Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2012 07:56:19 -0600
Reply-To: Jim Felder <jim.felder@GMAIL.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Jim Felder <jim.felder@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: How to get the tumbler out of a lock mechanism?
In-Reply-To: <AF7B3222-F26D-4E21-AB96-1DE1419D43AA@gmail.com>
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That was a cool thing about British cars. Mostly, you could drive them
around town on the ragged limits of adhesion and nobody knew.
I had my restored 59 just after I bought my 90 Carat new. They were both
about equal off the line. The MGA was a bit faster top end.
MGBs and TR4s were a different story. I got into lots of ticketude with
them. Once, in the days before the interstate, in the 200 mile drive
between my home and Atlanta through rural Alabama and Georgia, I (in a TR4)
raced a woman in an MGB that I met alongside on the way. We went at it four
about 45 miles until she turned off in Villa Rica Georgia, encountering
only the occasional milk truck in the very early morning hours.
My heart still races to think about it. It will never happen again for so
many reasons.
Jim
On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 7:44 AM, BenT Syncro <syncro@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've had an MGA too, Jim. I used to race it up and down the Great Highway
> in San Francisco before the local bureaucrats turned it into a promenade.
> Ironically, that is the place where we hold BurningVan. BV wouldn't have
> been possible with speed maniacs running up and down the highway. The MGA
> felt fast. Without the side curtains and the top down, you thought you were
> going 120mph. I'm fact you were probably as quick as a normally aspirated
> Vanagon Westy. The difference, of course, is the Vanagon would start
> reliably as long as you had a good ignition switch. ;-)
>
>
> BenT
> sent from my electronic leash
>
> On Feb 2, 2012, at 4:38 AM, Jim Felder <jim.felder@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > It took me a long time to figure it out (I did a frame-off restoration
> of an MGA in the early nineties that's still winning shows) but they suck.
> German cars don't, by and large, and Vanagons fit my needs, are easy to
> work on, and come with a great community to back them up. Though I had
> plenty of VWs (buses and bugs) it was a long time before it finally hit me
> that the German stuff was better made and better thought out. That MGA I
> restored: the year it was made, it was part of the third larges car company
> in the world. Just over ten years later, the marque was gone.
> >
> >
>
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