Upon getting my MGB home the next logical step was of course to strip things down and see where there were repairs needed. It was pretty straight forward to pull out the seats and get a good look at the floors. As you can see from the video, even at work before getting it on the road I had found one hole into the interior so I knew we needed to work on patching some floor panels.
Uh oh... well below you can see that I found some rust in the floor pans, more than I had anticipated. At this point I thought I could repair this in a few places and we'd be good to go.
Also some rust on the inner sill. This is the side opposite to the video (passenger side) I poked with my screw driver and it went like a knife through warm butter, that light spot near the lower middle is my garage floor below.
Okay, now I'm getting annoyed. Time to remove the rubber on the inner sills. What the heck is this nonsense? Someone has "repaired" the inner sill by screwing some sheet metal over the rust. Not only on the passenger side but also on the driver side we have rusted right through these babies. Speaking of babies, there's a nest of dead mice hidden in the gap in the drivers side sill.
Time to pull off the fenders. This is quite a job actually, took me three evenings to accomplish, but the windshield needs removing first and then there are a crap ton of bolts to remove. What I found was not good. My whole inner sill on both sides are gaping wide open with some lame Bondo covering some stuff... Worse still someone again "repaired" the deal by propping up the fender with wood, again Bondo'd into place. AAARGH!!! Also the driver side fender was clearly fixed with a patch piece which isn't holding together very well... Without more Bondo of course.
The icing on the cake was a rust spot I found right over top of the passenger rear leaf spring... That's right, I'm surprised that baby didn't ram right through the floor when I drove over those speed bumps on the way home!
So I mean in the end, had I known about MGB's better, I may have run away from this car the first time I saw the rust below the car as seen in this photo of the jacking point below... Had I known the proper sill structure I would have noticed the obvious in this photo.... Everything to the left of the jack point is just a flat piece of replacement sheet metal, to the right, that's original. The whole body is compromised until it's repaired properly.
I got quite angry and depressed about this for a few days but Matthew 6:19-21 kept popping up in my head over and over again. If you're not a Bible reading person, here's what it says:
"Do not lay up for youselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
I realized that I've become quite obsessed about this vehicle to an unhealthy degree and I needed to repent of this. It's okay to have hobbies, but not when it comes at the expense of my faith as well as my family.
It's good to do some soul searching from time to time.
Sigh.... In the end I decided to stick with this project and look at ways to fix this machine without incurring crazy expenses. One silver lining is that I was able to pick up a passenger fender for free off of Craigslist!
