If this is worth more than £50 as scrap I am a monkey?s uncle.
tinyurl.com/6zp4dw
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If that's worth £250 then the AX is worth £750
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First brand new car I ever owned - B-reg MG Metro.
Nice enough little vehicle, quite well thought of by the motoring hacks of the time and almost bordering on trendy.
Did you know the front and back bumpers are the same?
Other fascinating MG Metro facts welcome.
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Mine never stopped leaking oil. Red seatbelts were very trendy in their day.
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I admit to having had an MG Maestro and indeed thinking the red seatbelts were cool. Mind you I also thought red braces and red framed sunglasses were too. It was after all the 80s ! In retrospect the car was unbelievably ugly and as for my taste in accessories....well ! It drove alright though by the standards of the day.
Edited by Shoespy on 06/07/2008 at 20:14
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I'd rather walk than drive a Metro .... you'd *have* to walk if you owned one !
I could live with the MG version though - worth collecting ?
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Dunno that I'd call it collectable exactly, but I've often been in an MG Metro that a friend was left by a motoring uncle. The friend, who has very heavyweight motoring genealogy, didn't much like the Metro but it always seemed all right to me. He now has a rapid 1400cc Seat Arosa, much the same sort of car actually but better in various ways.
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I didn't realise *this is* an MG ... must be all the rain down here in the west country getting to me :)
Obviously cars have changed a tad since 1983 - 25 years ago !
If I drove it today, compared to my 1.8 Almera auto - I'd probably die of laughter !!
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>I will only sell it to a true Metro enthusiast.
I agree. He will only sell it to a true Metro enthusiast. Every other punter is gonna walk away in a fit of giggles.
Kevin...
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It will have a certain value to BL enthusiasts though I would imagine. Looks like an easy tidy up for someone. You don't see many about these days. All I can remember about the "miniMetro" was the low mounted fuel filler.
I would have thought ebay would be a better place to sell something like this.
Do not expect to be welcome at the MG owners club!
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I owned a one for 3 months,and got rid of it when I went around a roundabout,and the car ended up facing the other way for some reason.Also the distributor was knackered,meaning evrytime I switched the engine off with the key,it ran on for about 5 seconds.
As for the MG Maestro....
Well,I had a set of Weber DCNF carbs and manifold off one of the pre injection models,and they were put on my AX autograss car,and it made a world of difference.Apart from some very slight machining,it went straight onto the AX cylinder head,and were a delight when set up on the rolling road.
Edited by helmet on 06/07/2008 at 22:57
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Mine drove quite well.
Next, you'll be telling me the original Mini couldn't go round bends.
Much of the ridicule on here is based on what happened to MG Rover since - irrelevant.
I even risked the delicate handling balance of my MG Metro by fitting a twin spotlamp grille conversion - it had relays and everything.
And an electric aerial under the wing - the tyre used to clout it if the suspension was compressed hard over a deep pothole.
Not much room under there - so much for aftermarket accessories.
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I heard that the wheels were imperial sizes, whereas tyres are metric, so in certain conditions (heavy braking??) the wheel would stop but the tyre would keep going round...Please tell me this is not true.
I did know a girl once with a beat-up metro and never felt safe in it, although I think her standard of driving contributed to that. She had a couple of crashes in it, the second one fatal tragically.
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Greg
Close.....I think some of these came with early runflat tyres (developed by Dunlop & Michelin IIRC). To prevent 'normal' tyres being fitted in their place the wheels for the runflats were a metric size, just slightly different to the normal imperial sized wheels. The runflats were very expensive, the concept never took off, the tyres became unavailable and owners swapped to normal wheels and tyres. I wonder if some tried imperial sized tyres on the wheels?
JS
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The tyre was the Dunlop Denovo, I think.
At the garage I worked at at the time, we took one off the rim and inside was a wire string of what looked like metal cotton reels.
There were about eight and we presumed they acted like a can of tyre goo does today.
The bead of the tyre and the rim were also unique in shape and profile.
Denovos were expensive and hard to get, but the rims, absolutely strictly, were not suitable for ordinary tyres.
Owners, well, garages, put ordinary tyres on because they looked for all the world a good fit.
We heard of stories of slipping, but never actually came across one.
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Wasn't the Denovo pioneered on the Mini Clubman in the 70s?
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RE: "This car has been in the same family (mother & son) since 1986." - it's an A-reg, who owned it for the first 3 years of its life?
RE: "but the engine and gearbox are excellent " - not if it's been run on unleaded fuel for the past 6 years.
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Well, I'd pay 250 quid for it! So there.
I wonder what'd happen if just as I was handing over 25 tenners for it I happen to mention I was in to grass tracking.
"Nah mate, cant do it. sacriledge, deals off"
A decent little car really - not many about - a nice project for someone to fettle and tinker with.
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These were quite good fun. It's not a car I ever really liked though. Seemed to me to have all the drawbacks of the original Mini (rot, oil leaks, noise, discomfort) without any of the charm.
Its bigger brother, the MG Maestro 2.0i on the other hand was a cruelly underrated car.
As davidh says, the car in the link would make a good project for someone who likes them. People obviously did, as they used to be everywhere, certainly where I lived. Unfortunately, most of them ended up burnt out in fields after the joyriders had done their worst. Something a bit sporty that was easy to drive, and could be stolen with nothing more than an IQ of 25 and a lolly stick. :-(
Cheers
DP
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MG and GTi Metros are fetching reasonable money on ebay. Maybe he should try selling on there!
I had a 1984 MG Metro around 8 years ago and was great fun. I paid £70 quid for it at the time and it cost about the same again for an MOT. It did 10K miles in about 9 months and never missed a beat - only later I found out that I shouldnt have been running it on unleaded but it seemed to keep going :-)
If it was closer, I might have rescued it as a project (probably one of those that never gets started!) but its too far away!!
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Pity the car is in silver, not the best colour for an MG Metro. Metallic Blue looked best or the later all-white models. Red or black at a push. I always liked the pepper-pot wheels.
My dad was a Rover dealer in the eighties and I got to drive a lot of these little Metros, even wrapped an MG one round a telegraph post one Sunday morning. I think the MG had about 73hp and was quite brisk to drive compared to the usual supermini fodder of the day. Handled well and had an acceptable ride IIRC.
I drove my grandparents back from Glasgow to Dorset on a freezing December day in a 1.3 HLS metro in 1983, four hundred miles and only four gears.
The later GTi models were a hoot! 105hp 1.4 16v K-series, five speed box and tasty spoked alloys. They were quite refined but totally outclassed by the 205 GTi.
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