Originally Posted by fdcg27
Originally Posted by Bud
Originally Posted by sloinker
I think any car should be importable as long as it has deluxe Lucas electrics onboard.
I have had many MG and Triumph cars over the last 50 years. Lucas has taught me the true meaning of patience.
I daily drove an MGB in my younger years and it wasn't all that bad.
As a twenty something, I didn't really mind messing with it on a regular basis.
The only Lucas issues I saw were the light switch, which disintegrated one evening when trying to turn the lights on with various parts raining out from under the dash, the alternator, which took a few tries before getting a good rebuilt and the stock ignition system, easily and cheaply remedied with one of the then common aftermarket kits.
There were also the brake and clutch hydraulic problems, not avoided with Castrol LMA as often claimed.
OTOH, the basic guts of the car including brakes (weak as they were), chassis, engine, gearbox and rear end were quite robust.
Of course, clutch replacement required hauling the engine and gearbox out as an assembly to separate the two.
Who thought that was a good idea with everyman's sports tourer?
I have two BL cars that are loaded with Lucas and SU parts.
The MG in particular does not deserve the bad rap for electrical issues that it seems to get. The single biggest issues I've had are with cheap, poor quality new production replacement parts. In fact, not too long ago I spent $60 on a new old stock Lucas red box headlight switch, as the $20 ones that are readily available from Moss and other vendors will fail in a year if you use them regularly. The one I removed lasted nearly 50 years, so I can't complain too much about that. My biggest ongoing issue now is the brake light switch, which there again reliably goes out-sometimes from the internal spring overheating and losing temper, sometimes from simply falling apart, but most often from the plastic rivet that holds the whole thing together melting and causing the the switch to go open circuit(I've temporarily revived those, but it's always a short term fix until I can get a replacement ordered and installed).
I've had a few electrical odds and ends refurbished also. I opted to have someone in Minnesota refurbish my distributor, and it's better than new and far, far better than new production examples. I run points, but they trigger a CDI system(Winterburn) so there's no appreciable wear to the contact faces. Finding good quality points can be a bit of a fun adventure, but I have finally found them. Condensors are so unreliable now that I prize good working ones and rarely replace them when I work on someone else's car unless there's evidence of the old one going bad.
I am running a new production fuel pump from SU/Burlen fuel systems that came from the factory with the notoriously unreliable points replaced by a hall effect sensor. It wasn't cheap(around $250 IIRC correctly-amazingly enough NAPA actually had it in stock over the counter) but I expect it to last a long time.
The Marina has been a bit of a fun electrical adventure. A lot of stuff doesn't work, and it is significantly more complicated than the MGB. A lot of the issues, though, seem to stem from it sitting unused and undriven for 10 years. It initially didn't spark, but a few passes with a points file got that taken care of. I'm actually finding that a lot of things seem to come back to life if I just exercise the switches. I started doing that last night on the turn signals while tinkering with something else, and the next thing I knew I had 3 of the 4 working(both right, one left). One of my other issues that I'm slowly tracking down and fixing on that car is bad grounds, a problem that affects pretty much any old car, especially one that has sat.
BTW, shortly after I got the car, I swapped the transmission with the help of a friend. The original was grinding in 3rd and 4th, and the speedometer drive inside the transmission had disintegrated. It took us 2 days, but part of that was a delay of a couple of hours to repair the exhaust manifold studs that broke when taking it apart, and a lot of the rest of it was doing general clean-up and painting the engine and other odds and ends. There were a lot of other "might as well" jobs on the engine too like replacing the timing cover gasket, pan gasket, and rear crank seal-easy jobs with the engine out and a lot of work with it in. Even including the exhaust studs, we could have pushed and had it done on one long day if we'd skipped the clean up.
Both will be coming out again this winter for replacement. The rings are shot in the current engine, so I got hold of a spare bottom end am rebuilding it. It will go back together at a ~9.8:1 c/r(I'm running 9.5:1 now, stock is 8.8:1) and a "street performance" cam along with a bit of head work to help it breath. It's also getting an overdrive transmission(factory type 4 speed with Leycock electric O/D), which I'm having someone up in PA go through and rebuild anything that needs rebuilding along with converting it to a 3rd/4th overdrive unit.
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