What is this cool piece of British Engineering? I’ll give you a hint, it’s from the front end of my MGB GT. Enough of that, these are the splash panels that I removed from the car when I was cleaning away decades worth of built up grunge. They supposedly keep water and mud etc. from entering the fender behind the front wheels. They aren’t overly good at it although in my case I think I’m one of the fortunate ones.
In the first photo you can see where they are located. This is looking from the front wheel area back into the fender in front of the door. The scary thing here is that there’s a shelf at the top right in the photo that was completely packed with mud and sand. What a silly place to have a flat shelf under the fender. Needless to say, there is some rust in this area but I’ll just have to clean it up as much as possible as fixing it correctly would require removing the fender.
MGB splash panel with shelf up above.
This next photo shows where the the rear fender area with the splash panel removed. Fortunately the splash panel was heavily caulked and even though the rubber seal had started to deteriorate the panel had still done a decent job of keeping most of the crud out of this area. This is after pressure washing, I wish I had shot a photo before.
MGB rear front fender with splash panel removed.
In the photo below you can see the very narrow gap between the inner fender and the outer fender. I slipped a thin knife in there and tried to get all the dirt out but this is likely almost impossible. No wonder so many MGB’s are rusting badly in this area. You would have thought they could have either filled this area with tar or something or at least put drain holes at the bottom.
Lower area of front fender with splash panel removed.
The splash panels will go back in later this winter as the MGB won’t be on the road again until the end on March. The panels really don’t look too bad, the rubber seals are another story.
MGB splash guard seals are very ugly but fortunately they are readily available.