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Brynmor LLoyd-Griffiths' 1978 BGT
A Little Bit of
History
When I first
started restoring this 1978 MG BGT I couldn’t drive.
I was sixteen and the car was and technically still is my fathers.
Let me explain. The family
toy was a 1978 MG Midget. Fully
restored by my father and mechanically sound.
Then one day he decided to get a BGT.
My mother wanted an estate car!!
What he came back with was another restoration project. He drove it for three months but God alone knows how it had an MOT when he bought it. The engine knocked more than a black smith’s foundry and the shell was so rotten that jacking the car up resulted in a tug ‘o’ war to open the doors. Eventually it was garaged and the work began.
I can clearly remember lying in the snow replacing the front suspension as the garage was too small to have the car inside and work on it, at the same time. It took until the summer of 1999 to finish and it finally got an MOT in October (I think) of the same year. I painted it myself from a bare metal shell having never sprayed anything more than the odd touch up aerosol. From then on it was used as a daily driver, back and to, to Chester.
Eventually time took its toll on the paintwork around the rear arches and combined with some other blemishes I thought I’d give it a bit of a refresh. 18 months later and another full re-spray it re-emerged blemish free. Well almost. It was at this time I part paid my father for the car and took the keys. That was 2 ½ years ago and I still haven’t finished paying for it. I will do Dad. Honest!
Towards the end of Jan 06 I slid the car off the road taking out a telegraph pole being used as a fence post and 9 more timber posts before sliding gracefully to a halt in a field. I was lucky. The car came within 2 meters of a much stronger looking telegraph pole, just inside the field and ended up facing an oak tree that had been approaching the drivers door rather too quickly for my liking. Barbed wire and livestock fencing had gone to work on the paint job but other than that and a chunk of rubber missing from the front bumper, the car was intact.
Now it’s back from the body shop and looking as good as new so onto the changes. Most were completed before my off-road experience and a few as part of the rebuild and upgrade.
Copyright Brynmor LLoyd-Griffiths