As some of you would've seen in the general thread, my brother and I scooped up this '70 Morgan 4/4 last weekend. We originally 'found' (were connected with the owner) it 5 years ago and came out to his sheep farm to see the car(s) then. At the time, he wasn't terribly motivated to sell and we couldn't agree on a price everyone thought was fair, but 5-years later we re-connected with him and put a deal together on this one.
Basically, the car had been sitting inside the barn, top down, for roughly 20 years. The barn was dry enough to keep the body and interior in really good shape, but mechanically the car needs a thorough refresh. Fuel system and hydraulics need total rebuild and we'll go from there. Of course, there was an unholy amount of cob web, dust, mice droppings, etc on and in the car the first time we saw it, but after making a deal the owner decided to clean it up a bit for us and gave it a good wash before we arrived to pick it up.
Always a Toronto car, the story of how it came to be in a barn North of the city is a good one, but out of respect for the owner's privacy I am not going to post it here.
I actually don't know much about these, so in terms of accessing 'correctness' I am not quite there yet; but cosmetically the car looks pretty good. Paint is decent, no real rot or damage, and the interior (dash, seats, etc) looks to be in really good condition as well, despite being filthy. So the majority of the work on this one will be mechanical I think.
Yesterday we pulled all the interior (seats, belts, mats, etc) out for a thorough scrubbing and I washed down all the interior of the tub....It's almost entirely wood and is in amazing shape for a 41 year old car, still has it's original black paint and no signs of rot. Same goes for the frame and underside, clearly a car that was never used in foul weather. With the interior out and the tub washed out we cleaned the top and side-curtains and got them back on. The thorough cleaning seems to have taken care of the old barn smell.
We will scrub the rest of the interior pieces and get them back in, otherwise I don't really want to get into another big project this summer, would rather catch up on the rest of the fleet, so I think this will sit for a few months. Come fall we'll dig into the mechanical bits that need to be redone so we can sort it out over the winter.
This first photo was how we saw it in 2016:
Washed and out of the barn:
Interior stripped and the tub washed out:
How it sits today with the top and side-curtain back on:
