New Forum for the Spridget!

Well, I had enough people ask for this, so here it is! The British car forum's latest forum dedicated to the Spridget. No longer will Spridget drivers have to decide whether to look in the Healey forum, the MG forum, or both. Now you have you very own BCF forum! Now you had better use it or Basil will visit you in the small hours and put a bat up your nightdress!

Excellent Basil. ! you just keep amazing me. Allways thinking you are.THANK YOU
mark

Basil,

Thank You!! I know there are enough of us lurking around BCF to make this a useful forum. Now we don't have to scan two other forums to see if there are any 'spridget' related subjects that we spridgeteers can contribute too or ask questions.

Now lets get the next virtual rally going! Boy did I really blotch up (or should I say down)the last one.

Biff
'59 Bugeye, 'Kermit'
'62 Sprite, 'Ole Gray'
'71 Midget, 'Freebie'

Sprites2

[ 12-24-2003: Message edited by: aerog ]</p>

Jolly good idea Basil.

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by aerog:

<hr></blockquote>

I'm going to expose (more of) my ignorance - is that a Spridget?

[ 12-24-2003: Message edited by: aerog ]</p>

It's an Austin Healey Sprite...an older, bugeye/frogeye type - but then we have these:


MG Midget


Austin Healey Sprite

see? SPRIDGET!

[ 11-01-2003: Message edited by: aerog ]</p>

Outstanding idea, Basil. It will consolidate things a bit, but I will still peruse all the rest of the forum as well.
Jeff
Too many Spridgets to list.

Thanks, Bas! Been vacationing so my attendance has been spotty. This was a nice suprise to come back to.

MattP

Bas,
Nice pic in the header. Love the color. I personally think that blue is one of the more photogenic colors.
D

[ 11-02-2003: Message edited by: Dave Russell ]</p>

THIS is a real Spridget.
Not a Sprite, not a Midget.

https://www.exit109.com/~spritenut/pieces3.jpg

If I knew how to stick a picture here, I would do it.
If someone knows how, please do.
I do Spridgets, not computers.

Wow! I'm off-line fixing the bashed race-Spridget and I return to find this! Thanks!

Maybe next we can have separate forums for "Bugeyes/Frogeyes" and "Box Spridgets"......then maybe forums for "Quarter-Elliptic Spridgets" and "Half-Elliptic Spridgets"...then maybe "Mechano-Set Top Spridgets" and "Folding Top Spridgets"......then "Side Curtain Spridgets" and "Roll-Up Window Spridgets".....then maybe "A-powered Spridgets" and "1500 Spridgets"....then "RWA Spridgets" and "Square-Wheel Arch Spridgets".......and on and on and on....there's just no end to it.

One of the neat things about Spridgets is the easy transfer of parts from year-to-year....even more so than other Brit cars.
As you can see from the "pieces" car of spritenut, mix-and-match body parts is easy. A 1958 Bugeye nose will fit right onto a 1979 MG Midget...in fact the newer Spridgets retain the rounded front sill area required to allow a Bugeye nose to clear the other body work....there was never a good reason to change it. My '78 car has a '62 right-front fender and '77 left front fender and the left rear fender is from a '67. My car has a '76 engine (from a Spit) and I've forgotten what year the front suspension parts are, but none are original. "Matching Numbers", it ain't!

When Jerry Coker originally penned the Mk. 1 Sprite (as a partner to the "grosser Healey"), he was thinking of a successor to the original pre-war MG Midgets (even the later "T" series MGs were called "Midgets"). I thinks it's kind of appropriate that the modern MG Midget is a spin-off of the first Sprite...and "Spridget" is a perfect name for all of these neat little cars.

Thanks for the Spridget Forum, Bas!

Absolutely great! I've a '63 Midget - oops, Spridget - that I absolutely love to drive...all the neighborhood kids tell me I'm driving Stewart Little's car (mine's red with white painted wires!) & they all want a ride...so, from time to time you can find me running around the neighborhood with a bunch of little kids hanging all over the car (always on our quiet, slow, subdivision streets)...&, I have a '63 & '65 parts car (1 MG, 1 AH)!

What hath Basil wraught?

Great forum, greater!

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by spritenut:
THIS is a real Spridget.

If I knew how to stick a picture here, I would do it.
If someone knows how, please do.
I do Spridgets, not computers.<hr></blockquote>

Look at the top of the screen. See those menu buttons up there? Look at the one on the right. It is labled HELP. Now, hover your mouse over that button and select "Tutorial" from the drop down menu. Once on the Tutorial Index Page, select the option "How do I add Pictures to my post?" That will take you to a verbal explaination. Click the "Show Me" link there and it will show you with actual screen shots of the forum how to post pictures. It is really no more difficult than posting the link that you posted.

Cheers.
Basil

Now that I've created a forum for you guys, will someone be som kind as to explain exactly what defines a Spridget? How made them, when, and why are they considered a cross between MG and Healey? I honestly don't know "the rest of the story," as Paul Harvey would say.

Basil

Here is a link to some light reading that gives a short overview. I hope it helps. (and I hope the link works)

https://www.mgcars.org.uk/midget.html

Well, in addition to my '63 MG "Spridget"...this afternoon I'm going to look at a '62 Austin Healey "Spridget" that's for sale locally....it sounds promising!

Good deal, Basil. If you haven't already done it, you should put a note in the MG forum about this new forum. I just fell upomn iot when I backed-out to the home page.

Regards,

Midget Larry

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Basil:
Now that I've created a forum for you guys, will someone be som kind as to explain exactly what defines a Spridget? How made them, when, and why are they considered a cross between MG and Healey? I honestly don't know "the rest of the story," as Paul Harvey would say.
<hr></blockquote>

Basil:

There are MG Midgets, and there are Austin Healey Sprites. The term "Spridget" is just a convenient nickname for the Sprite/Midget series (an exception to that comes later).

Austin Healey, under BMC's management, originally produced the Sprite (the frogeye version). As it evolved BMC chose to use engineers from Healey and MG so some portions of the newer revised cars took on some traits of the newly designed MGB. Soon after the release of the first non-frogeyed Austin Healey Sprite, MG released their version - the Midget. The two are pretty much the same car, just different name badges (similar to what Mercury and Ford did for years).

The two models (Austin Healey's Sprite, and MG's Midget) were sold concurrently for years - until the morphing of BMC into British Leyland dropped the Healey name from their corporate structure, at which point the Sprite slowly disappeared leaving just the Midget.

While "Spridget" is really just a nickname for the twin cars, there are true "Spridgets" out there that use an MG Midget car with a frogeye-Sprite bonnet adding a legitimacy to the term.

The Midget itself sold until almost the very end of MG's existence, with the final models appearing remarkably like the first non-frogeyed Sprites.

So not only do we have a new forum, but BCF actually has it's first model-specific forum.