MGA Great deal on a MGA "project" car!

[Bret]

Who says you can’t find a good fixer upper MGA anymore? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smirk.gif

58 MGA

 

[jcatnite]

OMG...that makes me want to cry. Still, hopefully someone will save her and restore her to former glory.
JC

 

[Radford]

To bad, looks like somebody had a decent project going ( although the tought of a Weber on that car makes me want to cry) before they did something just plain stupid.

 

[Banjo]

Amazing how the fire managed only burn the expensive, hard to find parts.
Looks like a good candidate for a vintage racer.

 

[Tullamore]

I know the owner that set the car on fire (accidentally). He is from Des Moines and used to race bugeyes and minis. Here is a picture of what it looked like before the fire:

I am not sure if it was ever raced but it was running and could have been taken racing.

The car caught on fire where you see it now, his garage was ruined but luckily he was able to get all the other cars out before they were hurt. He had about 10 minis, sprites, mgs, and tractors in that garage and the upper floor was filled with NOS parts.
[ QUOTE ]
It is hard to believe this is the garage and cars we were showing to everyone as part of our BCCI Garage Tour just a few weeks ago.
It all started on Saturday morning, June 18th as I was preparing to take a car or two to the Johnston Green Days Car Show. I had a small 1.5 Amp trickle charger hooked up all winter to a total of 4 cars with a positive and a negative wire going from car 1 to car 2 to car 3, etc.
I unclipped the wires from the battery of the MGTD and clipped them together so that one metal clip would not touch the other one and just laid them on the seat of the adjacent car, the 1958 MGA. Apparently the metal clips then both touched the metal floor or maybe the metal tunnel of the MGA with the other ends of these wires still hooked to the battery terminals of the car. And, of course this 14 guage wire would have gotten extremely hot and ignited the car cover that I had just taken off the MGTD and laid over the MGA.
Meanwhile, I had driven the TD down behind my house to clean it up a bit before taking it to the car show. Then 8 to 10 minutes later my neighbor came running across the street yelling Fire! Fire! The garage is on Fire!!
I attacked the MGA that was burning with 3 different fire extinguishers that we had at home while my neighbor used the garden hose to douse the flames on the wooden door and exterior of the garage.

It took the Johnston Fire Dept. at least 15 minutes to get to our house because they were lined up for the start of the Green Days parade behind the Pioneer headquarters building with a HyVee semi parked behind them. When they did get started they went to NW 54th Avenue instead of to our house which is on NW 54th Court!! Because we had several fire extinguishers and a very alert neighbor who stayed and fought the fire with the garden hose we had it well under control by the time the Fire Dept. arrived.

All in all, it could have been much worse if our neighbor had not been observant and alert and if we hadn't had several fire extinguishers. If we would have only been able to watch things burn until the Fire Department arrived, everything in the garage would have burned, including 8 cars and tractors...and with exploding gas tanks it is very likely that our house would also have been in flames as well.

[/ QUOTE ]

You can see the car covered in foam in the foreground of this picture.

 

[Banjo]

What a nightmare! Very lucky given the situation.
That's a good lession about having at least one fire extinguisher on hand.