NAMGAR 2003

NAMGAR GT-28, Welches, Oregon
July 13-19, 2003
By: Clayton Merchant & Kay Jennings

The North American MGA Register (NAMGAR) held it's annual get together (GT) on July 13th-19th at the beautiful resort of Welches, Oregon near the base of Mt. Hood this year.

7 intrepid members of your BMCU attended the event and had a wonderful time. Making the trip to Welches were J. & Kay Jennings in their 1957 MG Magnette, hereafter known as "Maggie" , John & Barbara Progess in their freshly restored and very nice 1960 MGA 1600 Coupe & Dodge Durango pulling an empty trailer, just in case. (It gave great piece of mind and would come in handy.) Clayton & Sharon Merchant in their 1958 MGA 1500 Roadster & Steve Nelson who made the trip to Welches and then drove down to L.A. for the GoF West immediately following the NAMGAR event in his comfy Ford Explorer, (Smart guy, Steve). Also with us in spirit were Bill & Julie Van Moorhem who had done much of the organization of this trip only to not be able to attend at the last minute due to some health issues with Julie's mother. You were both greatly missed, and Bill, it was your spare ignition wire set that got me there and back, couldn't have done it without you!

The group met at 6:00 AM on Sunday 7/13/03 at the Kaysville Park and Ride amidst the smoke cloud of the burning foothills from the first fire above Farmington of this summer.

The plan on the first day was to drive to Ontario, Oregon a distance of some 370 miles and to spend the night there before moving on to Welches on Monday. All went well the first day as we had breakfast in Burley, Idaho and proceeded on to Boise. The weather was very cooperative and sweltering temps that soared above 100 degrees soon replaced the cool air of the early morning. Sharon and I had gone top down in the roadster until we arrived at a rest area about 20 miles outside Boise when the sun became unbearable and we put the top up. At just about 20 miles outside Ontario, our roadster began to spit and miss, it had had enough and at one point let out a huge belch of black smoke, Barbara was behind us in the Durango and got the worst of our James Bond impression. The 'A  made it into Ontario where we discovered a bad plug wire, easily fixed and ready to go in the morning.

We celebrated Sharon's birthday that evening at Winger's, did a little swimming and prepared to leave early on Monday morning.

Monday proved to be a challenging day as the group no sooner left the motel than we got semi-lost on the wrong road in western Oregon. However, we didn't go far before the mistake was realized and corrected and we were on our way again. Everyone in the group was carrying Talkabouts, very useful handheld 2 way radios that made communication easy between every vehicle in the group. We hadn't gone far when Kay's voice cam over the radio indicating that "Maggie"  was losing power. This was the first of what would be many stops in an effort to locate the source of the Magnette's problem. Each time we would stop, all of us weekend warriors (shade tree mechanics w/o the shade) would do our best roadside diagnosis without success. We tried EVERYTHING that we could think of to help Maggie w/o success. Coil, no, Plugs, no, Fuel Pump, no, fuel filters, no Carbs, no. It was ultimately decided to load Maggie onto the trailer and tow her into Welches. The remainder of the day was trouble free but the delay had us arriving late at the Resort and unable to register and attend the First Timers Welcome Event. 

J. & Steve were able to work on the Magnette until later that evening when the problem was found and rectified.

TECH TIP HERE: Be careful mixing certain kinds of gasoline with certain Moss carb gaskets. The gas that J. had purchased in Ontario was from a station that had ethanol in it. This gas reacted with a rubber gasket on the fuel line connector to the front carb and it had swelled to 3 times it's original size, effectively cutting off fuel flow to the front carb. Who would've thought?

The weeks activities were many and varied and the NAMGAR host club, The Columbia River Gorge MGA club did a wonderful job. There were many tours of the local area around Welches including trips to Mt. Hood, Mt. Saint Helens, (incredible to see the devastation even after 23 years) a region wine tour that turned out to be more like a rally than a tour (keep up if you can, if you get lost, here is a map! Good Luck.) a rally, and a fantastic car show that exhibited some 200 MGA's among other fine LBC's. There were also some great tech sessions for us gear heads that were well attended and very informative.

John had a little electrical problem after the wine tour that took about 4 hours to sort out, but in the end was corrected and had no long-term ill effect. There were two very nice dinners during the week, the club dinner and the awards banquet and auction/raffle. The speaker at the club dinner was Keith Martin, editor of Sports Car Market Magazine, who was a very entertaining and humorous speaker (and has obviously spent a great deal of time with British sports cars.)

The awards banquet/raffle/auction was very nice and everyone at our table with the exception of poor Steve won something to take home to remember the evening. Bob Vritrikas, author of MGA: A Restoration Guide was the speaker that evening and gave a great presentation on the history of MG.

The frosting on the cake for the evening and the trip was for John and Barbara Progess who took home a 3rd place trophy in the coupe class from the show. (I am a little biased, but he was robbed and deserved better.)

Congratulations to John on an immaculate restoration, done almost entirely by himself!

Our trip home was fairly uneventful as far as the cars were concerned other than some heat related issues and a rock thrown up by a truck that put a nice bulls eye in my MGA's windshield that we repaired that evening. The Jennings' Magnette boiled over a couple of times climbing hills and my MGA tried to vapor lock a couple of times but other than the heat it was a very smooth ride home. A bank sign in John Day, Oregon read 107 degrees and the heat was miserable once we left heavily wooded areas of western Oregon.

In Burley on the way home we celebrated Barbara's birthday and we pulled into Salt Lake about 5pm on the evening of July 20th . We could have called this the Birthday Tour as coincidentally we celebrated 2 of them during the week which no one had prior knowledge of.

We had totaled 2201 miles on our MGA and had only a bad plug wire and relentless heat to complain about. We all had a wonderful time and have vowed to do the next GT in the western portion of the U.S. again in the near future.

Many people are hesitant to participate in these types of activities with their LBC's due to reliability concerns, but I can tell you that a well thought out and planned trip such as this resulted in nothing but a great time with good friends and good exposure for your cars in a beautiful part of the country.

These will be lifelong memories with great people and that is really what these events are all about.

Tremendous thanks have to go out to John & Barbara Progess for dragging the trailer and hauling luggage & spares. Also to Bill & Julie Van Moorhem for the planning and organizing + the dinner meetings and spare parts and J. & Kay for hauling our luggage home. (Sharon greatly appreciated it and a luggage rack will be my next accessory purchase, I'm told.)

GENTLEMEN & LADIES: START YOUR ENGINES!!!

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