MG TF Question.

[JPB]

Is it a Kwik-fit fitter, maybe it's someone who's just been run over? No, it's Tailpipe Man! No links 'cos his "niche" car-related hobby is NSFW or anywhere else for that matter, but we all remember Tailpipe Man, don't we?

And if you haven't heard of him, FGS use Duckduckgo to search as visual media relating to TPM has a habit of breaking Google.


But on MGTFs, the modern kind that's essentially a less practical member of the Rover Metro range; there's some bloke around the south east who has one of those and drives like a buffoon. He's 70 if he's a day and he's just fitted a noisy exhaust and had the car repainted from that dark metallic bottle green that (IMHO) looks pretty good on MGFs & TFs, to a horrid shade of Barry turquoise. Clever thing about the paint job is that the gifted artisan who did the work has left a very consistent stripe of original green around the screenas a tribute to MG's fine tradition of using colours that actually look good. Also around the screen are some clever, three dimensional special effects to give the impression - to the casual onlooker - that the A posts are blistering through and about to break out in a nasty case of rustyitis. The guy has also reintroduced the seventies / early eighties concept of the sunstrip with names on. Remember those eh? "Gary & Shaz", "Baz & 'Chelle," etc. Well this one says, I kid you not..
"Us 2 & the bairns." The irony of this legend being displayed on a car with two seats had me rofling to the point of needing to go to the lavatory.
But all of this makes me happy and how? Well, if folk will do this to Fs, sure & they'll start on Bs soon, seeing as they're so much less fragile and so much more freely available than those mid-engined machines.

Could shell suits and big "rimz" be about to replace elbow patches, flat caps and chromed wires at the MG shows? Oh please, bring it on.

[GHT]

Is it a Kwik-fit fitter, maybe it's someone who's just been run over? No, it's Tailpipe Man! No links 'cos his "niche" car-related hobby is NSFW or anywhere else for that matter, but we all remember Tailpipe Man, don't we? And if you haven't heard of him, FGS use Duckduckgo to search as visual media relating to TPM has a habit of breaking Google.

No, never heard of him, and not wanting to get drawn onto some deceitful click bait I texted someone that I could trust, he sent me a link to some forum or other where I saw this post. It beggars belief.

"Tailpipe Man" (now curiousity may encourage you to throw this into google image search, but i must warn you. Far from curiousity killing this cat, this curiosity will kill your sex drive for a week). Basically its a picture of a man sticking his penis in the exhaust pipe of a Range Rover. Disgusting but hilarious.

Hilarious? Strange sense of humour.

But on MGTFs, the modern kind that's essentially a less practical member of the Rover Metro range; there's some bloke around the south east who has one of those and drives like a buffoon. He's 70 if he's a day and he's just fitted a noisy exhaust and had the car repainted from that dark metallic bottle green that (IMHO) looks pretty good on MGFs & TFs, to a horrid shade of Barry turquoise.

Whilst I agree with you about the colour being hideous, it really doesn't matter if the bloke is 70, I mean, chances are he was like that when he was 20, and as the saying goes, "Once a wanker, always a wanker."

Clever thing about the paint job is that the gifted artisan who did the work has left a very consistent stripe of original green around the screen as a tribute to MG's fine tradition of using colours that actually look good. Also around the screen are some clever, three dimensional special effects to give the impression - to the casual onlooker - that the A posts are blistering through and about to break out in a nasty case of rustyitis. The guy has also reintroduced the seventies / early eighties concept of the sunstrip with names on. Remember those eh? "Gary & Shaz", "Baz & 'Chelle," etc. Well this one says, I kid you not..

Agh! I thought that freaking awful habit was truly dead & buried. Where I lived in London a neighbour had "Randy Rabbit" across the top of his windscreen. I tell you what, the poor bastard was so far back in the queue for attractive good looks that not even the randiest rabbit would look at him.

