People ask me, “Why are you visiting the Morgan factory again? You’ve seen it once before”. Well, I find that on every factory tour I take, I learn a little more about Morgan, Morgan cars, and the car build process, and the ThamesMOG trip to the factory last week was no exception.
The introduction of the Morgan CX bonded aluminium chassis in 2019 required a complete change in the sequence of building a Morgan, compared to building a car with the steel ladder chassis that had been used in Morgan cars for the previous 83 years. All this was expertly told to us by Graham, one of the factory’s tour guides. Graham, a long time Morgan owner himself, knew how to pitch the tour to Morgan owners, and was willing and able to answer a very wide range of questions from our ThamesMOG members.
The firm’s steel ladder chassis was introduced in 1936, in the Morgan 4-4. This car’s name came from the fact that it was the first Morgan to have both four cylinders and four wheels – Morgan’s vehicles before this point, since the company’s foundation in 1909, were all three wheelers. The steel ladder chassis, while undergoing many alterations, and improvements over its lifetime, went on to underpin the Plus 4, Plus 4 Plus, first-generation Plus 8, 4 Seater, V6 Roadster, and the 4-4’s eventual successor, the 4/4. In fact, every four-wheeled Morgan produced before 2019, with the exception of the Aero range and second-generation Plus 8, has used a variation of the steel chassis.
In the steel chassis days, Morgans were built from the chassis up. First the engine, gearbox and axles were attached to the chassis, before being wheeled to the body shop where the car’s body work of ash and aluminium would be made-to-measure and assembled onto that chassis. The car would then be partly dismantled in the preliminary paint shop. Chassis with body tub still fitted, plus all the panels (wings, bonnets etc.) go through the paint process. The fitting of seats and trim next, with refitting of wings, cowl and bonnets in Final Assembly. With the accuracy of the tooling in the making of the CX chassis, the car’s body, still made from ash and aluminium, is made up in parallel to the CX chassis on a dummy CX chassis jig before being painted. The body tub and rear wings are then attached to the CX chassis before the car enters the trim shop. Final Assembly will then add the front wings, cowl and bonnet to the trimmed CX chassis. This change in the car’s assembly process did not occur overnight, with CX chassis cars being made alongside the steel chassis cars for some months. Only a company like Morgan could have coped with this level of variation in its production line.
In contrast, the previous Morgan Three Wheeler (M3W), sometimes known as the five-speeder, had an ash frame fitted into the body, rather than having its frame panelled like the four wheelers. Some very observant ThamesMOG members noticed that the new M3W, the Super 3, did not include any wood in its build. You can’t pull the wool over a Morgan owner’s eyes.
I would like to thank Morgan owner, MSCC member, and Morgan factory guide, Graham Wright, for his help in writing this article.