[Epic Restoration]
When you’re building a Fifties sports car to your perfect upgraded specification, there are better starting points than a rust-ridden UK MGA 1500 – yet the end point matters much more
It’s a fantasy many of us have shared: we see a listing for a sad-looking MG project and we plan our own perfect tick-list of features. Start, perhaps, with an American dry-state import to keep the cost down and dodge the rot, then build in more power and better gearing, stronger brakes, brighter lights and numerous other advantages. David Eales of Oselli Ltd has been doing just that, and after 25 years of restoring MGAs, he’s developed a definitive specification – an MGA that will easily keep up with modern traffic and behave itself with an obedience that most Fifties classics could never hope to attain.
The latest car to receive this extensive program of works, this 1958 MGA 1500, arrived not from the dusty plains of a hot south-western state in America, but from a moist English lock-up. Painted an unlovely orange butterscotch colour with blooms of red primer showing through, the car began its journey through Oselli’s restoration process as the Covid restrictions hit, turning a well-drilled and relatively rapid process into a more drawn-out rebuild that sees the car road testing in the summer of 2023. David Eales explains what lay in store for it.
‘The core of the new specification is a 1950cc B-series engine teamed with a Mazda five-speed gearbox and many more subtle changes to make it work as well as it possibly can – braking, suspension, cooling, durability and so on. This one was much rustier than a US import, but there’s kudos in a genuine UK-market car, so we decided to go for it.’
Oselli has been around for 60 years and developed a reputation for rebuilding and modifying BMC engines, based on its machine shop facilities.
‘Developing these modified restorations has come about since I took over the business in the Nineties,’ says David, ‘even though my background was with Aston Martin. So now we have this unusual dual identity, specialising in Aston Martin and MG, but with a shared foundation in our engine-building work that allowed us to engineer this MGA in-house.’
A bracing experience
David and his team plucked the MGA’s body from its chassis using the crane mounted on the wall of the main workshop space (see My Favourite Tool, p85). With obvious signs of corrosion in the bodyshell, they braced it until there was reasonable confidence that the structure wouldn’t fold inwards or droop outwards when raised from the chassis. The body went onto a support jig, where it remained when work commenced.
‘We’d hoped that most of the rot would be in the body,’ says David, ‘but the chassis was affected too. In fact, we coul
