That looks good! And the Enkeis look just right on these
That looks good! And the Enkeis look just right on these
The Miata rear CAN be shortened by cutting the cradle in the middle and squeezing it a bit tighter around the pumpkin and getting shorter axles made by Dutchman. One of the Members of this forum did so.
In reply to NOHOME :
If I decide against the fender flares or want to run wider tires in the rear that'll be the way to go.
The rocker panel is solid!
I'm sure I'll find something on the bottom edge when it gets stripped but so far they look perfect besides a few dents.
Pulled the anti-roll bar and bushings off, want to take a guess at how well the ARB was working prior to me parking the car? I may end up buying the 3/4" bar but we'll see how this one feels with the poly bushing ugrade.
The engineers at Morris decided that this bolt should be a philips head.
Even with some heat and JIS screwdrivers (don't cam out as easily as philips) it still stripped.
Thankfully my metric vice grips were able to get a good hold on the head and spin it out.
See something off with this picture?
Here it is jacked up.
No Bueno
I think the technical term is "berkeleyed"
At least my new suspension components aren't at fault for the lean.
After I pull the engine/trans/crossmember I'll start measuring to see where it's tweaked. I know one of the manuals has specific points to measure to/from to check for squareness.
Engine and crossmember were supposed to come out today but the city adjusted our block's scheduled power outage from 9:00-3:00 to 8:50-6:00.
I did however mange to pick up a few parts I wanted to replace and found a little british car treasure trove.
I really want to do an MGA someday.
The dude has 100+ more cars and parts out near Willow Springs.
Cleaned some gunk off of the front of the frame rails and found some more evidence of it being tweaked.
This build is giving me a special feeling, and if I ever win the twin lotteries of time and money, I may copy several of your ideas.
The special shade of Baby Food Yellow looks awfully close to the factory Harvest Gold color of that era. My '72 roadster was originally that color, as was a friend's yard art '70 GT. Seems like it was everywhere in the early 70s.
In reply to DarkMonohue :
I'll be sure to document the suspension swap in detail when I get to it.
When it's buffed and waxed it looks very close to Harvest Gold, I didn't hate it but I also wouldn't paint a car that color.
The Good news is I made some progress.
I used a bolt through the block alternator bracket hole and the rear exhaust stud to lift the engine. A lot of guys use the rocker studs but I didn't feel comfortable using those without an adapter plate.
The factory installed the engines using a similar setup and since this engine is eventually going back in and then back out of the car I'll make one before reinstalling.
You need to tilt the engine back quite a bit after the initial push forward. The rear of the car was up in the air about a foot to help with the angle.
Tomorrow It'll get a scrub and stripped down.
The bad news is...
Chunks in my transmission 
Magnetic chunks in my transmission
This is what was in the non-magnetic drain plug, I didn't pick anything up in the catch bucket when I ran a magnet through it.
Hopefully nothing is seriously damaged. I never had any problems or weird noises shifting but I'll spend some time inspecting it once it's separated from the engine.
Crossmember finally came out.
I need to get some shims or jack screws to set the frame up square and level but I did some investigating to try to figure out the twist.
Next steps are to strip the crossmember to inspect it for any distortion and measure the frame to try to determine if I can fix it without major surgery.
Found one of the the big bends in the frame tucked under the crossmember mounts.
What's strange is that the corner to corner measurements on the crossmember bolts were the same. I'm guessing it got tossed on a frame machine and fixed horizontally and then they just ignored the twist.
Drilled out the grille support.hood latch and duct panel.
Both were smashed enough that working them back in to shape on the car would have been really difficult.
After some more inspection it looks like it's just the passenger side frame rail that is distorted and all of the damage appears to be in front of the firewall. Building one from scratch or grafting one in from another car shouldn't be too difficult.
The brace box was exhibiting some oil canning that didn't quite go away after I straightened it out with a hammer and dolly. It jumped about 1/4" after the first cut so there was definitely some built up tension between the rails.
I stripped down the crossmember, I need to inspect it to see how badly it's twisted. There's a nice one locally for $200 that's already been sandblasted so I may end up picking that up next week.
