As promised in Part 5, today's work was to get a real mechanic involved to assess the basic safety of this MG. I just didn't feel qualified to give it a clean bill of structural health, even though my investigations made me very hopeful. John Zimmerman and I had lunch, and then he agreed to follow me to Lancaster Mitsubishi, my local garage of choice. That seemed like overkill, but during the 2-mile trip, the MG started running very poorly and smelled very strongly of raw gas. I was glad to have the insurance of a rescue wagon behind me!
We did make it into a parking space at Lancaster Mitsubishi, and I then alerted owner Bill Durland that we were on the premises. He has been avidly following this blog, and wanted to see the MG with his own eyes. He suggested that we put the car on a lift, and arranged for that to happen. However, as I feared, the MG didn't want to restart. It was clearly flooded, and since I'm old, I knew the right technique was to hold the gas pedal to the floor while cranking. It took a while, but it finally caught.
However, the mechanic noticed that gas was dripping from a line under the hood. I recognized the line as part of the emissions control equipment, but had no idea why gas would be leaking there. We decided to push the car into the service bay, and several mechanics pitched in to help. Then it was time to get it into the air.
I had asked John to return to the Grant St. Garage to pick up some fuel line to repair that leaking hose. While he was doing that, the mechanic and I did a basic safety inspection. While driving there, the steering seemed very good to me, and he confirmed that the front end was in good shape:
He confirmed that the clutch slave cylinder needed replacement, which I had noted earlier:
We then started looking at the under-structure, and it was pretty good news. I took a lot of pictures, but for this post I'll show a basic underside view, showing the rust damage there is quite minimal.
The gaping hole is what I've been worrying about on both sides, but there is a lot of structure remaining, and the suspension mounting points are extremely solid. Here's one of them:
However, the mechanic discovered something that made my hair stand on end! The red circle below shows the positive ("hot") battery line, rubbed completely through. The hole stopped right at the edge of the bracket holding the cable to the frame.
A bit more wear, and that would have been a massive short leading to either a fire or a battery explosion. Since the battery is in the passenger compartment, and I had left the cover off for convenience, I would have been showered with battery acid! We gently lowered the car, unhooked the battery, and put a solid rubber insulator around the spot.
By that time, John had returned with the fuel line, so we quickly repaired the leaking hose. Of course, that hose shouldn't even have had liquid gas in it, so this was just to limp back to Grant St. I was able to do that, but once we got into the garage, it was clear I had a pretty major leak. This photo was with the car pushed back from the spot, so I could better see where the drip was:
What I found was quite interesting. The gas was dripping from a large hose that had originally run from a carbon canister to an air pump, part of the emissions system circa 1974. It was never a good system, and some time in the past 43 years, that pump had been removed, and the hose simply cut to allow the carbon canister to vent to the atmosphere. EDIT: Subsequent study showed that the air pump, while missing, wasn't involved with that hose. It was indeed an original vent to the atmosphere. However, it should never have raw gas leaking from it!
I temporarily plugged the lines to the canister from the two carburetors, and then turned on the key. The fuel pump started running, and gas immediately started dripping from the front carburetor. Ah HA! That happens when the needle valve is stuck open. Well, we had previously worked on the carbs because the needle valves were stuck shut, so no huge surprise that they are still a problem.
Off come the carbs again, and I'll have to order new floats and other parts to correct this. Sigh... Part 7 may take a few days to come around!
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