As long as the chassis work was completed, I
decided to splurge for my birthday, and bought a set of wire wheels for her. I
located a set of front wire wheel hubs from an MGA "1500" in good
condition, and bought new brake drums, radial tires (Vredestein 155r/15)
tubes, etc. The front wire wheel conversion is fairly straight-forward, as the
brake components and disk/wire-wheel hubs are shared with the MGA.
At the rear, I simply bought Triumph TR3 rear hubs, and bolted them on to the
Magnette's rear drum brakes using the the Magnette wheel studs and lug-nuts.
This is exactly how Triumph used to convert their cars to customer order if
you wanted wire wheels - theirs are "conversion hubs" and do not
require modification to the brake components. As long as you are using
anything close to standard tire sizes - there is no problem with interference
from the Magnette wheel-arches at all - in fact they
look completely natural!
The TR hubs use only 8threads per inch, whereas the MGA hubs use the finer 12 threads per inch. So the only other thing you need to purchase is a left and right knock-off spinner with 8TPI for the rears, and the regular 12TPI knock-off spinners for the fronts, and you're done! I chose 60-spoke wire wheels from MOSS Motors - which were on sale at a good price and are far stronger than the 48 spoke originals on the MGA "1500" - I thought the 72-spoke wheels looked a bit too "crowed" somehow on this car, although I'm sure they're stronger still. At any rate, I now have wire wheels, the effort wasn't too bad, and the cost was not really any worse than doing it to any other MG.
by Tom Webb, USA
