By: James Lockridge

The T-shirt said it all. It displayed a red MG octagon logo with a slash through it, with the word above the logo “LOVE” and the word below the logo “HATE”. My 1953 MG-TD was the epitome of “LOVE/HATE”. It was a delight to drive, frisky as only a car with positive camber steering could be, but more mischievous in its mechanical dysfunctions than any human could ever imagine. I’m certain it had a mind of it’s own that continually conjured up new ways to confound, and scheduled the events to occur at the most inconvenient time.

Older British cars had three construction issues familiar to their owners. The first was Lucas electrical systems. Lucas came to mean the god-of-darkness for those who depended on lighting, fuel pumps, or anything else Lucas. I was later told that the Lucas problem centered on asphalt based insulation, especially in the wiring. It broke down with age, heat, and wear. The second issue was the metallurgy, which also broke down with time, and resulted in events like a crankshaft failure while on the highway in the middle of the night. And thirdly, the primitive material used in the top and side-curtains. For a country like England where it rains a lot, side-curtains were never a good solution to a predictable driving condition regardless of any element of charm they might have presented!

I did love the car. The style and handling were delightful, even with no power steering or power brakes. And I also hated it’s unorthodox malfunctions and untimely failures, much like a petulant child throwing tantrums for lack of attention. The MG definitely needed a LOT of attention! And, there were times I wished that I could give it a good spanking.

The Lucas electric fuel pump was mounted inside of the engine compartment approximately opposite the passenger’s knees. Periodically the engine would not start or would sputter and cease to run accompanied by the cessation of the clicking noise that indicated a failure of the fuel pump to do its job, usually due to carbonizing of its points. This malfunction was easy enough to remedy by using a small file to clean the carbon from the points, and perhaps by bending the point arm just a little. But, this remedy was always good only for a finite number of repetitions.

Late one chilly night I was driving from Mobile, Alabama to Craig AFB – about 160 miles – on the darkest road I have ever driven before or since, with a good friend in the passenger seat. He was a newly-minted second lieutenant and Air Force Academy graduate returning to his student pilot duties. As was appropriate to the nature of the weather, he was bundled in his flight suit and flight jacket, huddled in the passenger seat. The engine quit. There was no clicking. The fuel pump had sparked its last time. No more filing points and bending. This was the end.

I uncoiled a length of fishing line, ran it through a hole under the dash into the engine compartment, and tied it around the arm of the fuel pump points. I gave the other end of the line to my friend. For the next hundred miles we were propelled by a jet pilot providing a manual making and breaking of the points by very slight jerks of the fishing line held between his thumb and forefinger. The “Rube Goldberg” nature of the temporary fix notwithstanding, we made it home! One had to be resourceful to drive an MG.

In what I knew would be a futile attempt to create actual heat for the cabin area, I located a new heater for the car, and set about mounting it under the dash between the two seats. The mounting brackets required some hole drilling for sheet metal mounting screws. This was not a problem, and I completed the job just in time to head out for a date with a young lady that I had recently met at a University of Alabama debate tournament. She lived in Mobile, three and a half hours away if the creek did not rise and the car kept running.

Upon arrival in Mobile I stepped out of the MG to discover that I no longer was wearing my right shoe. It had completely disintegrated, and I mean turned to dust! Those were my best shoes! Investigation revealed that one of the heater bracket mounting holes had been drilled through the firewall into the car’s battery. A very tiny drop of sulphuric acid from the battery had been dripping continually on my shoe from directly over the accelerator pedal for the past three and a half hours!

One night as I left the air base and turned left on to the main highway, there was a crashing sound, the MG lurched, scraped, and the radiator cap was suddenly pointing slightly up instead of straight ahead. In the confusion that followed, I noticed an MG wheel that looked very much like mine pass me on the right side. The wheel continued on down the roadside embankment, through the weeds, and settled on the railroad tracks that ran parallel to the highway. As I had only three wheels remaining, I pulled off the highway to discover that it was indeed my rear right wheel that had passed me. I was driving on three wheels and a brake shoe (now ground flat). The axle itself was bare. The top of the right rear fender was split where the tire had broken through in the process of its escape maneuver.

