Maintenance record
Changelog
Substantive changes to this archive, newest first. New pages, corrections of fact, and photographs supplied by owners. Typo fixes and styling tweaks are left out.
New page on selling a T-Type
A seller's guide to the routes to market, the factory record each model can have, describing the ash frame, engine and conversions honestly, the law, payment scams and the DVLA handover.
Heritage Certificate wording corrected
British Motor Museum Heritage Certificates cover the TF only. Pages now point TA, TB, TC and TD owners to the MG Car Club T Register factory production records.
Winter storage: new section on mice, rats and a stored car
The lay-up guide gains a section on rodents and the stored car: the damage they do, what keeps them out, what is unproven, poison and the glue-trap bans, and the checks before the first start in spring. Three owner questions are added with the page's other content.
MG Midget on a V5C corrected from an error to a fact
The archive had wrongly described MG Midget on a V5C as an entry worth correcting, when the T-Types themselves were badged and sold as MG Midgets and the factory's workshop manuals are titled M.G. Midget. The registration guide and the TF disambiguation page have both been corrected.
Wide reference tables now scroll on narrow screens
Wide reference tables were being clipped on narrow screens rather than scrolling, which hid the source column on the settings and torque figures page. They now scroll horizontally and are reachable by keyboard.
Spark timing tool no longer claims its advance curves come from the factory
The interactive spark timing tool described its advance curves as sampled from a factory curve. The Workshop Manual publishes a single total automatic advance figure per model and no curve, so that claim has gone and the curves are now labelled workshop guide figures. The tool now shows the factory timing figures alongside the workshop practice it recommends and says which is which. The TB and TC entry no longer includes the TA, whose MPJG is a different engine. The remaining 0.025 in plug gaps in the diagnostic trees now carry the factory 0.020 to 0.022 in beside them.
Ignition figures across the site reconciled with the factory Workshop Manual
The spark plug gap is now given as the factory's 0.020 to 0.022 in alongside the 0.025 in of modern practice, rather than 0.025 in alone. The contact breaker gap is given by distributor type rather than as one figure. The automatic advance is now split between the TD's 32° and the TF's 25° at 3,100 rpm, where the site previously gave one figure for both.
TF model page now carries its American context and factory dual-measure capacities
The TF was the only T-Type model page without the American context already present on the TC and TD pages. It now includes the 'Built for America, and priced for it' section, the factory's own imperial and US capacities from the Series 'TF' General Data in the Workshop Manual, Issue 3 (H & E) 93692—5/55, and two new FAQs on American sales and the TF 1250/1500 split.
Pages with no recorded date no longer claim a sitewide fallback date
The structured data previously gave every page without an entry in src/data/page-dates.ts the same datePublished and dateModified, taken from a sitewide constant. That turned a fact about the archive as a whole into an unsupported claim about each individual page. articleSchema now omits both dates when the archive holds no date for that page.
Rebuild tolerances checked against the factory Workshop Manual
The rebuild tolerances page has been checked against the factory Workshop Manual, read at source. The manual states that no regrind is permissible on the XPEG crankshaft, printed twice on the Series 'TF' General Data page. The factory's oversize and regrind ladders are shorter than Wood's and are now given alongside them. Two bearing oil clearances differ between the two sources and both figures are now shown. Factory valve dimensions and valve spring pressures have been added.
Workshop data re-sourced from the factory manual
The torque, clearance, ignition, plug, capacity, tyre and pressure figures on the settings and torque page have been re-sourced from the factory Workshop Manual, read at source, rather than from a web transcription. Every torque figure in the manual is printed in pound-inches, which is why the transcribed table looked corrupt. Cylinder head torque is now given as three figures by engine rather than one, and the main bearing figure previously withheld as corrupt has been established at 62.5 lb ft.
Author's other archives now linked from the links page and sitewide schema
The links page previously listed only independent third-party T-Series resources, while the author's other single-model archives were confined to the About page. A separated 'The author's other archives' section now sits at the end of the links page, using the existing AUTHOR_ARCHIVES constant, with a clear note that these are by the same author. The sitewide Person JSON-LD now carries the same full sibling-archive list in sameAs. The footer gained an About link, and the sibling-archive links on the About page no longer carry noreferrer, so the author can see that traffic arriving in his own sites' analytics.
Sign-up now says when a confirmation link has failed
A visitor whose email confirmation link had expired was returned to the sign-in page with the reason hidden in the address bar, so the page looked untouched and the refused sign-in that followed had no explanation. The page now reads that reason, states it plainly, and offers to send a new confirmation email. An account that exists but has not been confirmed is now named as such rather than shown the raw error. After a successful sign-up the form is replaced by a plain instruction to check the inbox and the spam folder, with a warning that submitting again invalidates the link already sent, since a second sign-up regenerates the token and was the most likely cause of the failures.
Every page now carries its own date, or admits it has none
The archive showed the same "last updated" date on every page, including pages created that day, because one site-wide constant fed the visible byline, the structured data and the page metadata alike. The structured data also gave every page the same invented publication date. Pages now carry their own published and reviewed dates, seeded only from dated entries in this changelog, so every date on the site is one the record can support. Pages with no such evidence do not borrow one: they say they are part of an archive last updated on a given date, which is true, rather than claiming the page itself changed then. Twenty-five pages have real dates so far and the rest will gain them as they are reviewed.
