For more than a decade, Allan Leighton has been buying and restoring MG cars. He has bought so many cars, in fact, that he has also had to build extra garages.
“Why do I like the MG? I don’t know really. They call it MG Mad, don’t they? You just sort of get into them,” said Allan, 67, who lives near Grange, Keith.
His first MG came in the form of a 1972 MGB GT almost 11 years ago.
They had been holidaying in Scotland when they had to cut it short after Allan’s mother-in-law took unwell. They later made a decision that they wouldn’t be able to go too far away from then on.
“So I told my wife that I saw this car and we should buy that instead,” he said.
“I was a service engineer so I used to drive all around the south of England and I used to drive past this garage a lot. I saw it on the forecourt and I just sort of noticed it but didn’t really think much about it later.
“After that trip though, we decided to buy it.”
The car was in dire need of restoration. Although Allan had never restored a car before, he was up for the challenge.
He did have some mechanical experience however – making his first car out of three individual ones.
“I actually bought three in the end. They were Ford 100E and I bought one and I rebuilt the engine, but it was a bit ropey,” he said.
“Then someone offered me another one for £5 so I bought that for the gearbox. And then my boss had one and he said you can have the car. I ended up using that one in the end because it had the best body shell and I took all the best bits from the other cars.
“We actually came to Scotland for our honeymoon in that. When we got back the engine was completely wrecked – and I had to change the engine before I went to work on Monday morning.
“I was really up for this. It was a challenge and gave me something to do. My job at the time wasn’t very challenging, so that was why I bought more cars really.”
The restoration took around six months and Allan was happy with the result.
Two years later, a comment from his wife about previously owning a MG Midget led him to his second car.
“I said, ‘That’s funny, when I was at Raf Halton, I saw a Midget for sale.’ So we bought that next,” he said.
“All the Midget needed was a good clean and we put a new interior in it because the hood had been ripped. It had been stored outside with a ripped hood so we got new carpets, seat covers, a new hood fitted and that was it really.”
The two cars, which were mostly used for day trips and weekend runs, accompanied the couple when they moved north to Moray.
It was after the move that Allan really got his collection going – with his next car being a roadster. But his choice in car would turn out to be Allan’s biggest project yet.
He said: “I decided that I might get a roadster, so I bought a white MGB roadster from a guy up in Burghead, I think it was.
“It was his baby. He said, ‘I love it, it’s never been out in the rain’, but when I looked underneath it was all rust.
“That was my first full-blown restoration. I totally stripped it to a shell, got a rotating jig and sandblasted all the bottom and repainted all of it. I taught myself to weld and then decided to teach myself how to do a re-spray, so I ended up doing everything myself.
“The only thing I didn’t do was rebuild the engine, but I got a good deal on it.”
Since then, Allan’s MG cars have been joined by a line-up of other cars, including a 1970 Morris 1000, an MG 1300 four-door saloon and a 2003 MG TF.
So what is the attraction in rebuilding classics?
“It’s a challenge,” he said. “To be honest, I’m not a big fan of modern cars and I don’t want something that is too complicated, that goes wrong and no one can fix it.
“I just like to see things restored. I don’t even like seeing plants in my garden dying.”
Allan likes to ensure that his cars look as close to what they would have done when they emerged from the factory. And with one of his cars, he’s got a handy tool that helps him find out about its history.
“For my GT, I’ve got the history from new. I spoke to the guy who bought it new and he kept a petrol log on it, which I’m still keeping, and he actually kept a book of the running costs for the first 12 years.
“The first entry in the book is the price of the book. He’s got everything – his garage rent, lightbulbs for the garage, he’s even got a note of what tapes he was buying for the car, it’s all in this book. So it’s got a full history, that car.
“I just like restoring things. I mean, what else would you do?”
And while he is not a fan of preparing the car and the mechanical work – which he said was “easy and just a matter of taking things apart and rebuilding,” restoring the bodywork has taught him lots of new techniques.
As for his favourite car of his collection?
“I think the first one we had, the GT, is my favourite. And it’s the best one for Scotland; you can stay dry and warm in it. I like the TF as well – it’s modern and drives well and it has a hood that you can drop down. It’s interesting that they are essentially the same car but very different in the way that they drive.”
My first car…Ford 100E
My dream car…MG ZT. I like estate cars