Blizzard Blankets Michigan!

Last night a blizzard starting blowing through most of the Great Plains and northeastern part of the U.S. This afternoon, it's still snowing heavily. Not a great day for a 79-mile commute each way, so an opportunity to catch up on things at home.

The motor to the TD is completely disassembled and the major components are at a local machine shop being measured this week.  Bill Mikkelson, working out of his Chelsea-based shop,


Dexter Manufacturing, Inc., has built up a reputation over the years as one of the area's most proficient machinists and a bona fide car guy. His tongue-in-cheek rat rod looks like something out of a Big Daddy Roth sketch and summers  can often find him shooting up rooster tails on one of our many back-country gravel roads.  With the addition of his son and master engine builder,  Chance Mikkelson, DMI is now doing everything from Masserati engines to a tour d' force Ford Model T with  fuel injection. Having such a resource just four long country blocks from "the farm" where I now sit means the Mikkelsons have both my MG Midget race motor as well as the old XPAG out of the TD sitting on their bench.

When a machinist tells you, "Don't worry about it, I'll just put it on your tab," it's time to worry. Bartenders say that. Machinists don't say that.

So, with these two MG engines  spread around DMI, and various parts of front suspension, brakes, rear axles, etc. littering my garage, I got to thinking about the original construction of my little MG-TD.


Morris was born in October of 1952 and was "named" TD 22161. The British Motor Corporation, successor to the Nuffield Organization (named for English auto magnate Sir William Morris, Lord Nuffield, the original venture capitalist behind the MG Car Co. Ld.), manufactured 29,664 "Series TD" MG Midget automobiles between November 10, 1949 and August 17, 1953. Over 23,000 units of this production run were exported to the United States as a part of Britain's post-war industrial recovery efforts. Many fewer went to South Africa, Australia, Asia, Canada and the European continent. A scant 1,656  cars (5.6%) were kept for sale in England. Around 1964, one of these "home market" right-hand drive vehicles came to the United States  with the personal effects of an American oil engineer returning from assignment in the U.K.

Until some time in the early1970's, TD 22161 lived the life of a "second car" and eventually came into the hands of one Stanley Gillis, a banker in El Dorado, Arkansas. In 1976, Mr. Gillis disassembled the originally green car in his garage and painted it a stunning wine red and maroon hand-rubbed lacquer. Over the years, this labor-intensive paint job, which required hours of hand-sanding between its 14 coats, has stayed with the car and collected it's share of chips, dings, and cracks-- what hobbyists refer to as patina. It is not the factory color sprayed by the chaps at Abingdon in 1952, but it is to this day my favorite MG color combination, and a reasonable representation of the duo-tone color schemes popular on MG cars in the 1930's.

To get a glimpse of what MG production looked like in the early 1950's, follow this link to the archives of the British Pathe' video library:
http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=81695