An American Moggie ~ My '59 Morris Minor 1000 2-door saloon

[irmscher]

You are getting there how many minors in your area ?

[indian301]

Do yourself a favor and just cut the u bolts. Any spring shop can make you up a set for about $20.00. If you want I will send you my old Newfield plate, it is from a 1952 MM, but no one will ever know. I live in AZ. Just PM me your address.

Dave

[ASL642]

Fin the horsehair stuck to the roof under the headliner is to stop the roof vibrating when driving - otherwise you get a "thrumming" kind of noise. I've tried a new piece of sound deadening and it seems to do thetrick

[Alex'n'Ane]

Yea i replaced it with modern stuff. Just make sure it is very very well stuck down or else you will end up pieces of sound deadening in your headlining.

[Fingolfin]

Excellent! I'll investigate sound-deadening materials when I've got the thing painted. I'll go on and cut the U-bolts, and PM sent! I think there are no more than ten Minors in my area, most of them owned by a fella on here named Foghorn; I estimate there are about 5000 left in the States, but that's not really based on any solid figures.

And guess what we've done...?[frame][/frame]It was very easy; we just positioned the tires at the four inner points of the car, with one for the B-pillar to roll onto, and flipped it right over. Took only two people, only one of them (my dad) lifting. It can't weigh more than 500 pounds...
[frame][/frame]Me making sure I can get to the floor inside.
[frame][/frame]I'm replacing this...
[frame][/frame]Handsome sound metal underneath the rear seat.
[frame][/frame]But the left spring hangar is a bit unhappy...see the crack? I'll clean off the rust and see how extensive the rot is.

Didn't feel like welding or grinding today! Tomorrow.

[Fingolfin]

Taking it one thing at a time. My goal now is to strip off the underseal and possibly the paint (though the paint is looking pretty good, so maybe just scuff it up), and then repair the holes I find. Here's how it looks so far:
[frame][/frame]
The metal is quite sound! I've been very pleased at how little rot there is. A few tiny holes have appeared, but those will be easily patched.

[jaekl]

Your Minor is typical of the condition I have seen in Pennsylvania, just a few localized areas as opposed to what is found in England. They truly are maintaining the breed with extreme efforts. I suspect the cars over there were used more often and longer. The worst I had to repair was an 'A' post up into the kidney panel.

[davidmiles]

I was reading a interesting book, Morris Minor by Paul Skilleter, reading through chapter 4 "Minors in America"
made me think of you and your project fin, your car is representative of a big piece of the morris minor history. between 1957 and 1961 a total of 45,128 Morris 1000 cars were purchased by Americans, they gotta be somewhere over there, they might be at the back of some isolated scrapyards somewhere. lots of spares for you to pick over, trouble is Its a mighty Big Country.

[Fingolfin]

It is an enormous country, David, ten million square kilometers and 310 million people! Those Minors have got to be here somewhere, and like Jaekl says many of them are probably in pretty good condition. But out of perhaps 250 million registered cars in the States, 45000 (or, say, 80000 for total production?) is a tiny number.

Anyway, I've been somewhat hard at work! Though things have attempted to go wrong quite a lot. This is what's gone down so far:
[frame][/frame]I disassembled the carburetor, remembering anxiously a fuel leak I once had while running the car. Inside the main chamber (what you see here, I don't know the terminology), it's in very good condition. Only somewhat bad places are the external levers, particularly for the choke which stays open once pulled (!), and inside the fuel float chamber.
[frame][/frame]Got the sill repair stripped and welded firmly in place. Another seam weld inside and it'll be stronger than new.
[frame][/frame]Here's a patch I'm less and less satisfied with. It went in well, but as you can see it was rather difficult to grind.
[frame][/frame]The domes make great footrests! The underside, to reiterate because I'm happy, is in remarkably good condition for its age.[frame][/frame]The fuel tank aperture, before I'd finished scraping underseal. What the devil is this thing? Does it serve any purpose?

[Matt Tomkins]

[/quote] What the devil is this thing? Does it serve any purpose?[/quote]

it's the thread for the spare wheel clamp

[Fingolfin]

Brilliant! I'll have to get one of those -- a spare tire, I mean! I'll need to get a clamp too, it didn't come with one.