I retrieved the wheel and rolled it back up the embankment to the MG. unbelievably, the wheel retaining nut AND the remains of the securing cotter pin were still inside the hubcap, which had remained attached to the wheel. I jacked up the car, slid the wheel on, tightened the nut, reformed and inserted the cotter pin, and drove home. I did install a new unused and unbent cotter pin the next day. This was the first time I ever had a brake shoe go flat, or of necessity, changed a tire that wasn’t flat.

During the summer of 1963, I sprayed crops for a small firm at the Elmore County Airport near Montgomery, Alabama. I returned to the car at the end of one day to discover that, as I looked at it from the front, the MG had become knock kneed. It had been driving just fine when I parked it that morning. The front shocks, each of which were mounted to the frame with four bolts, had loosened and some bolts were missing. Between the two assemblies I found enough bolts to temporarily secure the shocks until I could obtain replacement bolts, and drove the car home. Unlike most American cars, the MG-TD shocks were essential parts of holding the front wheels in a normal upright position when the car was not moving.

Soon after I acquired the MG, it needed an engine overhaul. A flight instructor friend who was assigned to the nearby air base had access to the auto hobby shop, and offered his assistance as a highly experienced auto mechanic to oversee the overhaul. After a few weekends we had it back together and rolled it out for the test run. Even with several interested friends and bystanders assisting, we could not get the electric starter to engage and start the engine. As a last resort I took the hand crank from the storage clips behind the seat, inserted it into the bolt/receiver in the front of the crankshaft and, in frustration, jumped up and down on the handle – certain that once we got a little movement, it would turn over more easily. The crankshaft never turned, but the head of the special hand crank bolt on the front of the crankshaft that received the hand crank, and also retained the main fan belt pulley, broke off cleanly. We eventually resolved the jam issue, and found that by slipping the Woodruff Key on the fan belt pulley into position, the pulley would stay in place on the headless mounting bolt with the engine running so long as the fan belt itself was properly tensioned. The MG ran for several thousand miles with no bolt head holding the pulley on the shaft. However, the option to start with the hand crank had been lost.

A young lady in whom I had an interest needed a ride back to school at Auburn. Gallantly, although with an ulterior motive, I offered to drive her. I arrived at her house to find an enormous pile of back-to-school luggage. By putting the MG top down we were just barely able to load the stack of luggage in and on the car. Half way to our destination a thunderstorm came across our path. Suddenly, with no warning, there was a commotion under the bonnet and I lost the generator and the water pump. I just had time to make a quick survey of the problem under the hood, and throw a tarp over the luggage stack and seats before running for a barn a short distance across a pasture. The storm hit with a fury, and we settled into the hayloft for the duration.

The fan belt pulley had finally come off the crankshaft. The Woodruff Key was lost. As we waited out the storm, I noticed a large nail in the wall – perhaps there to hold tack. I pulled it out of the wall and worked on it with a file to form a temporary replacement for the missing Woodruff Key. Unlike a real Woodruff Key, the nail was made of more malleable steel, so working it with the file was fairly easy. By the time the storm was over, I had a new “soft-of-woodruff-key” and it worked wonderfully well for several thousand more miles! We arrived at Auburn, unloaded the MG, and I never saw the girl again. Oh well, the “fortunes of love and war”.

One night during my college days, I decided to visit a co-ed friend in Birmingham. As I attempted to pass a Greyhound bus on a hill, the engine on the MG started making god-awful thrashing noises. I pulled off the highway, still under some power, and called a cousin to come help. We got the car into a restaurant parking lot. The next morning I came back with tools and dropped the oil pan to see what the problem might be.

The problem was “only” a broken crankshaft. The 54 HP engine has three main bearings, and the center main bearing cap had broken right at the mid-point. I re-secured the oil pan and we towed it back to my boarding house, where it remained as a typically southern “yard ornament” for several months.

