Some sort of fuelling issue on a longer test-drive today. Car was running fine, accelerating well and driving nicely but then died at one point. I think it happened twice, both times going over 3500rpm in fourth, the engine seemed to falter and stutter and then eventually die. The first time this happened, I pulled over to check the bodged fuel lines, but no issue and no leaks under the car. When I turned on the ignition, however, it wasn't clear if there was fuel running into the filter or not, but it definately didn't have that half-ful appearrance that I would expect. This issue repeated a little later, after the car had started up and run with no issues after the first problem, but I was able to cruise a bit and then bump start back into normal driving.

It seems likely to be a fuel starvation issue - which would explain the stuttering and misfiring - which may have a number of causes: 1. The new fuel pump doesn't provide enough fuel. This will be easy to test but unplugging it and measuring its flow rate... It also seems unlikely, given it was brand new and sold to me by an MG parts specialist!
2. Some of the new lines are blocked, narrow. Though why this would only cause issues sometimes I am not sure. 3. Perhaps most likely, some bad fuel or a bit of air passing through which causes temporary starvation. Not sure how to check this, or solve it? Perhaps just add in more, good, high-octane petrol?

Having removed the old: in with the new!

I started by installing the new pump - don't know why, but I had to start it somewhere, so I started there.

The new pump is smaller and lighter, but otherwise has the same fittings and fixtures. The new pump came with a new hardline to go to the tank, and a rubber line to attach to the main fuel line to the front. I inserted the new pump into the clamp, bolted it up snug, and attached banjo fittings which connect to the lines. I chose not to re-plumb a new hardline to the rear - it looks a little tricky, though I should do it at some point as the current line looks pretty rusty. I also pushed the new rubber hose onto the line going to the engine bay.

Important note: steel braiding on the exterior of rubber hoses is always the worst. I always cut myself, and it never stays within the boot it's supposed to.

Interestingly, the old pump had wires coming off it to plug into the harness, the new one has two male connectors on the body itself. Luckily, the harness was long enough to reach - otherwise that would have been a boring 10 minutes creating some extenders.

New tank time. Firstly, screwing in the sender unit took some trial and error. Eventually, I needed to bend in the holding tabs to get it to seat properly. The order goes: rubber sealing washer, sending unit, locking ring. Once it was in I first twisted, then hammered the locking ring to get everything secured and fuel-tight.

I had to install the captive nuts in the correct locations on the lip of the new tank, namely: two in the middle on the left, both of the back, one in the middle on the right. Oddly, I couldn't install these nuts without scratching the new paint - hello, rust!

Once the large hole in the side of the tank had been filled, it was time to actually install the thing. I initially lifted the tank up using the floor jack, but eventually just jammed my hand underneath and lifted one haded to locate the tank onto the downward-extruding studs. Having to do this one haded while also screwing on a washer, a locking-washer, and a nut is very hard - but not actually impossible. Once all of the studs were one loosely, the bolts could go in from the top, with a fibre and metal washer. Everything is screwed down (or up) snugly and the fuel tank is on!

Connecting the hard line to the pump, and the fuel sending unit wires (green and black to the central, black to the ground).

So, all done! Turn the key, drive off! Sadly, no...

For some reason, no fuel appeared to be getting to carbs. The fuel filter remained stubbornly empty, despite the loud and incessant clicking noise coming from the new pump.

Time to trace the issue. I knew that the pump was working (as I could hear it). I knew that the hoses were connected to it in the right order (there's helpful arrows on the Hardi pump). So, I started at the front.

I unscrewed the jubilee clip from rubber line in the engine bay which feeds the carbs, coming off the copper pipe which runs from the pump. Dry, check further back.

Removing the rubber line from the back end of that same copper line (i.e. where it takes it feed-in from the pump), also showed dry. I checked the hard line going into the pump - fuel!

This told me there was fuel going in, but not coming out. So, I unbolted the out-flow from the new pump. This came off easily, along with a spurt of fuel indicating some backed-up pressure. Perhaps, then, a blockage in the rubber line?

Blowing through the rubber line with some carb cleaner didn't clear it, though. A closer inspection of the banjo connector showed that there was actually no hole from the banjo-ring through to the rubber tube! Balls.

It's not clear why there was no hole - perhaps some crimping issue, or some defect in the banjo ring? Whatever the issue was, it was really, really, really, annoying.

Then followed a long period of trying to drill out the hole, fitting, testing, undoing, redrilling, refitting, retesting, re-undoing, etc, etc. This didn't work - it wasn't possible to get the right angle with the drill, so any hole was at angle, this means that you'd need a really really long thin drillbit to make it work - a drillbit I didn't have.

