It’s amazing that after puttering on my 1967 MGB GT for about 4 years that I never got around to rebuilding the rear suspension or painting the rear wheelwells. There are a number of reasons this area was neglected, mostly bad.
Since the MG has 4 wheels again I can now remove the rear wheels easily without permanently leaving the car in a beached whale state for a few weeks or months. It’s time to finish up the last few details.
Fortunately there wasn’t any rust in the wheelwells so prep work was primarily scrubbing the area down with heavy duty cleaners and removing any loose undercoating. The MG factory did a very respectable job with undercoating in this area or at least I think we could attribute the work to the factory. Another possibility I suppose is that the US importer or dealers were responsible got spraying the goo. Whatever the case, cleaning up the area was easier than I thought.
I was debating removing the old undercoating but common sense got the better of me. The finished product won’t be quite as smooth but the extra layer of protection will be good. Nobody sees this area anyway unless you enter a concours and some anal judge looks for a few specks of dirt. My MG would suffer big time if I did that!
There is some rust on both sides of the car at the fender lip area. This seems to be very common on MG’s and hopefully I can come up with a permanent fix at some point. In the meantime I prepped the area using POR15 Metal Prep which does a fantastic job at neutralizing the cancer.
Masking off the area well is really important. The undercoat I’ve been using, Dominion Sure Seal Rocker Guard, is incredibly messy and gets everywhere including my arms and hair. It doesn’t come off easily, I have lots of experience with trying to clean it off my body. Once the rubberized undercoat dries it’s almost impossible to remove from metal and paint. This stuff is tough and on freshly cleaned metal leaves a very nice texture.
Here’s the finished wheelwell area. I’ll let it dry for a day before reinstalling the brake drums and boring Hyper-Silver painted wheels. Of course, the hubs and brake backing plates still need to be painted and the suspension still needs to be rebuilt. Something to look forward to some warm summer day.
