There isn’t much to do when being in Corona quarantine. Therefore, I thought it is a good idea to review the MGB project, clean up my inbox, go through all invoices and other documentation. But having full transparency on all spendings and time that went into Mildred and the Mini40 project after a few hours doesn’t feel too good 🙂
One of the first things I did in 2021 besides FixingC6622 was to replace the Mini gearbox. When I picked it up after repairs, I saw the MGB GT at the Mini garage. Somehow, I ended up making an offer in May 2021. I was in the final stage of the Morgan restoration (so I thought) and it looked like a good follow up project. There weren’t many other MGB GTs on Ebay-Kleinanzeigen or Mobile.de for this price at the time. Just one – a late rubber bumper model – and that looked much worse.
I picked up Mildred a few weeks later – in the middle of June. Doors, seats, bumpers and front wings were already off. As I was also completing the Morgan at the same time, it was sometimes not easy to correctly note the hours per car. In my OneNote I recorded a total of 52 hours to completely take the rest of the MGB apart until the end of August. Total costs including the car, some tools e.g. ClearStripDiscs, the material for the roll-over jig, a new LHD dashboard and all spares for the front suspension up to this point were just above 5K€
In September and October 47 hours went into building the Roll-over jig, striping the shell with a wire wheel, and removing door and tailgate skins. Included are the few fun hours of rebuilding the entire front suspension. The only investment during this time was elbow grease. The bare metal on the car revealed more work than expected.
A replacement shell that requires less work along with new sills and many other panels were bought in November. What I did not document is the time that went into looking and finding the replacement. Another ~2K€ were spent for shell and new heritage panels. The Mini40 project came up suddenly in mid-November. The hours (35 hours so far) going into this will help keep the welding budget low.
To sum it up: on average, roughly 30h per month went into my hobby in 2021. With the latest spare part orders, I did over the last couple of days almost 9k€ were spent on the MGB project in total. It is already clear that the original budget of 22000€ for the MGB will not be enough to complete the car. In a post on the MGDC forum Andreas once wrote that 20000 to 30000€ is the required budget for a full MGB restore. I think he is right about this. The problem with sticking to the lower budget sum on a full restoration is that once you start – you easily get carried away with “upgrades” and changes.
2022 will bring several changes for me. The biggest will be a job change. While I will have more time to work on the cars for the next couple of months – I might not have the necessary budget to complete the MGB this year. Especially not with some other stupid ideas in mind. The current goal for 2022 is getting a painted rolling chassis. Everything else would be icing on the cake. Stay tuned
Fixing C6622 
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