to and we could have made it work reasonably well but it wasn't even awful lot more development time than we were ever allowed it was a big family I mean being an avid Dhoni implemented myself from before war during a school where you just knew everybody we had three and four generations of families in the factory and we just didn't have strike something people got on with it we at least have raised about thinks everybody did but everybody said no you could go buy the cars in the end you saw take your own problems you know and that's what the management talked to the shops jurors any opportunity and every opportunity I only ever had one meeting with a shop steward Eric Brenda senior shop steward in the whole time I was there which was a problem which is needed resolving about the mechanics going out and what rate there would be pained at when they were away from the factory because of what was happening in other factories wasn't something we generated ourselves it was a comparison it was resolved in about an hour so it was a good place to work people did talk and they come on and everybody was always interested in what was going on everywhere every level oh I'm an awful on it was the fact we never had conveyer hours production lines the cars were always pushed up by hand and when they finished a section some of you look slow you'd hear push a lot pushing them up and coming down the thing and the cars would move a bit quicker down the line it was easy because we built a car a man a week when we were going to 1100 cars a week with lemon drew people it was that sort of size of operation there are four basic ingredients in building a car body is suppressed tools that make the the panel's the jig's to hold them together the equipment to weld them together and the people who know what they're doing with the starting point and that was a Christmas holiday I took home the PPN a sheets as as I would know them with production parts and assemblies detail sheets and broke them down armed with this list went back in to Swindon primarily because that's where most of the tools were and started hunting around there there died parks looking for these tools once we've established that the bulk of the dies were were present it was a logical step to say well we ought really to be producing a body shell but the other thing you need having got the bits that make the car the pressings that make the car from the dies you need the jigs and fixtures which hold the various parts in the right relationship to each other we were lucky again in finding some of the jigs some of the major jigs not all within the original producing factory either and those jigs we brought to find and and refurbish their having got the dies and jigs the equipment we've borrowed acquired from the various plants again massively expensive each of the transformers and timers that we need and we've got 18 on the MGB is 12,000 pounds new you then need to get all the K all the power both high-voltage and the ordinary 240 volt water air to each of the guns and you need steel to hang them on the world in guns so it's it's a very expensive business to actually put in the welding operation as we have done we were lucky in that we situated ourselves deliberately midway between Oxford and Swindon which are where the skills that we needed to produce a body shell existed mostly in at the start were people who'd retired after 20 30 40 years in the trees took early retirement and we've tempted them back out of retirement [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] we pursued the idea of building a car but it was decided that heritage was not in a position to actually produce a car itself there will be difficulties within Rover of one of its companies producing a car so for that reason it was shelled we do the complete body shelf and for the our v8 we ship it to Cowley for final assembly paint and final assembly and the body that leaves here is prepped ready to go directly into their paint shop with no other work on it so it's a it's a major undertaking for ourselves we also have reintroduced for the our v8 but they will also be usable on earlier mg B's the main front crossmember to which all the front suspension is attached the gearbox crossmember the pedal box is window winder regulators so a number of things that will have benefit the Heritage MGB if I can call it that as well as the the latest are v8 [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Motoring On

Views: 343,891

Keywords: mgb history british cars automobile MG, MG, MGB, British, classic car

Id: yPPDXKjVRfE

Length: 54min 35sec (3275 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 24 2018