Well, I've got a single-seater MG these days!
Monday night I got home from work just in time to
watch the Mid-Ohio Indy car regatta -- uh, race,
made a quick dinner, and set out to see how much
damage I could do to my MGB and still have time
to get it put back together to drive to work
the next morning. (Kim and Torrey are in Southern
California visiting relatives and making rabbits,
and they've got the Biscuit Tin of Steel down
there.)
Honestly, I merely set out to clean up the interior
a bit. But that nice, fuzzy, black carpet set that
I got when I bought Pete Gregory's MGB kept beckoning
to me, and when I found the 3M trim adhesive, it was
a done deal. By 9:00 I had both seats out and was
ripping the old mats out. Found the weirdest thing
I've found yet under the floor mats of a British car:
a 1961 5 centavo piece from Ecuador, in very fine
condition. What it was doing under the mats of a
British sports car, I don't know.
About that time, while I was cleaning the grit and
detritus off the generally solid floor boards, the
phone rang. Someone in Toronto was calling about the
ad for my Falcon Sprint, now departed to Paterson, CA.
We ended up talking for a long time -- he's a vintage
racer in Toronto who runs a Mini Cooper S that's
still in mostly street trim ("after the races, I take
the tape off the lights and drive it home," he said).
He left me with a shopping list that I'll post in a
day or two (when I remember to bring it).
But by the time that Malcolm and I got through (after
he offered me a drive in his Mini around Mosport in
return for a drive in my B around Laguna Seca!), it was
almost 10:00. The interior is bare, scruffy, ugly, and
singularly devoid of seating, and I thought of the early
meeting I had the next day -- no sleeping in for me.
I got the carpet set installed, then had some trouble
with the seat. Naturally, the mounting rail fell off
the inboard side just as I was setting it into the
passenger's compartment. Then I couldn't get the bolts
to line up. Fortunately, this carpet set has holes
cut for the mounting bolts, which led me to the trick
that did the job:
How To Install MGB Seats Fairly Easily
1. Place a shop light under the chassis so that the light
shines up through the mounting holes.
2. Loosely fit the wooden slats and the thick metal washers
over the mounting holes.
3. Place the seat carefully over the wooden slats, taking
care not to disturb them too much.
4. Line up the mounting holes in the outboard seat rack over the
mounting holes in the chassis, using the light under the
car for reference.
5. Install the rear mounting screw in the outboard seat rack.
(We'll come back to this in step 9.)
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for the inboard seat rack.
7. Release the seat adjustment lever (attached to the
outboard seat rack) and push the seat as far to the rear
as it will go.
8. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for the front ends of both the
inboard and the outboard seat racks. Note that because
the wooden slats pivot around the rear mounting bolt,
the length does not change, which simplifies this end.
9. And here is where I'm stuck.
My problem is that when I did 4 and 5 for the rear bolts,
I left them a little loose so I'd have some fiddling room
to install the front bolts. Well, now for some reason I
can't seem to get the seat to come forward far enough to
get to the rear bolt heads with my wrench, which is insane --
the seat started out that far forward, because I had it there
when I put it in. This is all so puzzling...
Any suggestions? Has anyone else fixed this problem? In a
pinch, I'll just R&R the whole seat again and tighten it down
fairly well, but it makes my head hurt just thinking about it.
The seat doesn't appear to move around or otherwise wiggle in
place, but it's frustrating because I know.
(What I *really* need to do, of course, is to wire-brush, then
rust-proof the floorboards while the seats are out, but then
this car needs brown carpets eventually. It's just that, well,
the black mats were right there...)
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