Little break from the MG
This is the 350 that was in my dad's truck for 400,000 miles that has never been opened up. It was down on power and only had ~20 lbs of oil pressure so we were all excited to see what it looked like inside. The truck's name is Christine for obvious reasons.
It is going to go in the RHD jeep after a trip to the machine shop.
Non-carbon goop is from the wash we did yesterday.
No perceptible ridge on the cylinder walls, just carbon at the top lip.
The only real damage was on a few of the lifters and the one of the cam lobes.
I pulled the kingpin out of the upright with some percussive persuasion and a jerry rigged fixture.
Thankfully there's no wiggle in the kingpins so they don't need to be reamed.
Cleaned up some of the casting marks and gave it a scrub while the components soak in cleaner.
And my engine paint got here. I need to wait a couple days for the temps to be more favorable but it looks much better than the current bright red on the valve cover.
Modeling the suspension to hopefully be able to do some geometry analysis.
Upright/Kingpin assembly is still WIP but here's what it looks like in motion.
And the build process for those who enjoy it.
I'm calling this good enough. Time to tear some hair out learning suspension software.
Nice drawings. Did you scan the parts of did you actually measure all the parts?
In reply to NOHOME :
Thanks!
Just calipers, a digital angle finder, and a precision ruler/straight edge.
I finished modeling the front suspension and wheel assembly,
My model was off 0.002" from the actual wheel offset but since I measured it with a straight edge and a tape measure I'll consider it acceptable 
Long time no see GRM
Aside from learning about suspension I've been putting a lot of thought into how I want to address the twisted frame. My measurements show that the The distortion is ~90% just the twist around the longitudinal axis with the damage almost entirely contained to the right side frame rail and inner fender. The frame shops near me gave me estimates that were almost more than the car is worth (classic tax + unibody) and I haven't been able to locate a cheap donor frame rail.
With all that in mind my current plan is to cut off everything forward of the firewall, build a chassis jig, and then fabricate a new front end.
My very rough "napkin sketches" for the front end were originally designed to run the standard MG suspension with a modified crossmember along with some structure to swap to coilovers down the line.
After a lot of time reading through suspension textbooks, making spreadsheets, 3d modeling, and more reading textbooks, I came to the conclusion that trying to improve the MG suspension is not the way to go. For what I want out of the car every component would end up being fabricated from scratch unless I wanted to de-valve the Armstrong shocks to use them as plain A arms.
So I picked these up.
The Miata acronym still rings true.
I need to decide if I want to use the stock miata subframe, make a custom subframe, or go the Keith Tanner route and weld the pickup points to the frame.
Here are the mounting points outlined in orange.
And here's a frontal comparison of the MGB Suspension with an NA Miata setup (orange outline)
Although the Miata suspension is wider the stock subframe attachment point puts the frame about 3" above where the body of the armstrong shock would sit, meaning it takes up a little more space in a tight area. based on my first few design passes that's pushing me towards a custom subframe.
In other news we're almost finished with the 350 rebuild for my friend's jeep.
We only forgot 1 gasket during assembly (so far) so I'm feeling pretty good about it.
This road is starting to look familiar!
I ended up going with a full Miata chassis under my project, it took a few false starts to get to that point.
First I tried grafting in the subframes like you have into the factory chassis structure. Did not like that because it looked a bit contrived rather than designed. Then I decided that I would just used the rear chunk of the Miata chassis. The Miata comes apart pretty easy along this line of spotwelds. So I tacked in the part and it looked good. It brought a fuel tank and location for an exhaust to the party hence saving a lot of time.
But that just led to this:
A full chassis swap with an MGB would be tricky in that the extra width of the Miata puts the drivers seat and steering wheel around 3" outboard. Hard to move the seats inboard because of the tunnel; it is much wider than the MGB.
But the front clip does detach much the same as the rear in the first pic, and maybe graft this in on its own? May or may not want to use the firewall structure. This reduces a lot of your fabrication to just the passenger compartment packaging requirements.
There is an MGB GT on YouTube that has a full Miata chassis swap, but I have no idea how detailed the videos might be.
Impressive modeling work! I went with the grafted in rear subframe and haven't gotten around to the front. Looking forward to seeing how you skin the cat!
How'd I miss this?!
Also, how can I bribe you to share your CAD work?
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