Anyway, I forgot one! I cut into the front of the chassis leg I replaced, to see its condition, and I think it's great![frame][/frame]So I won't be dropping the leg! Just getting the rust out of its rear half, which should be possible from within the cabin. Saves me a day's work.

[Fingolfin]

My apologies for the photo quality, but here's what I did today.
[frame][/frame]The original seam welds on the floor were horrible -- because I did them upside down -- so I'm going to redo them. For that to happen, the old ones had to be ground off. Four hours! But that's an important job done. Tomorrow I'll weld that up, and fix the funny angle in the right-hand chassis leg, and patch some holes...

[ASL642]

Fin - spare wheel clamps come up on Ebay over here regularly

[Fingolfin]

Excellent, Lou, I always enjoy having a look on the British eBay. Neat stuff you guys have got. I'll go perusing for a clamp sometime down the road; right now I have bigger fish to fry. Or perhaps I've finished the big fish?
[frame][/frame]360 inches of seam weld, securing every piece of the floor to every other. It'll be fantastically sound. Also, those are some welded-on nuts you see around the gearbox aperture; I decided that I hated captive nuts that were a standard I couldn't match in this country, so I replaced them all.
[frame][/frame]Also I've ground off the rust on the underside.

So, another day of welding, another of grinding; some priming and undercoating, and then flip it back over! Progress, my friends, is being made.

[Fingolfin]

So I tried to close some holes in the underside...and it turned into this:[frame][/frame]The whole floor of the rear seat box was crap. And the spring mounts have to come out, but I think the mounts themselves are salvageable:[frame][/frame]It'll be fun trying to get the floor remnants off of them.
Finally, I had a look under the rocker cover on Mog's engine, and the rockers are somewhat more rusty than I recall.[frame][/frame]The frontmost valve rocker won't move at all, though the engine still turns.

Today has been a hard day in the world of Mog.

[Fingolfin]

Well, it certainly feels like not much progress today, though I worked about ten hours. I cut out the spring hangers and ground the remaining (horrifying) floor off of them:[frame][/frame]
Then I widened the holes in the underside, and ground out the rust in the box and painted it. The drops should dry eventually:[frame][/frame][frame][/frame]
Tomorrow morning I'll finish cutting out the new floor pieces and weld them in, painting them afterward through the holes in the top of the box. Should work. Sadly I won't be able to punch structural depressions into the new floor, so I'm considering some angle iron over the floor instead.

[Neil MG]

Why not punch the depressions, looks to be well within your capability? There have been several successful examples here recently.

[RobThomas]

[frame][/frame]

Exactly the same repair on mine!
The easy way is to get a sheet of thick-ish plywood and to carve out to half depth so that there is still some wood strength and then use the hollows and a BFH to make the shapes you want. I didn't have any plywood so I did mine over the edge of a Workmate table thingy. This one has maybe 20 minutes invested in it.
Yours looks to be better inside the car whereas I had to cut chunks out of the inner box section. I'm glad I did this rather than trying to cut corners as it would have annoyed me in years to come. [frame][/frame]

[Fingolfin]

Haha, I should've known. I said I wouldn't be able to based on the thought that I'd need an industrial press. But of course there'd be other ways... I'll give that a shot.

[Fingolfin]

Well, I haven't been working TOO hard.

First, my favorite. I'm not generally very superficial, but I've gotten tired of all the structure work, so I did a little painting. The horns are now gloss white, because I wanted to leave my own special mark on Mog, and the front grille is gloss white too![frame][/frame][frame][/frame]Looks much better than the flat black.

I got an oil pressure gauge off eBay, but it came with no sender unit. What should I do? There are some sender unit fitting kits on eBay, would those be helpful?[frame][/frame][frame][/frame]I've been looking for a water temperature gauge, but don't want to take the risk of buying one without a sender. I'd love to have had the NOS dual oil pressure/water temperature gauge I found, but it's $250.

I put in part of the new rear seat box floor, the parts that the spring hangers attach to.[frame][/frame]And ground the welds down flat...[frame][/frame]The funny "bulge" you see on the inboard side of the sill is a patch, and since the car is on its side the molten metal drooped. It's perfectly smooth though, and I think it should present no problems.

I tried to punch those depressions into the floor remainders, as was suggested, but I believe I got rather thicker metal than I expected, and the depressions didn't come out very nice. I'm going to try to smooth them a bit (and on one of them, redo them -- they got out of position somehow), but I don't have much confidence.