"Us 2 & the bairns." The irony of this legend being displayed on a car with two seats had me rofling to the point of needing to go to the lavatory.
But all of this makes me happy and how? Well, if folk will do this to Fs, sure & they'll start on Bs soon, seeing as they're so much less fragile and so much more freely available than those mid-engined machines.

Good, serves those 'B' owners right. They just will not have it that the only reason their MGB drives so well is because they have spent thousands putting right all the wrongs that B/L did. No, no, no, they were good cars, talk about a blinkered outlook.

Could shell suits and big "rimz" be about to replace elbow patches, flat caps and chromed wires at the MG shows? Oh please, bring it on.

Flat caps and elbow patches, so that's why MG types are always staring at me. Thanks for the heads up.

Christchurch quay 006.JPG (140.91 KiB) Viewed 37792 times

[JPB]

Steel wheels, with the appropriate shiny bits attached, now that's more like it! And the attire? Timelessly elegant as ever.

[Dick]

Looking dapper as usual! You just need one of these to complete the ensemble
https://images.app.goo.gl/z6N62EFnRRyU8XA59

And some 70s bad taste alloy wheels on your car for the next mgoc show

[JPB]

Gotta love a nice Chicago Typewriter! I had a toy one when I was a small(er ) child, it looked more realistic than some of the airsoft replicas going around these days.
I went through a phase of carrying the toy gun on the crossbar of my bike, the third time the village polis took me and the gun home in his Land Rover, bike shoved in the back, Dad called time on my relationship with the toy and confiscated it, eventually giving it away to some random cousin. The b4574rd.

[GHT]

Gotta love a nice Chicago Typewriter! I had a toy one when I was a small(er ) child, it looked more realistic than some of the airsoft replicas going around these days.
I went through a phase of carrying the toy gun on the crossbar of my bike, the third time the village polis took me and the gun home in his Land Rover, bike shoved in the back, Dad called time on my relationship with the toy and confiscated it, eventually giving it away to some random cousin. The b4574rd.

There's a mate of mine who has never grown out of that. He bought a Harley WLA, sometimes known as The Liberator, in pieces, all in boxes, and carefully restored it. He had a stock from a shotgun, on it he fashioned a gun barrel out of a conduit pipe, it's only going to be a matter of time before some rookie bobby sh*ts a brick and calls for armed assistance. I have warned him. (did you see the Plymouth another friend had that was restored outside and sprayed using rattle cans? This chap was the restorer.

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[JPB]

I hope that guy parks out of view of the front door of the bank when he goes into town to do his business..

[GHT]

John, you seem to know more than the average of the MG TF, the later one, not the 50's one. I've done a bit of searching and can't find out what exactly the XPower 500 engine is. Was it a new concept? Is it a rehash of the K series, and looking at the picture, it struck me that if the K series engine had head gasket fails because of overheating issues, how did the XPower fare?

MG_TF XPower.jpg (106.3 KiB) Viewed 37746 times

[JPB]

Sorry, GHT, I know only that the K-series is, like many other BL engine designs, remembered for the faults that it had when launched and for the time lapse between the cars' launch and repairers learning how to overcome those issues, but I have never seen inside the engine bay of the car to which you refer and have had no luck in finding out anything myself, so assume that we must have searched as well or as badly as each other!

Somewhere out there in cyberspace, there must be someone who knows this stuff and maybe, if we're really lucky, they will come along and fill this void in our car-related knowledge.

[gazza82]

Wiki says

MG TF XPower 500 – A 500PS race derived XPower concept for the MG TF, designed to accommodate the brand new XP-20 engine used in the race car MG-Lola EX257, with a Garrett turbocharger with an anti lag system which achieves 500PS

And the relevant bit on the Lola

For an engine, MG would turn to Advanced Engine Research (AER) for construction of their engine and Garrett for turbocharging it. Using some elements of MG's production engines, the new 2.0 Litre turbocharged Inline-4 known as the MG XP20 (AER designation P07) would come to approximately 500 hp, limited by air restrictors put in place by the ACO to equalize cars.