The 1275cc engine and original gearbox is now out of the engine bay, making way for a K-series! We had a few little problems on the way which we overcame. The first was that the hoist we bought was too high off the floor and wouldn’t go under the midget’s wishbones without lifting it with a jack which was a bit awkward. The second was taking off the mounting points in the correct order, after a bit of confusion we realised there were 3 bolts on one of the mounts hence why the engine wouldn’t budge!

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More progress on the stripping front, the original 1275cc engine is very nearly ready to come out. All that is left is the throttle cable on the engine and the rest of the gearbox stuff like the prop shaft, gear lever and clutch linkage.

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I’ve finally started work on the Midget after what seems like ages! I started by removing the bonnet followed by the headlights and surrounding chrome so I can remove the wings. I’ve also removed some of the inner panels and found that the inner wings have a replacement panel on there which doesn’t look too bad. Here’s a pic of the car without headlights and bonnet:

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Firstly welcome to my blog! I’ve created this to document the restoration/butchering of my 1973 MG Midget. She was my first car and is now sitting in the garage very poorly. On the way back from Leeds last year she blew a water hose whilst on the M62 in rush hour. Luckily I had breakdown recovery free with my classic insurance! The engine bay needless to say got very hot with the lack of coolant still remaining in the system. Most of it had gone onto my windscreen and hood, the rest just turned to steam! It was so hot it melted the HT Leads onto the spark plugs! We put the hose back on and topped her up and I drove the 150 miles back home with the car slightly misfiring and quite worse for wear.

7 months later and here we are! Since owning the midget we’ve had a fair bit of work done: new hood, new clutch, new starter motor, new coil, an engine tune-up, new alloys, K&N air filter, sports exhaust and a 4 pot brake conversion. The plan is to restore the body work and upgrade the suspension and drop in a 1.8 VVC K-series engine. Hopefully we will be making around 160-170bhp which is nearly 3 times the power of the 1275cc A-series at the moment. We should be looking at 0-60 in around 6-7 seconds if all goes to plan.

I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for reading.