The picture above illustrates the situation poor old JBY has been in for the last couple of years. I’m (thankfully) at the back end of a major house renovation project, and inevitably the garage had become the dumping ground for all the miscellaneous clutter that had no place inside the house while the work was going on. Now that’s all over, JBY has finally been excavated from beneath the Billy bookcases, the garage is clear, and I’m cracking on with things!
I start by removing the seats, carpets and most of the interior trim. The majority of this is beyond saving and will end up in the bin eventually, but I’m packing it all up in black sacks and dumping it in the shed in case I need to refer to it when refitting the new stuff later on. The driver side door and all the window glass comes out, and I start to be reminded of some of the horrors I had… let’s say “overlooked” when I restored this car the first time round all those years ago.
Previously I had fitted lower rear wing repair panels (the type that only comes up to the chrome waistline strip), I guess I just didn’t have the appetite for dealing with this mess back then, and it’s only gotten worse in the intervening years. As mentioned previously, I’ve already purchased full rear wing panels, and the inner repair panels will be on the shopping list, so this will be getting fixed properly this time. The same corner on the near side is not as far gone, so might get away with a simpler repair to the inner panels there.
I had never removed the windscreen before in any of my previous projects, so was curious to see the state of things when it came out.
Turned out that it had quite probably never been taken out, at least not whilst it’s been painted red!
I’d like to say I was surprised, but with an MGB one should always expect to find rust. From memory there’s definitely some filler under the red paint around here, so it follows that there would have been rust under the windscreen rubber itself too.
I finished up today by removing the tailgate and taking out the glass. On close inspection the tailgate is pretty badly corroded across the whole inner bottom edge, and has several other bubbling rust spots, so potentially another new panel needed. A pretty productive first day of work.