New page on threads, spanners and the two special tools
A subject the archive did not cover at all. Every nut, bolt and stud inside a T-Series engine and gearbox has a metric thread but a Whitworth head, because the mechanics who would work on these cars had Whitworth spanners and no metric ones, so one set of Whitworth spanners covers most of the car. Later TDs and all TFs put UNF where some BSF threads had been, needing AF spanners. The page also records the rear brake drum hub nut size, why its torque matters more than its size, and the five-hole hub puller problem. It is drawn from one named source, Barrie Jones's Essential Buyer's Guide, and says so. The chassis and engine numbers page has also gained Jones's key to the guarantee plate codes, kept alongside the existing caution that the codes changed through production.
Published figures checked against Barrie Jones, and four corrected
Every figure on the TD and TF reference pages was checked against Barrie Jones, MG TD, TF and TF1500, The Essential Buyer's Guide, Veloce Publishing. Thirteen agreed. Four did not. The TD chassis number was described as being on a bulkhead plate; it is stamped into the front left chassis dumb-iron under the wing, with a brass plate on the toolbox, which is also what this archive says about the TC. The TD weight is published here as 18.5 cwt from the Workshop Manual, which is Jones's figure for the TF rather than the TD; both are now given with the disagreement stated. The claim that the two 1953 Motor Show cars were TF/7252 and TF/7253 has been withdrawn as impossible, because TF production had only reached 6501 by July 1954. And the TF page no longer says the TF 1500 total of 3,400 is an arithmetic remainder, because Jones states it directly. Several figures the TF page had declined to publish for want of a named source are now published with one: overall length, width and height, and the engine, gearbox and axle capacities.
Fitting a temperature gauge to a positive-earth T-Type
A new technical library article answering the recurring TA, TB and TC question: why a capillary gauge ignores polarity entirely, what the factory fitted and when, capillary handling, the voltage stabiliser, and the radiator-versus-head argument, with the sources named and the gaps stated.
Sister-site links removed from the footer
The block of links to the other classic-car archives was taken out of the footer, which repeated it on every page. One quiet author credit remains, and the full list now sits on the About page only.
Page titles and descriptions audited for length
Every page was checked against a 60-character title and 160-character description limit, and the over-length ones were rewritten so search results are not truncated mid-sentence. Journal entries gained an optional shorter search description.
Humidity and dehumidifiers in the garage
A new page on storage humidity, arguing that an ash-framed car has a lower bound as well as an upper one: run a dehumidifier hard in a sealed garage and the timber, leather and rubber dry out. Published guidance from five suppliers is compared where it disagrees.
Driving a T-Type through the winter
A new article on winter use rather than winter lay-up, which is what almost everything else published on the subject covers. It says plainly where an open car with sidescreens and no demisting stops being sensible.
Model pages stopped competing with each other
The generic T-Type and T-Series terms were assigned to the models index, and each model page was rewritten to lead with its own name in the heading, title and opening sentence. The TF page now separates the 1953-1955 car from the unrelated 2002 roadster in its first paragraph.
TD, TC and TA model pages deepened
The three pages were expanded well beyond summary depth, covering independent front suspension and rack-and-pinion steering on the TD, the post-war TC and its American reception, and the TA's move from overhead camshaft to pushrod. Model reference entries were added alongside.
Abingdon works history added
A page on the factory itself, from Pavlova Leather Works to the end of MG production, since the T-Types cannot be explained without the place that built them.
SU fuel pump article rebuilt around a reader's photograph
An owner supplied a photograph of the pump on a 1953 TD Mark II, which allowed an honest account of where the pump actually sits rather than a vague description. A points and pedestal diagram, a filler cap photograph and an annotated vent passage diagram followed.
Prompted by: Photograph supplied by a TD Mark II owner
Em dashes cleared from the article database
A house style rule against the em dash was applied to the technical library properly for the first time: 1,214 occurrences were removed across the published articles. Image captions that ran into their labels were fixed at the same time.
Image rights notice reworded
The statement on photographs was rewritten as a good-faith notice with a route to get in touch, replacing wording that claimed more than it should about ownership.
Commercial links removed
A codebase audit found an advertising block and tracked outbound links. Both were removed. Editorial references to clubs, specialists and other archives were kept, since they carry no commercial arrangement.
WSU 141 heritage certificate published
The British Motor Industry Heritage Trust certificate for WSU 141 was added to the car's record, confirming body number HDP 16/8411, Ivory with red trim, and engine XPEG/524.
TF 1500 casting numbers, and a provenance correction
The AEF117 block and AEF118 head castings were documented on the originality guide. References suggesting WSU 141 came from New Zealand were corrected: it is a UK car from new.
Prompted by: MG T Register TF Registrar
TF 1500 engine prefix and chassis range corrected
The engine prefix is XPEG/ and not XPEG/TF/, the TF 1500 was given its own row in the comparison tables at 1,466 cc and 63 bhp at 5,000 rpm, and the chassis range was corrected to TF250, TF251, then TF501 through TF10100.
Prompted by: MG T Register TF Registrar
WSU 141's colour corrected to cream
The car's colour was described wrongly in the photograph commentary. Every description was corrected to cream, and a check now runs before each commit so the error cannot return.
Links page added
A short, hand-picked list of other independent T-Series resources, including the Original MGTF Midget reference, the T Register and Totally T-Type 2.
Originality guides for the TC, TD and TF 1500
Three guides on what is correct and what is not, written for owners trying to judge a car rather than restore one to concours standard.
Production change timelines and the ash frame hub
Dated production-change records for the TC, TD and TF were published, along with hub pages on the XPAG engine, chassis and engine numbers, and the ash body frame.
Last updated .