By Ken Edgar

  One tends to learn to roll with the punches, so they say, when messing about with old cars because it pays to be adaptable. Everyone has heard the old bromide “it will cost twice as much and take twice as long as you figure” to see a restoration/refurbish project to completion. In my experience things tend to start as a basic plan and then fly off in a completely unexpected direction. In some of these cases all I can do is hold on and see where the whole works slides to a halt.

   Enter a woebegone 1966 Midget: a partially stripped carcass devoid of a drive train or interior that arrived at my home two summers ago. The poor thing was listed on an MG forum first for sale and then to give away after the owner had no takers. My Brother-in-law saw possibilities to cut parts from the shell for use on his MGB Sebring clone project and made the offer to take the car away. He had one slight problem – he had no way to get the car home and the it was five hours away. He did know one guy who had a trailer; as a result I received a phone call.

   “Hey, do you wanna go on a road trip to pick up a Midget body? Wait, that didn’t come out right; do you want pick up a car?”

   “Okay; where?”

    “About five hours from here.”

    I’m always for trying to save old iron so I agreed to use my truck and trailer to go pick it up.

   We left out at daybreak and arrived at the car’s location on the hottest day of the year so far. The driveway was narrow and sinuous with a very small parking area by the house. Because of the tight quarters we had to decouple the trailer and horse it around by hand since there wasn’t room to turn around. We then had to drag the wheel-less carcass up onto the trailer and lash it down. This was all performed under a heat index of 102° F on empty stomachs after a five hour drive.

  At the end of a very long day we surveyed what we’d picked up: a basically complete body too good to cut up. We discussed what to do with the car and, in the end, my Brother-in-law gave me the car to rebuild. This was ambitious to say the least as I was looking at sourcing a rear axle assembly, engine, gearbox, front hubs and brakes, an interior, dash, and the need to bash a large dent out of the right rear quarter panel left by a tree that had fallen on the car. There also was no title paperwork – an onerous process to correct in my home state. Did I mention ambitious?

   Things looked promising at first since I already had an engine from a Spitfire and a gearbox from a Toyota. Yeah, these bits come from something other than a Midget but I’d figure out how to make them work when the time came. Hubs and a rear axle were found from a wrecked Midget and I planned to use the seats and a few other items from a Spitfire I’d previously parted out. A local member of the aforementioned MG forum was holding a “garage sale” this past summer and my Brother -in-law wanted to check out what he had, again for the Sebring project. I tagged along in the hope I could find some more parts for the Frankenmidget, as I’d dubbed the car.

  We arrived at the guy’s house and lo and behold, what does he have but a 1977 Midget sitting in the front yard. He tells me about the car: it’s all original with 48,000 miles, it runs and drives, the interior is almost perfect, and he has all the paperwork. He doesn’t care for the modern Midgets so he wants to make a deal. I sent my wife some pictures and explained my off-the-cuff plan for using this car instead of the ’66 Midget, thus successfully sidestepping the Edict of No More Projects. A week later the car was mine. A new set of tires with a little work on the lights and brakes resulted in a street legal car all for the price of restoring a Midget interior alone.

   What to do? I like the looks of the older Midgets over the new ones but, in this case, the new Midget covers all of the major issues I faced with the old one. My hastily conjured plan envisioned making the ’77 bumper less using parts from the ’66 and a number of Midget owners have done just that. However, the ’77 needs only some rust repair and a paint job. I had actually considered keeping the ’77 original except for the boring, white body color. Around the same time I was chided by a fellow forum poster about keeping the cars whole and original looking. He went as far as to state that we were obligated to do such.  Such presumptuousness prods me to want to graft a huge V-8 into the car and paint it purple with yellow flames but I won’t. A good, loud orange color will suffice.

    At present the Midget is an occasional work hack and I have to get a few other projects out of the way before I turn my full attention to it. We’ll see where the journey takes me.