Photos by David LaChance, unless otherwise noted.
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the May, 2013 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.
You know what the Boy Scouts always say, be prepared. Or how your Momma told you about squirrels storing up acorns for the winter. This is a practical lesson about the same kind of values, as applied to a 1966 MGB roadster. When he acquired this car, Mike Oliva was determined to do something with it. And he did, again and again, repeatedly redoing the MGB, with an eye on getting it perfect. Just to provide one such vignette, he’s had it repainted four different times.
What sets this MGB project apart from so many others is that long before he acquired this car, Mike had been laying in supplies of MG parts at a nearly obsessive pace. Professionally, he’s a carpenter from Weymouth, Massachusetts, but as a self-described pure hobbyist, had been building a hoard of original works MG components for years. It involved a long time and some repeated steps, but as MGB restorations go, this one has an uncommonly high level of factory parts, as opposed to reproductions.
“I bought the car in 1978. Just got it running at the time. I didn’t have any real plans for it, but for eight or nine years, I had just been collecting parts all the time,” Mike explained. “Then, around 1989, I decided to do the car up, and it turned out better than I thought.”
Mike’s MG is one of 14,543 Tourers, as the MGB roadster was officially dubbed, that Abingdon sent to the United States in 1966. That model year represents a fulcrum between the MGB’s introduction in 1962 and the looming conglomeration of British Leyland that occurred in 1968. Mike said he was attracted to the 1966 because of its traditional appearance, led by the chromed semi-polygonal grille (a blacked-out version was a 1970 update) with vertical bars, a simplified instrument presentation in its basic steel dashboard, with the added benefit of the five-main-bearing B-series engine that first appeared in 1965, plus a fully synchronized transmission. Mike has been restoring MGs for about 20 years, owning four MGBs presently, plus a six-cylinder MGC.
He first spotted this roadster in 1977, when his cousin, who was then living in Florida, brought it north for a visit. It took a year for Mike to persuade him to sell it, following an instantly enjoyable first ride. At the time, it didn’t run reliably and looked awful. The factory blue paint was faded way shy of presentation quality, and early stages of corrosion were already visible. As a stopgap, Mike sprayed it in black primer, circa 1981, and used it as a driver. In New England, the rust issues in the floors and rocker areas made themselves increasingly evident. The MGB, it’s worth noting, was not exclusively a Florida car. After taking possession, Mike found an old registration slip issued by South Dakota. So the car, and its indifferently rustproofed sheetmetal, had seen the extremes of Great Plains winters. But Mike kept improving it, or at least getting it to run reliably, while he did the legwork prior to a hazily defined restoration plan.
“Around 1986, I’d say, I just started buying parts, and getting into the circle of meeting (MG) people, making contacts. Eventually, I would just come across stuff, sometimes through the want ads, and I started buying it,” Mike recounted. “Then I met this guy who had a lot of NOS stuff and I started buying from him. I got all the stuff I needed to do a car: All the quarters, the doors, rocker panels, everything. All the sheetmetal stuff, I bought. The rest, the mechanical stuff, I refurbished. I sent the transmission out to be rebuilt, but after I had the machine work done–cylinders honed, crankshaft polished, a valve job–I rebuilt the engine myself, redid the carburetors myself, got it running better. I was tweaking it. I guess that’s the best way to put it.”
The heaviest work went to Mike’s friend and classmate Steve Cappellini, who runs a body shop in Hanson, Massachusetts, and decided to undertake the body restoration. Unlike any number of other British sporting cars, including its immediate predecessor, the MGA, the John O’Neill-designed MGB uses steel unitized construction, albeit with an aluminum hood until 1969. So despite its comparative simplicity and light weight, an MGB body restoration is akin to that of any number of other 1960s and 1970s cars. “We just agreed that if something looked suspicious, let’s just do it now, because with some of the body panels, there might be a hundred spot welds that you have to drill out to replace a part,” Mike said. “So we decided just to do it. There were many problems, from rotted fenders, wheel arches that had to be replaced, to the bottoms of the doors and the inner sills rusting out.”
Restoration photos courtesy Mike Oliva.
Here, beginning in 1989, was where the cache of MGB goodies that Mike had been stashing came into play big. Both rear quarters were cut away with air chisels and a Sawzall after the spot welds were drilled out. The inner fenders, perhaps surprisingly, were fine, only needing to be sanded down and cleaned. The underlying structure of an MGB consists of two parallel front side members, which fans of the car commonly call chassis legs, and which run rearward from the firewall to a crossmember positioned aft of the transmission, located up front by the steel dash. For additional stiffness, MG added double-section sills on either side of the unibody that attached to the rear side members, which rise up to cross the rear axle housing and alongside the trunk floor. Lateral strength was accomplished by tying the sills to the floor panels and transmission tunnel. The rocker panels lie outboard of the sills, critical components that required removal of various panels to reach.
The first impression was daunting. Not only were the rocker panels perforated, but Mike and Steve immediately realized that the sills on both sides were badly corroded. “The sills make up what MGB people call the box,” Mike told us. “The inner structure up front was basically okay; you usually don’t run into any problems up there. Once we started to open it up, and got what was left of the rocker panels off, we could see that holes were rusting through the sills, so we said, fine, let’s pull them out and replace them. We basically worked from the inside out, and rebuilt that whole box section on both sides.” Going outwards, Mike and Steve welded in the sill plate, jacking points and braces, all NOS components.
There was more: At some point, the battery had been relocated to the trunk, without a battery box. You know what that meant. Acid leaked out and gobbled through the trunk floor. They already knew the floorboards were shot. Replacing them often also requires renewing the castle rails, basically linear structural members that run from the rear wheel arches forward to the toeboard. These, too, were NOS. About the only significant non-NOS body pieces that were employed were floorboard and trunk floor kits, both furnished by Steelcraft.
As we said, Mike has refinished the car four times, the most recent case dating to 2008 and applied at Steve’s shop. First, on went three coats of PPG DP epoxy primer, block-sanded with 400-grade paper and then sealed. The paint was two-stage PPG Deltron, with four color coats applied to inhibit the red pigment’s natural tendency to bleed. Three clearcoats were added, and then wet-sanded with 1,500- to 3,000-grade paper. Mike sent the bumpers, grille, center post and trunk lock out to South Shore Plating in Quincy, Massachusetts, to be rechromed, and topped it off with NOS overriders.
“With this car, the actual body repairs and getting it running, took me maybe a year,” Mike said. “But really, I’ve been working on this car for 30 years. How come? I guess I’m, what do you call it, anal. But as I went on, I developed my craft, and learned that I could make this thing better.”
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