MG Sports Cars

1962 MGA | Jag E-Type rear end | Fabricated front suspension (Fatman?) | 302 Ford | 5 speed |

She's a project. Extended nose to accommodate radiator, it seems.

Congratulations on what should be a great project, looking forward to seeing your progress on it.

Thanks for the encouragement! Like any project, the problems are becoming bigger...well, not really bigger, just more recongnizable...now that I have it in the garage and can get a closer look at it. Basically I bought a pile of parts that can, in principle, be assembled into a car, given enough enthusiasm and lack of sense. One thing that attracted me to this car is that it is already stripped to the bare bones, you can see what you have more easily than if the car were whole. Given that its purity as an MGA is already lost to history, I will not feel any guilt about modifying it to suit my tastes. I've always been interested in having a modular car, one that can be taken apart quickly to get at assemblies that are normally difficult to access. For example, I'm a long ways from tackling the body work, but I am entertaining the idea of tilt-up rear and front body sections, to provide the sort of engine access you see on a Spitfire or Jag, but similarly with the tail section. To do this I would probably add some tube framing to the chassis and to the body sections, with a system of pins and clips to keep things in the right position.

Meanwhile, it seems that the biggest item on the to-do list is to figure out the half-done XKE rear end setup. I pulled the aft body section off today (easy to do, it was just resting on the frame rails) and did some staring at the bits and pieces. I'm not familiar with the stock MGA setup, so It will take a while to recognize the changes...although many are easy to spot because of the welds, some of which look like they were done by a blind man with a cold torch. The most significant problem to solve at this point appears to be the radius rods, which were set up naively so as to cause binding, and probably serious toe-in changes, as the wheels move into jounce or extension. Basically the {cough} builder welded on some mount points to the frame rails at the point in the front of the wheel arch where the rail levels out again, after descending from above the axle; then he ran rods straight forward from the lower control arm mount tabs, and connected it forward with a tie-rod end on each side. To my eye, it couldn't be more wrong if you tried. It seems to me I can run a rod diagonally from the control arm toward the centerline of the car, so that the forward joint lies on the same center of rotation as the control arm. This geometry should prevent binding, but the diagonal attitude means having to take up the bending moment somehow, maybe by triangulating from the center of that diagonal back towards the inner mount of the control arm. I'll post pictures and diagrams when I get a chance.

Does anyone here have experience setting up XKE IRS on an MGA or similar? I've seen a few projects in the archives that mention it. I'd love to see some closeup photos. {EDIT: I see the 'Roadmaster' project addresses Jag IRS, [forum.britishv8.org] } {EDIT2: or this one from a Cobra project [forum.britishv8.org] could work. I was thinking of that today when staring at it. Might have to go to a fuel cell to make it work though }

--Mike



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2016 10:17PM by 62A302.

i might suggest the hamb or google jag irs. many differing opinions as to best way to accomplish this from using the rubber mounts and cage to solid mount of the differential and the control arms straight ahead to heims located near the center of the chassis (east-west). good luck

Thanks. Looking here (p6 of [www.jheengineering.com] ) it seems that my setup was an attempt at a Watts linkage. It wasn't clear to me at first, because I purchased it partly disassembled. I'll have a closer look through the parts tomorrow.

Hi Mike, I think I looked at that project too. Quite a project but the parts alone are probably worth more than he was asking! If it is the same one, it seemed like it had a Fat Man front end and QA1 shocks all around. I'm no expert on Jag IRS but I did notice two things on that car which concerned me a little, the first was that the right rear hub was clearly labeled LR which might work but made me wonder about the attention to detail that the rear end was assembled with but more concerning to me was the way that the axels were shortened and the lack of uniformity in the welding of such a crucial rotating part. I don't know if it's really a safety issue or if the variation in the thickness of the material would be enough to cause significant vibration or wear but it might be worth having an expert check it out just in case.
Hope it works out and you can make something fun out of it.