I gave up on that after a while.

I had another idea: I still had the old connectors! The old rubber line had perished and leaked hard once I test it - perhaps the trauma of removing it had killed it. I did, though, have the threaded end, some copper tubing with a nut that would connect to it, as well as various bits of tube a clamps.

So, I could attach the threaded banjo connector to the pump, then bolt a short length of copper pipe to that threaded connector, then plug that into a short length of rubber tube which could also be connected to the copper line on the car to take it forward!

Amazingly, this worked, though felt very fragile. I drove it around for 10/15 miles, but will be replacing it with a proper connection as soon as I am able.

The back of the car often smells of fuel. In fact, the front of the car often smells like fuel but this fix probbably won't help with that...

New fuel tanks can come from a variety of places: - MGOC Spares do avery smart looking zinc-plated, powder-coated one. Sadly, it was out of stock when I was looking to buy. - MGB Hive do two, but why would anyone choose to buy the one without a drain plug? - Moss though this one seems more expensive and without any of the bells or whistles

I bought the one from MGB Hive, who were able to deliver it - along with a new Hardi fuel pump, all the required fixings, some Hammerite, and some other various neccessities - very quickly. One minor concern I had when it arrived was that it looked like they had forgotten to inlcude that important new drain pug. It looks like there was something in the hole that would function as the drain hole, but, on closer inspection, there was no issue, The drain plug is a flush fit (which can be undone with an allen key).

Now that I had the new tank, I could work out how to drop out the old one. THe Haynes manual showed nine bolts which needed to be unbolted. Actually, five of these were bolts with captive nuts and with four studs which protude from the bottom of the boot bottom.

Having raised the back of the car (and removed all of the stuff from the boot), I made my first mistake.

What I should have done was to unplug the fuel line just after the pump, and then use it to drain the tank into a handy container. That way, I could have easily have kept the fuel and have massively lightened the load I then had to wrestle with.

Having not done the prudent thing, I quickly unbolted the fuel line which was attached to the old tank and unplugged the two wires which were attached to the fuel sender. From the top of the tank (i.e. in the boot itself), two clamps held a rubber tube which connected the fuel filler neck on the back of the car to the protrusion on the top of the tank. Unscrewing those clamps allowed me to withdraw the filler neck out of the back of the car. All that remained attaching the fuel tank to the car were those nine bolts (or five bolts and four nuts).

Holding the bottom of the tank up with the floor jack, six of the various fasteners came undone easily. However, the two bolts at the rear of the car, were very misshapen: no socket head or spanner fitting properly. Luckily, some bolt-head remover sockets did the trick eventually. In removing eight of them, however, the final remaining bolt was holding the whole weight of the tank which was now hanging at a skewed angle. This meant that, when I reached for the impact gun having become bored with the slow pace of things, instead of undoing the bolt it actually just ripped the captive nut out from its holder. Luckily, 10 minutes of blindly grasping the nut with a pipe wrench with one hand while using a socket wrench with the other allowed me to get it free.

Then it was off! Down she came!

I lowered it down gently with the jack, and pulled the tank out of the back of the car. The top was covered in rust flakes, with at least one hole - that might explain the fuel smell!

I gently tipped out the 20L of fuel which remained inside, storing it safely and security and definitely not spilling any of it all over the floor...

Of course, the tank is only half of the story: the old pump needed to come out too. There's no particular reason I needed a new pump, but it seemed like the sensible thing to do to avoid some future failure. This was remarkably easy, compared to the tank. The pump is held in a clamp inside of a rubber mount, just unscrew the clamp and it's free. It's also wise to unscrew both the hard line coming from the fuel tank, and remove the hose which leads to the engine.

I had read that the anti-roll bar on the front suspension was responsible for managing body roll, and that an easy way to fix the - what some passengers called "horrendous" - body roll was a thicker, stiffer anti-roll bar.

It's an easy replacement to make. Probably, it's possible to do it without removing the wheels, but I did as it was easy to do and made my life much easier.

The old one came off relatively swiftly: the passenger-side simply undoing and coming away. The driver-side, however, took much more persuasion and eventually I just cut the old one off as the bolt was so rusted to the bottom of the suspension arm.

Installing the new one is a matter of routing the bar in the same location as the old. It bolts to the suspension on each side and then a polyurethane (or rubber, if you're feeling cheap) bushing is clamped on to the underside of the frame. Since the frame bracket bolts were greased, and slightly shorter than I would have liked, it took some work getting them in and tight, but it was achieved at the end.

