Guild of Craftsmanship - 1937 MG VA

To paraphrase the Merle Haggard song, Thomas Newcomen tried. And mostly, once he'd developed a workable steam engine, he succeeded in propelling Great Britain into the modern age, which came to be known as the Industrial Revolution. Water and steam power permitted mechanized manufacturing to take place on an unprecedented scale, while new processes of casting iron reliably proliferated. And yet, the English tradition of hand labor in assembly, a spinoff of the apprenticing system that dated back before Shakespearian times, persisted stubbornly. No matter how big and smoky the mills became, countless English products remained significantly hand-hewn.

Which explains nicely why for all its swoop and handsomeness, the MG VA is a throwback to this venerated British tradition. Stripped of its flowing sheetmetal, the MG reveals construction techniques that could easily have been lifted from a steam¬punk graphic novel. It's got a primitive frame, heavy steel fenders, and sheetmetal skins tacked over an ash-framed body. You could almost think of it as a four-door, four-place takeoff on a Morgan Plus 4. None of this, of course, posed an obstacle to Bob Faria. Quite the contrary, it pegged his enthusiasm meter at the prospect of restoring the VA. After all, this is a guy who's already worked magic on a Tickford coupe, an Austin 7 "Chummy" and a TC. It was all in the family.

This is a model from the expansionist prewar years of MG. The story really begins in 1935, when MG made an unexpected grab for the sports saloon niche by introducing the four-door SA, sometimes called the Two-Litre, at almost the same time that S.S. Cars, the future Jaguar, unveiled a similar creation. The SA marked a total break from previous MG design, best embodied by the Magnette and the PB Midget. By contemporary standards, it was a huge car, and boasted such advances as Lockheed hydraulic brakes and full gearbox synchronization, plus a Wolseley engine. The SA, however, was plagued with quality problems associated with a wobbly production startup.

By 1936, MG was looking for a smaller, cheaper car, but realized that fitting saloon bodywork to a Magnette or Midget would result in an impossibly tiny cabin. Cobbing up a new midsize chassis, MG introduced the VA in late 1936 as the storied Magnette's replacement. It was powered by an OHV four-cylinder engine that displaced 1,548 cc stock, and was again based on a Wolseley powerplant. The wheelbase was nine feet exactly. They were never built in big numbers, just 2,407 produced in all. Despite that total, virtually no two VAs were mechanically identical. Constant running changes at Abingdon involved two crankshaft redesigns, the substitution of insert rod bearings for babbitt, camshaft, carburetor and spring changes, among many more. They're all different in some way. And yet Bob knows of only two others that exist stateside. With help from some sheetmetal craftsmen, Bob utilized his skills as a custom homebuilder to undertake a body-off structural restoration of the VA in his shop, located in Little Compton, Rhode Island.

"I had just finishing a 1937 VA Tickford. I restored it, and then a friend of mine in the New England MG 'T' Register, who actually lives in North Carolina, had bought this VA and had it at his place in Durham, in total disrepair," Bob recalled. "So I went down there, looked it over and offered him $9,500 for it. The tires on it were so rotted that he let me borrow wheels from his TC to get it into the trailer and bring it back to Rhode Island; I shipped the wheels and tires back to him. Then it was, like, 'here we go again.'"

As to the car's known history, it had at least two owners in the United Kingdom before a now-deceased physician brought it across the Atlantic sometime in the 1970s and allowed it, essentially, to sit untouched. The OHV inline-four had largely seized and the Cecil Kimber-penned saloon bodywork was rotting from the bottom up. The thought of taking on a project car built in the low four figures--do the math, an average of 15 were built per week during the VA's lifespan--close to 80 years ago might terrify the average restorer, but not Bob. For one thing, you're not totally out of luck in terms of finding parts for a VA. A British firm known as SWV Spares is a world authority on the SA, VA and WA model lines, with enough expertise to construct complete custom bodywork on existing chassis with MG (or Morris, or Wolseley) components. Proprietor Peter Ratcliffe can sell you a VA firewall, a reproduction Tickford body, a full ash body frame kit or even a complete car. As Bob put it, "If you've got a checkbook, you can find the parts. Anything I needed, I could have gotten it from him. But even if you get, say, a wing for the car, you can get it over here and try to match it up, and it won't fit. That's because these cars were all hand made. They all fit differently. To get a sunroof that's off the shelf is practically impossible. You've got to custom-make it."

