Matt Drayer's Journal

"Dad, I see yellow!"

"Yellow?"

"Yeah, in the wheel well. I'm scraping off the black gunk and underneath the gunk it's black and brown, but underneath that it's yellow."

I put my wire brush down and went over to look at the front passenger wheel well. Sure enough, there was a bit of yellow paint showing through the grime.

I scraped at the wheel well and exposed more yellow paint. Yellow? The OEM color of this car was Russet Brown -- the engine bay, interior, and trunk were all Russet. Was the body repainted yellow at some point before being repainted white? But the yellow was actually showing from under the original brown paint, which had been further spraypainted black. Could the manufacturer have put a yellow fender on during assembly, then painted the car brown? That seemed unlikely...it was most likely a repair.

"How about that? Talk about odd. Well...we don't know much about the car, but we do know that it was painted white by the second-previous owner. Not the person we bought it from, but the person who owned the car before him. So this is probably a replacement fender pulled from another car, maybe one from a junkyard. This car is almost fifty years old, so it's not surprising that it's had at least one repair in its past. I'm sure we'll uncover more history as we continue digging. I call it 'Carchaeology'."

Looking closer, I could now see that the sheet metal inside the passenger wheel well wasn't smooth and flat like the drivers side. There were wrinkles and bends. Where clean straight lines should have been, instead there were a few twists and turns. I tried to visualize what would have caused all of this distortion, all of this...crumpling. That was it. This wasn't a simple replacement of a rusty fender. This was an impact.

"Interesting..."

"What?"

"Well, do you see all of this bent metal? On the driver's side it doesn't look like this -- everything is smooth. And under the brown paint there's no yellow paint from what I can tell. I think this little car was in an accident at some point in its life. Maybe the driver hit a telephone pole or something. These MG's didn't have airbags, but the front ends were designed to crumple on impact. And it must have happened before the car was painted white, because whoever installed the yellow fender painted everything to match the car's original color back when it was still 'Russet Brown'. So this must have been a pretty long time ago.

And look -- if we scrub more here with the wire brush we can actually see where they welded parts of the car back together. This is a welding technique called brazing. It's basically gluing two pieces of metal together using a different metal. Lots of auto body shops do it, although I think a shop would have made better repairs than what I see, so this was probably a DIY job. Yep, here are some more brazes. And here. And here... (Oh man...)

So this poor little car was in a pretty substantial accident at some point years ago, and someone cared enough to go through all the trouble and expense to fix it and make it look new again."

"Whoa. How do you know all this?"

I didn't really know how to answer her without sounding overbold. I wasn't a professional body repair technician or a certified insurance adjuster, I was just a DIY hack that had adored cars since my very first Matchbox. I grew up watching the Dukes of Hazzard, Knight Rider, Speed Buggy, Herbie the Love Bug, and Cannonball Run. My favorite TV shows were Top Gear, Overhaulin', and Formula One: Drive to Survive. I'd consumed thousands of hours of YouTube restoration and tuning videos, and read a mountain of books, articles, and forum postings. I'd wrenched on bikes, cars, trucks, jeeps, boats, trailers, and more. I raced in a local adult karting league. My Amazon wishlist had a YesWelder MP200 on it. But all of that was just my foundation -- everything about this car was new to me.

"Well, sometimes you just have to listen to what the car's telling you. Let's keep going, I'm sure it has a lot more to say."