I think the body roll has been reduced, but it's hard to really tell: it's never something I really noticed before! I do, however, feel safer - given the rust that the old one had - that it won't just snap if I go too hard around a sharp corner.

Good, easy project for a weekend.

My first thought when looking for a new fuse box was to get one with more capacity for fuses. Just four fuses is a bit limiting and, clearly, MG themselves appear to have messed up here given they've had to add in an inline fuse in the same spot! Upgrading to more fuses seemed like an obvious win: more reliability from modern blade fuses and more space in case I decided I wanted to fuse more accessories (e.g. the headlights, permanent battery charging facility, etc.)

I bought a generic 8-slot blade fuse box from a large online retailer, and 3d printed a bracket for it which would allow me to attach it in place of the original without drilling extra holes. However, this was far too large, and the curve of the engine bay's bodywork made it impossible to fit in without some major redesigns. (Also, as I realised later, the PLA of the bracket was likely to melt, or at least seriously deform, given the under-bonnet temperatures). Plan A - scrapped.

Luckily, however, I then found that a company in America was producing restomod fuse boxes that used blade fuses rather than glass! Sadly, I believe the company has decided to stop making them, but not before I bought one. It was a straight swap and install, took no time at all.

The new fuse box is likely more reliable (even if only because it's half a century younger...), and has fuses that are widely available. Given the corrosion that had built up on connectors of the fuse box, I imagine this will have actually very much helped the 50-year old wiring. A win-win all round!

The old "rostyle" wheels have now been swapped out for more "classic" wire wheels. This was done using the MGBHive conversion kit.

The theory is to replace the wheel hubs, removing the four-stud pattern bolt ons with the splined-and-threaded shaft needed for wire wheels. The kit includes all you need to do this, including new bearing kits for the front.

Rear Wheels

The rear wheels are the easier of the two sets to do, simply: 1. Jack up the car, release the handbrake (having chocked the car), and remove the wheel. 2. Remove the split pin in the castellated axle nut (using a 1-5/16th deep socket), the axle nut itself, and the split "collar" that sits behind it. 3. Remove the brake drum (2/3 can be done in either order) 4. Pull off the wheel hub from the splines it sits on - I used a bearing puller tool we already had, but the MGBHive instructions recommended reinstalling the brake drum backwards and using a mallet. 5. Slide on the new hubs - I used a small amount of copper grease on the splines. I was not sure if grease was a bad idea (given the proximity to the rear brakes), but I thought binding on would be bad. It's important to make sure you slide it on in a orientation that allows you to access the thru-holes for the split pins. Double check you can do this before continuing. 6. Attach the brake drum to the new hub, using the supplied four bolts - it helps to have an assistant depress the brake pedal for this, and the next bit. 7. Reinstall the collar and castellated nuts (instructions spec-ed 150lbft, but I just tightened it as far as I could), as well as the split pin. Bend up the split pin. 8. Grease the wheel splines and the threads. 9. Slide on wire wheel, and thread on spinner.

Simply repeat for the other side.

Front wheels

Important: Do not tackle without an ample supply of paper roll, degreaser, and gloves. You will be messing around with grease that may have been there since the factory, so watch out!

The supplied instructions are pretty accurate for this: 1. Chock, jack up, and remove wheel. 2. Remove the two rear bolts from the brake caliper, which attach it to the hub assembly. These are on the "back" of the assembly, are require some force to remove. I placed the lose caliper on a box at the back of the wheel-well, so that there was no force on the brake line. 3. Pry off the "cap" at the end of the axle. Use a large set of pliers/pipe wrench and a small flat-head screwdriver. 4. Remove the split pin from the castellated nut, and undo nut. Making sure to check for notched washer that might come off with the nut. KEEP BOTH SOMEWHERE SAFE. 5. Pull the hub and disc from the spindle. Use a sudden, firm action to bring as much of the internals off at the same time. 6. Remove the disc from the hub, retaining bolts, washers and nuts. 7. Pry apart the old hub. Being careful of the aged grease. Ignore both sets of bearings, and the rear oil seal. Make sure to get the spacer (which resembles a gear-lever knob), and the two shims that are stuck to its thin end (or the inner of the smaller bearing). Throw the rest of it away. 8. Don fresh gloves and insert the new bearing races into the new hub. I used a vice to press them into place. The larger on goes on the rear, and the smaller on the front. 9. Attach the disc to the new hub using the four nuts/washers/bolts you removed from the old hub. Tighten as much as you can. 10. Insert the spacer, and the inner, larger bearing (after packing with grease), as well as the rear oil seal. The side with the U channel goes facing towards the bearings. Pack the whole area with as much grease as you can. 11. Clean the spindle of all the old grease as you can mange. Making sure to re-install the "collar" which sits at the back of the splindle and spaces the hub/disc away from the rear shield. 12. Slot the hub assembly onto the spindle. Use firm, sudden movements. 13. Slide on the shims you removed from the old hub assembly, followed by the outer, smaller bearing (after packing with grease). 14. Follow with the notched washer, and the castellated nut. 15. Tighten the castellated nut to ~50lbft, then keep turning until a gap is free to insert the new split pin. 16. Insert and bend the new split pin, followed by the grease cap which just sits in the tube. 17. Grease splines and threads of hub, attach new wheel and do up spinner.

