An M.G. Locost Build
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September 2, 2013

It's kind of strange to have so little left to do on the Locost. In the old days, like for instance way back in 2012, we could walk out into the garage, night or day, and find something to work on. We always seemed to be in the middle of half a dozen tasks, so we could pick up a work in progress, or even start something completely new. Now, the entire list of things we need to do fits on a single piece of paper, and most of those are waiting for parts. Although we do have people working on them.

Our driveshaft, for example, is currently being shortened by a machine shop in Sacramento. Our seat foam is being trimmed to the proper size and shape by an outfit in San Rafael. We also have it on good authority that our shocks and springs are being assembled right now by the good folks at GAZ in the UK. Or not right now because it's 4 a.m. in the UK, but soon enough. On the other hand we haven't received our windshield kit yet, and we don't know when we'll get our custom made front fenders, because we have no idea how long it takes to custom make front fenders.

  Genuine MGB license lights from an actual MGB
click to enlarge

So we haven't had a lot to do for the past couple of days, but we did get a chance to replace our cheap O'Reilley Auto Parts license plate lights, something we hadn't planned on doing anytime soon due to the exorbitant price of real MGB license plate lights from Moss Motors. But the other day we were perusing through eBay when up popped a set of semi-used MGB license plate lights for a grand total of $16 for the pair. Plus $11 shipping. So we placed our bid and we now have actual MGB license plate lights on our Locost.

Heat shield still looks like washing machine parts  
click to enlarge

Against our better judgment, and because we had the extra time, we made a new set of brackets for our exhaust heat shield, and attached the shield to the muffler. It doesn't look as bad as we expected, but it doesn't look great, either. As long as you look at it from the right angle, or just kind of ignore it while you're looking at the rest of the car, it's okay. In any case it doesn't look so bad that we think it's worth the time and effort to remove it, although that could certainly change over the next couple of weeks. We'll let you know.

If all goes according to plan, and there's no reason to believe it will, we are not only winding down our Locost build, we're also about to wrap up this lengthy and rather self-indulgent build log. We anticipate only another six or seven entries. The good news is, some of those entries will be among the most exciting we've written to date. At least to us. We have some pretty big milestones to cover, including our last component install and our first drive. We might even get serious and/or nostalgic in some of those. Not on purpose, though.

When we launched this website about two years ago, for the first several months we got very few hits. Our regular readers consisted of a couple of family members and a loyal group of search engine bots. The bots were nice enough to read the stuff, but they didn't comment a lot, so we didn't get a lot of feedback. Now it seems we have a few hundred loyal readers, unless our web host is lying to us, which is certainly possible. We're glad you stuck it out, and we hope you learned at least a little about what it's like to build a car.

We hope it was enough. The thing is, I'm worried we forgot to tell you everything. We might've left out a few things, and some of them might've been important. I know we didn't mention every part we installed, but that's not it. It's not about the parts or the mechanical side of the build. It's about what you need to know if you decide to go out and build one of these things yourself. Of course you'll figure it out. We did. But it doesn't have to be as hard as we might've made it seem. It was fun, a lot more fun than we probably let on.

Not all the time, of course. We learned a lot and made a lot of mistakes in the process. We won't get into the details here, but if you've been following along you know the best and worst of it. In any case when we're all done here we'll leave the website up for a few years in case you need to review. Meanwhile, over the next couple of weeks we'll report our last few tasks on the Locost, and after that we expect to be back once in a while to let you know how the car is running.

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