"New" American Dream

       It is hard to believe that such a small nondescript automobile could revolutionize an entire car industry. The little MG came to be coveted by many U.S. soldiers returning from WWII. They were familiar with seeing this car race around Europe's winding roads. Now, MG was in position to capitalize on this new American market. However, they were not prepared for such an immense outburst in popularity. The MG car with its sleek styling, quick response, and fast engine captured the hearts of America. This was a sports car priced to inspire the hopes of a reachable dream. America was officially in love with the "sports car".
       The MG "TD", now modernized for the American marketplace was outfitted with: left hand drive, safety fast engineering, and an overall smoother ride. In turn, this allowed the TD to out-perform its predecessors in all aspects. MG had found a home in the new American dream of owning things for pleasure. There was the toaster and there was the TV, but there was nothing like a sports car, and that was MG.

This is an advertisement promoting the MG TD, and glorifying its new features:

Rear Suspension

After taking a bunch of pictures and looking at all of the intricate parts that are involved with a car, I now know that I have absolutely NO IDEA what I'm doing! It's one thing when you're taking pieces off the car, but totally different when you have to fix things and put them back together. Looking around online I found that there is not a lot of direction on how to put a 60 year old car together. So I'm just hoping that I remember how to put everything back together using pictures. I've now taken apart the rear suspension, cleaned it, and repainted all of its pieces. I chose to do the back first because there wasn't nearly as many pieces as the front and it just looked a whole lot easier. My uncle had said that the leaf springs were completely redone before it sat for a while(30 years), but whoever did them didn't do a very good job. In between each leaf there is "supposed" to be a rubber pad, and when I took it apart there was rubber missing and the leaves didn't look like they had been repainted. I don't really mind how the job was done before, I just want to make sure that I'm doing a good job.

Here is a picture of my progress on the rear suspension:

This is the rear axle that had to be taken out in order to take off the leaf springs

These are the leaves that I separated and cleaned

 Here they are again after I put primer and two coats of black on them

Inventory & Teardown

One of the first things I needed to do was "try" and figure out what exactly was inside all of these boxes. Seeing as this would take quite a while I decided to recruite the help of my mechanically inclined friend Tanner. I've known Tanner since elementary school and we've always talked about restoring this car. As we started laying parts on this canvas where we took pictures of every part, we began moving along pretty fast. Part way through the inventory we were trying to find the guages that mount on the dash, and they were nowhere to be seen! After about twenty minutes of searching we finally stumbled across the missing parts, and then went about taking millions of pictures. A few hours of dilegent work went by and we had already finished everything we wanted to do...but we didn't stop there. We decided to take whatever was left, off of the car. This included the tub,(the part of the car you sit in) and usually in modern cars the frame for the car is made out of steel. In an MG TD the frame is constructed out of wood...not the safest car in the world. It will definitely take a while for my mom feel comfortable with me driving it, seeing as they put me in the safest car they could find that will be tricky.


Here's a photo I found of an MG TD assembly line!