I found this video helpful in understanding the manner and order in which to insert bearings, even if he is doing it on a four-bolt hub.

Thoughts

With both wheels, I was unsure how much force is needed when doing-up the spinner on the wheel. I just hammered it home until I felt it was on properly, then gave it another one for luck. I believe they can be attached too tight, but better that then too lose!

Once you've done one wheel, the other side is a piece of cake.

These wire wheels seem smaller than the old ones, perhaps it is the tyre-size? I'll be getting new tyres anyhow so I will try and get the largest sidewall I can.

To fix: Wheel clamp is now too short. To fix, I will need to get a small section of threaded bar (3/8ths - 24) and a coupling bolt.

I need new tyres - what are the right sizes? 175/56R14? Can I use the tyres I removed from the old wheels - should I?

Things it would have been good to replace while I was there

1. Front & rear wheel "shields" aka "dust covers"
2. Rear wheel bearing (RH seemed a bit "weepy")

MGOC Spares had a discount on new, hi-torque starters. So I bought one.

The new units were much smaller and lighter than the old. They also promise better performance, lower amp draw, and more reliability. This tackled two previous issues I'd experienced with the starter: 1. I had had the starter "stick" onto the starting gear. This made it inoperable and left me stranded on the side of the road in a busy Cornish town. It turns out that this is an easy fix, once you know the trick: simply turn over the engine by hand to unstick the starter and allow it to reset. Took the AA man less than two seconds! 2. When the car is hot, it sometimes takes a while to start. A newer, better cranking start should both shorten that time and - given it requires less power - give the car more juice.

I sadly didn't seem to take many photos, but the removal/install is easy: 1. Remove the bolts and unplug the wires. 2. Remove starter 3. Installation is reverse of removal.

This process did allow me a good look at the ring-gear teeth which - to my untrained eye - look fine-ish.

The new starter appears to have solved the above issues: it sounds to be cranking faster (though, this might just be a different noise of the starter?), and I've yet to have the hot starting issues - whoopee!

Recently, during a drive, we had an electrical fault. The switch I use to a security relay for the starter motor blew, meaning the starter would not turn over. This problem, once found, was easily solved by bridging the contacts of the switch with a screwdriver, allowing the starter to turn the engine, and engine to turn on.

Having replaced the switch, I began to think about other possible issues we might encounter. The fuse box, despite never having been the cause of an issue in all the time I've owned it, seemed a likely point of failure. The four glass fuses that the car uses to ensure nothing fries have long been overtaken by modern blade fuses meaning they're unlikely to be purchasable from a service station in the result of a blow.

This leaves me with four options: 1. Replace the fuse box with a modern upgrade with blade fuses 2. Somehow convert the glass fuses to blade fuses 3. Just make sure to carry spare fuses

The first one, mostly due to a desire to overhaul that particularly messy, dirty section of the car seemed to be the best choice.

Date: 21/4/2019

Sadly the Tudor Webasto Sunroof has begun to leak rather badly on the rear right hand side. When it rains heavily, water leaks through the edge of the sunroof and into the car. And it has begun to stain the carpet and headliner. 

There is very little information on removal of Tudor Webasto Sunroofs online - there is not very much information of them at all! - but have found this blog post: http://www.theminiforum.co.uk/forums/topic/276315-tudor-webasto-removal-guide/ which I will attempt to follow.

I plan to remove enough of the sunroof that I can see the back of it, where the leak is, and then once I have worked out the issue I will be able to fix it. I imagine that the issue is caused by a gap between the sunroof frame and the bodywork which allows the water in, if that is the cause of the leak then I will be able to calk it very easily. If it something more difficult then I will require more thinking!