Looking back, I am surprised that there was ANY function of that engine. It seems that two remaining cylinders did provide some pull even though there was a great deal of thrashing going on with the loose ends of the crankshaft. In time, the engine was replaced with an MGA engine. An MG specialist from a small town near Chattanooga did the job. There was no more engine drama after the MGA engine was installed. There was, however, a very long reach for the gearshift lever with the marriage of the MGA engine and MG-TD transmission that took some getting used to.

During my last year of college I worked spraying cotton in Catherine, Alabama. One day it was raining, so I took advantage of the bad weather to mount a new muffler on the MG. As a careful and conservative fellow, I very thoroughly explored the backside of a mainframe “I” beam through which I planned to drill a mounting hole for a muffler bracket The inner seam of the beam felt rounded and consistent, with no apparent wires or fuel lines. I proceeded to drill the mounting hole.

After a few seconds with the electric drill working through the frame, my right hand and forearm suddenly had a very cool sensation. Before I had time to ponder, my right hand and forearm became a flaming torch. I threw down the drill, ran out of the hangar to the tall wet grass, and rolled on the hand and arm to extinguish the flame. I then tried to get the car off the jack, as the MG was under the wing fuel tank of the Super Cub spray plane, and I wanted to get the car out of the hangar before the plane caught fire.

I knocked the car off the normal position on the jack to the safety position of the jack, and it became firmly locked there. Flames were beginning to build. Most of the bodywork frame for the MG-TD is wood. I had grazed a fuel line that was located in the crevasse on the inside of the “I” beam, but the area had become covered through the years by dirt so that it felt smooth. As the flames surrounded the MG’s gas tank I anticipated a Hollywood-type tank explosion. I watched in amazement as a sound like a cork coming out of a champagne bottle was accompanied by a “ka-ching” noise, and the flip-top gas filler cap popped open. NO explosion. The gas had all leaked into a puddle beneath the car.

I was now even more concerned as the flames roared up and spread out under the left wing the Super Cub – also a fuel tank! I called the owner, a few hundred yards away at the main house, and he came with a truck. We hooked a chain to the bumper of the MG and jerked it out of the hangar, free of the jack stand, plane, and building.

I treated my hand with petroleum jelly, and we went to the doctor. We patched the burned airplane wing with a bed sheet, and I was back flying under power lines the next day with a bandaged hand! Amazingly, there was never any residual scaring or disability to my hand.

The MG-TD was a great little car, but definitely different. Even the nuts and bolts were of a type neither SAE nor metric. They were “Whitworth”, available from Sears at one time. I knew of no use for them other than MG-T Series Cars, and Triumph motorcycles. I did know that “Valhalla” for a TD-owner was knowing a person within a few hundred miles who had an set of actual Whitworth sockets. My Crescent wrenches saw a lot of action!

Normal procedure for an approaching thunderstorm was to stop, put up the manual top, install four separate side-curtains and get back inside. When the weather passed, one revered that that routine – stop, remove and stow the four side-curtains, and put the top down. The side-curtains were stored in a compartment in the very small cargo area aft of the seats. If the storage space was occupied by luggage, then the luggage has to come out for access side-curtain storage area. When rain showers were intermittent and frequent on a warm summer day, the result looked like an old Mack Sennent “Keystone Cops” movie.

The MG-TD has been described as a casket riding on four harps. It was preceded by the TC Series, and followed by the TF Series – the final version of that body style. Thereafter came the streamlined MGA, the MGB, the short-lived MGC six-cylinder, and finally the MGF – sold only in Europe. I had an early version of the MGB in 1964. Wow! What a nice little car – roll up windows, a good heater, a nice radio and classic sound. My 1964 MGB was reliable and dependable. I once drove it some 8,264 miles in one month, from Alabama up through the national parks in the northwest, down to San Francisco and back to Alabama, trouble free.

It was almost unbelievable after all the inconveniences of the little TD, especially on the highways, where the 54-horsepowered MG-TD had been took weak to keep up with the pace of modern traffic. But, the little MG-TD will always have a special place in my heart.

“Love/Hate”.