Larry Eckler, co-owner of Morgan Motors of New England and Morgan Spares, offers some practical Morgan +4 advice.
If you get a weird color combination, then you gotta find the other guy who likes that color combination if you want to sell. It’s not a cheap car to paint due to all of the seams. To properly paint a Morgan, you need to take it all apart. Green with tan, everybody wants that. Hopefully you like the color when you buy it. The wood will kind of take a set, and then the bolts will be on their way to being loose. Tightening them makes the car feel better. I have never seen a car break in half, but I have seen some come close. If a car is constantly left out in the weather, the wood goes away quickly. How the wood ages is really determined by how the car is cared for. With any car from the mid-’80s or later, wood rot is less of a concern. If a car’s rotten, there will be rust in the footwells. Look for bubbles in the bottoms of the doors and the bottoms of the rear quarter panels in front of the rear fenders. We stock almost everything for the car, including all kinds of wood; we can even get a whole new body assembly. The things that you can’t get can usually be rebuilt. You can always rebuild a car. Adding a couple of fuses into the wiring can be helpful. Adding a fuse to the headlight circuit can save you a lot of grief. An inline fuse works fine, so a $5 fix can save your harness. It takes at least 12 hours to put in a new harness–if the car didn’t catch on fire. The +4 is a Triumph underneath, so you can easily install things like electronic ignitions and gear-reduction starters. Greasing is important. We do a lot of upgrades that make the car more user-friendly, like alloy radiators and better fans. Clubs are awesome. Morgan clubs tend to attract really down-to-earth people.