Glued to the TV

Post by **Sidney'61** » Sun Jul 20, 2008 11:39 pm

I just spent a few hours in front of the telly, I was watching a program on Discovery Turbo called 'An MG is born'. It was a series of about 8 Half hour episodes all following the restoration of an MG B roadster, I've learned so much useful stuff from it, especially the episode on the engine rebuild. It was fanatstic (although my sister didn't quite share my enthusiasm!).
Has any one else watched it?

Post by **bigginger** » Mon Jul 21, 2008 1:02 am

The whole 'Is born' series is quite entertaining, if a touch trite. When it moved on to a helicopter, I lost interest

Post by **chickenjohn** » Mon Jul 21, 2008 7:29 am

I've watched it, but like nearly all restoration programs on the TV its pretty poor. Very little is shown of the actual work we are interested in, about 70% is timewasting- far too much snippets of owners talking about their cars- easy to shoot at a car show, and we can go to shows ourselves and chat with MG owners ourselves, if we wish. The "humour" is cringeworthy, I'd rather see them sandblast items or watch the paint dry. Then they repeat bits after the numeous adverts to waste more time ( a re-cap as they call it).

Some of his workmanship is very questionable as well- why did he cut up repair panels to overlap them with spot welding etc in an originaly single skin area of the rear wheel aRCH. These repair sextions should have been accurately cut and butt welded to maintain the single skin where the structure was originally single skin. With all those overlaps repairs I saw no mention or any evidence of use of zinc weld thru spray being used. He has created a huge rust sandwich for the future in the rear wheelarch area of that MGB. Please don't copy his techniques!!!!

Why does he have to modfy everything- the MGB was a perfectly good car in its day, restore some of it as it was, electronic ignition is not more reliable than points- it leaves you stranded with little hope of repair.

The colour choice was poor as well, it did looke like they "clearcoated the primer". With such a great workshop, why did Mark Evans cop out and not do the re-spray himself??? lack of abillity again.

The only chap on the show who is good and knows his stuff is the one we saw the least of- the "bloke from stoke". he actually showed some amazing tricks of the trade ways of getting jobs done without using the factory tool and how to make your own tool to put the suspension together etc. And yet Mark Evans ridiculed and insulted this chap at every opportunity.

The beetle/ campervan programs were much better than this, showing that half way reasonable restoration TV programs can be made, not the "is born" examples.

Post by **polo2k** » Mon Jul 21, 2008 10:14 am

I saw that show a bit years ago but these days im on the El Creapo cable package so the only ones I ever see are at 3 am on a sunday. I did find this though http://www.play.com/DVD/DVD/4-/510015/D ... oduct.html
It seems like some of the programs now seem to follow a similar format. There is one on discovery most days where they buy a car, do it up, and then sell it at a profit, in this one its a similar story, the money man makes decisions without the technical guys opinion.

Thing is though, this is exactly the kind of exposure this hobby needs to keep it going. People might see this program, buy a shed to try some of the techniques and then get stuck. As long as they havnt done anything silly then once they get on a site like this then they find out what they need to know.