MG Enthusiast Magazine Vol.44 No.4 Back Issue

JOHN CLAYTON RAISED an interesting question when he emailed me recently with details of his two MGs. One of those was a total basket case
rescued from a scrapyard, while the other was bought looking good and ready for the road. Not surprisingly it is the restoration project which is
proving to be the more expensive of the two – and by quite some margin! You can read John’s story starting on p26, including some of the
conclusions he has drawn. This idea that it is cheaper to buy a finished car than to restore your own should not come as a surprise to anybody who has tackled their own rebuild, or to those readers who have paid
close attention to Rod Ker’s Market News column over the years – time and time again we’ve seen cars sold for a fraction of their rebuild costs.
So why do we bother? Well, sometimes it is indeed ignorance that sucks us in, either of just how bad a project car really is or of just how much a
total restoration can cost even if you are giving your labour for free. Yet that can’t be the whole story, otherwise people would surely learn their lesson, whereas in reality many of us dive happily into the next project just as soon as the first is finished. I guess the reasons for this are many and varied. Personally, I love to have a project on the go as it means there is always a puzzle of some sort to solve. Currently this mental
manipulation is being provided by a 1946 Standard Eight Tourer that I bought as a box of bits and which is now starting to look like a car again, (though this has just been joined by an MG – more on that in an issue soon). Having a never-ending list of jobs to do also gives me somewhere to slink off to in the evening when the rest of the family want to watch TV – quite frankly, the gogglebox bores me silly. Other cars in this issue have been restored for different reasons. Stuart Mumby’s MGA (p54) was built professionally to his own specification with long distance touring in mind.