So Bob decided to go with what he had wherever possible. He separated the project in two, taking on the chassis and powertrain himself. The body and interior were farmed out. He sent the body shell up the road to Tiverton, Rhode Island, and Jack's Body Shop. Most of the time, Jack's handles collision work, but it has a little-known sideline of precision restoration work. The owner is Manny Cruz and his assistant, John Silva, was described by Bob as a metalworking master. Manny explained how the job went, using skills of hand fabrication that John brought over from his native Portugal.

Everybody at Bob's house gets in the act. His granddaughter Madison ''installs'' hangers for the replacement exhaust system using one of Grandpa's ratchet wrenches.

"When it came over here, it was all rusted from the bottom and had some kind of black primer on it all over the place," Manny told us. "It was a mess. Some of the framing was falling apart. Bob worked on the framing himself. We had to strip everything down. Then I washed the metal down with an isolator before the body work began. The roof was the worst part of it, kind of bent, the edges all misaligned. We're not a modern shop, so most of the work was done with hand hammers and dollies. We had to patch the bottom of the fenders, the wheel wells, using 22-gauge sheet steel shaped by hand and MIG-welded into place. We worked with thin putty to fill in the pinholes from rust that we found, then used two-part DuPont etching primer and blocked the whole car, every panel, with 150-grade paper. Then I hit it with more primer and sanded with 400-grade. Then another thin coat of primer and wet-sanded it. We used six coats of color, each color, of DuPont Chromabase and six coats of clear, applied with a Sata gun."

The biggest headache during the three-year project, provably, didn't even crop up inside a shop.

John Silva test-fit the bodywork to the frame, which Bob had restored and finished himself. Getting the wings to fit to the rest of the bodywork was especially challenging due to continuous alignment issues.

"Let me tell you a story," Bob said. "We got the body out of the shop and were taking the car over to Fall River, Massachusetts, to have the interior done. I use a guy there who's also Portuguese, doesn't even speak any English, but does fabulous work, all by hand. Manny's got the sunroof in the car because it was being painted. I no sooner leave my house, go maybe a quarter of mile, and my son calls me, says 'Are you taking the car someplace?' I tell him yes, and he asks, 'You want the rest of it? Cause there's a part lying in the road here that several people have already run over.' It was the sunroof. Came free, landed in the road. I didn't realize it hadn't been fastened in place. Here, John had already test-fitted it so it would slide in without the paint getting scratched. So John had to reshape the whole thing, refit it, and paint it again, the same piece."

While John Silva dealt with that calamity, Bob focused his attention on the engine. The Wolseley-based MG engine nominally displaced 1,548 cc, but was locked up solidly. During the disassembly process, Bob tried to free up the rotating assembly, scraping and chipping away at the calcified gunk. That was when he discovered that sometime in the long-distant past, the cylinders had been sleeved. A transatlantic call to SVW Spares yielded an obscure bit of Morris Garages trivia: When the VA was new, some were fitted with a larger-displacement OHV engine for police use. The technical advice he received suggested reboring the cylinders from their stock measurement of 69.5 cc to 73 cc, boosting displacement to the bobby-spec 1,700-cc. That's about the biggest bore the engine will safely take. He then fitted oversized pistons sold by SVW after a local machine shop in Taunton, Massachusetts, bored and honed the cylinders after removing the sleeves.

The transmission hasn't been touched, but the clutch has. An MG VA foible is that it's fitted with a wet cork clutch that spins in an oil bath. Bob pulled it and shipped it off to a specialist in Florida who fitted about 200 new cork discs, each about the size of a nickel, to the clutch disc, which serve as friction surfaces. Regarding the gearbox, "No rebuilding of any kind was required," Bob said.

Perhaps the hardest part of restoring the car is piecing it back together. Manny told us of John Silva's meticulous work in hanging and rehanging the doors for a proper fit. With relatively few VAs built, and the constant production changes, determining factory tolerances and panel fits is at best, a guess. There's no literal factory standard. So it's up to the individual restorer to cultivate a disciplined eye and hand to get everything looking right. Bob used all the original body framing except for a single piece, the one that supports the cowling. Since it's exposed when the hood is raised, Bob had a cabinetmaker buddy cut, bevel and shape one from oak, rather than ash, which offsets the car's gold finish nicely. It's also a mounting point for show and tour badges. "If I had to get a replacement frame piece from ash, I could order one from England, although they're fairly expensive."

Bob knows that seeing a VA saloon restored happens very seldom, especially on this side of the ocean. "I know one guy who's going to do a 1937 or '38 VA saloon. When I got mine done, he couldn't get enough photos of it. You'd be surprised how many people don't know there ever was a four-door MG."