MOTO-SCAT

That really does look good, though I wonder how long it'll take before you getting annoyed by old boys telling you: "A Standard 8, that's the one with no boot lid, isn't it?" Sort of a lesser Scimitar/horse scenario, I suppose. I wanted a classic car as my first set of wheels and went as far as calling about a Standard 10 (£400-ish iirc) and a Bond Equipe with a Vitesse engine for £450 but eventually settled for a Citroen AX, as I'm boring. I mean, who'd have either of those as first cars?!

Having pootled around occasionally in the 500, I must admit that the novelty is starting to wear a little thin, though this is probably because there aren't many local town-speed roads to trundle round and it's only on loan, so I don't want to break it. Hopefully there's more slow roads on your commute, though I'm guessing it wouldn't be too difficult to update to some Herald motive power if it all became too much?

I'm waiting patiently until lunchtime so I can see the pictures when the work firewall lets me.

That shouldn't have too much trouble driving in normal traffic. You just need to remember that people are in far too much of a hurry to ram up the back of the car in front and need to chill out a bit more and slow down. You can get away with pootling about in older cars where you'd get beeped and tailgated in anything new. From experience with my Pop, it was only motorways that posed a challenge, but you soon get fed up used to sitting at a noisy 50mph all the way with some earphones shoved in and music playing.

Second vote for Speedy Spares - they keep bucket loads of obscure spare stuff for almost everything. And you've got the added bonus of living next door to them.

These springs might be a bit of a ballache to locate, but it can be done. As Seth said, you might get a new or second hand set from the Owners Club and they're probably your first stop. If they don't have any and the forums don't bring up anything, it's not the end of the world because you can get a new set made up for about £150. I got the ones for my Anglia made at Paddington Springs in Wembley (who normally make springs for trucks and stuff) and they did a good job. There's probably a spring manufacturer nearer to you but, if not, these things can be done in a roundabout way.

Barrett wrote:The one on the bottom right. Any ideas?

That's a manual starter solenoid. Has it got a pull-toggle to start it then?

Just a starter switch, no solenoid in there

Len - the drive is an hour door to door in a normal car, but probably not much more in something horrid

Jon - Have I ever told you what good taste you have?

turns out some of the rubber bits are shared with MGB and Midget so easily available off the shelf. Hopefully speedy's will have the other one which isn't shared with anything and is NLA. Otherwise that collector's car parts (IIRC that's what they are called) might have them?

It does indeed have a pull start. Not sure I should be posting this in public seeing as several of you know where I live, but the only key lock is the driver's door, then you just turn the ignition on and pull the starter. brilliant. Luckily there i a handy cubby hole to put your now-functionless bunch of keys. I'm glad it's just a starter, because I don't know what a solenoid is except that it's an electricky thing and therefore scary.

I'm surprised nobody has commented on my subtle White Moccasin inclusion in the thread yet...

Barrett wrote:I'm surprised nobody has commented on my subtle White Moccasin inclusion in the thread yet...

I assumed that was what you meant by "break shoes"

I only saw the spelling mistake !
I assume you sell new MG's for a living

So is that it fixedtehZ0rs then?

Yes!
After a week of using the Maestro, which was alternating between running brilliantly and being a total arse, this happened on Saturday


Some boring idling issues and being stuck in traffic made it boil over a couple of times, but I borrowed some tools from a passing Daimler Ferret scout car (really) and managed to get it back to sort-of normalish enough to get home. I parked it up and decided to concentrate on getting the Standard sorted so I wouldn't have to worry about it not getting me to work. I enlisted some helpers and spend the next 8 hours upside-down caked in grease getting the old broken spring off and the new one in, swapping over the bushes from the old spring which were surprisingly perfect. The more I see of the car the more obvious it is that it has been incredibly well looked after in its life.
This was the scene somewhere in the middle of the day. Note the three most important tools there, some fags, a cup of tea and a bottle of Plusgas


Amazingly, it all went together again and we didn't even have any bolts left over, so we took it for a quick run down to the sea front and back to test that all was well.


Everything seemed fine, so much later that night I set off for London for the Dawn Drive. It did nearly as many miles in one day as it did all last year and didn't miss a beat. As expected, it's enormous fun to bimble about in at town speeds but pretty soul-destroying on the motorway. I never thought I would be happy to see so many 40mph average speed cameras, but they certainly helped level the playing field a little.

I'll be using it for the commute from Wednesday for the first time, so hopefully it will behave itself enough to get me to the office and back, but my confidence in its abilities has rocketed after seeing how well it went cruising through the early morning traffic in central London.

You did well to sort the Standard out so quickly, especially when first disheartened by the state of the 'new' spring. I did actually cheer and clap when I saw you turn up to the meeting point on Sunday.

Best thing to do with the Meastro would be to give it back to its owner, telling him it was all fine, ran like a dream the whole time you had it and had no issues whatsoever. Hopefully he won't find out the truth.