Alright, it's time for me to feel like an idiot.
My MG has been in the shop for three weeks. I may have mentioned this, but when we pulled the engine we butchered the exhaust manifold and more or less pieced it back together. "Butchering" is probably a bit harsh, but 5 out of 6 studs snapped(hard to avoid considering where it is and the type of stress it gets). I also had an oil leak that I THOUGHT I knew where it was coming from, but was in the most inconvenient possible location.
I needed new rubber in my driver quarter vent window, so I decided to let my mechanic(the same one who is going to do the MGA) tackle both it and the manifold. I COULD have done the manifold myself, but looked at what was involved in the window rubber and said forget it.
In any case, my mechanic put helicoils and studs in the manifold. Somehow or another(I'm kicking myself for this one) we'd forgotten to clean the old exhaust gasket off the manifold, and that was causing an exhaust leak. The old gasket was hard enough that my mechanic ended up machining it off.
I'd installed fancy rubber side cover gaskets, which I later found out are universally hated. That's where my oil leak was coming from. My mechanic put on cork-something that he likes better and several other MG mechanics I've talked to prefer(When I asked John Twist about my oil leak, he asked if I was using those "G-D red rubber gaskets that always leak"). They can only be directly accessed with the exhaust manifold out of the way, so that sort of went with the manifold work.
My mechanic called me this afternoon and said that it was sitting in front of his shop, so I went and got it. The exhaust leak was gone, but I was treated to a terrible sounding engine that had no power. I had made plans to go look at another MG this afternoon(1980LE) that was out in the country, so I hopped in my car and proceeded to drive out there.
I stopped a couple of times to tweak the timing and even swapped distributors, but the car was still running terribly. I needed to drop down into 2nd at times to get it to climb hills(it would normally pull away without trouble in 4th). Not only that, but it was LOUD. It was obnoxious enough to give me a headache.
I went out and test drove the LE. While I was cursing the wallowy rubber bumper handling, I was also reminded of how a good running MG drives...and it's sad when you have that revelation while you're driving a last year of production model with a terrible intake manifold behind a single ZS-carb, a choked exhaust with a poorly designed manifold and catalytic converter in the way, a low compression engine, and a bunch of other power robbing emissions related crap. BTW, the LE was really nice, there's no way the seller and I can come together on the price now...perhaps we will if he still has it in a few months.
In any case, I got MY car home and proceeded to tune it. After I set the timing with the light, I still wasn't happy. I wasn't going to mess with the valves since "I just did them" but figured I might as well do it right. I pulled the valve cover and found THREE rockers that were missing the locknuts on the adjustment screws. Needless to say, the rockers were tapping very badly also. All said and done, it's amazing the engine was running, but then these engines can seemingly run with things very far off. I got the clearance set and made sure the lock nuts were snug. Once I started it up, I was rewarded with the nice, rhythmic "sewing machine" valve train clatter of a well-tuned B series engine.
And, finally, my car is back to driving like the MG I remember.
