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by Mike Greenwood

I always asked Ken Burke to give me Kimber Run plaque number 13 every year, nobody ever wants that one! Was that a bad Oman or a not such  a bad one……you decide. So another Kimber Run has been and gone, and it was a very pleasant and well organised event.

The difficulties for Jenny and myself occurred on our way home to Strathalbyn,

My idea was to avoid the freeway from Murray Bridge and take the slower run with less traffic via the Old Princes Highway through Callington . 

Just before the tun off onto the Old Princes Highway travelling on Adelaide Road, the accelerator cable on our MGC broke! Just snapped Completely!

Wow, What a place to do this~

I was very worried as at that point being in the dirt on the side of the off -ramp for cars coming off the freeway towards Murray Bridge, they were most probably still doing in excess of 70 kph or 80 kph, and I needed to get across this road and pull onto the verge to see what had happened.

So with trepidation I decided to make this move. The cars momentum was basically only at idle speed, so all I could do was hope and prey that we could crawl the 15 metres or so, across this off-ramp road , onto the start of the Old Princes  Highway, I pulled the choke out, put the car into gear and made a very slow crawl across,  fortunately no vehicles headed towards us and we were able to stop on the side of the starts of the Old Princes Highway, to allow me to check out what had happened,  

As we started this maneuver another car was also turning onto the Old Road and this car stopped a little ahead of our car. A young man called to see if we needed any help and by then I had opened the bonnet and was assessing the plight we were in. This young chap was accompanied with his two young children

The thought went through my head that possibly a 2 hour wait with the RAA was about to start and the distinct shame of being delivered home on the back of a truck!

As a number of people know, I had organised a number of “Know Your MG” events over the years for the MG Car Club members and so had a pretty good idea of how the cable works. There’s an inner and an outer cable with the inner cable working the carbies to get acceleration happening, so I pulled the outer cable out of the hole to the accelerator peddle and tied a knot in the inner cable. I need to find another length of rope or something similar so that I could get the extender cable inside the car to get acceleration manually.

Now, the young chap who had stopped was watching all this going on and said to his two children, (they were about 8 or ten years old) to go down the edge of the verge into the scrub and look for some fencing wire if they could. Being young kids, this was something exciting to do and you couldn’t stop them, calling out what they found to their Dad. This included several old TVs and assorted junk, but no fencing wire, However, after some time one of them came up to me with an old bedside lamp and I could see that it had a length of electrical cable attached .

This young chap and his sons were terrific, and we would not have been able to get very far if they had not come to our aid. So, we thanked them for their help before going any further, I am sure he thought this would not be very successful

Normally I carried a small tool kit but that was safely in the other MG my MG6, but this young man did have a pair of plyers so we did a bit of trimming and tied the end to the inner cable wire and so was able to get back into the MGC and pull on this discarded  piece of cable and was able to hear the engine speed increase after a fashion. After several attempts to get the cable to not get caught when closing the bonnet, we were ready to , they say in Rolls Royce  speak, proceed!

So off we went in a rather clumsy way towards Callington. Such a different action, with my right foot having nothing to do and my left foot having doing all the gear change and brake work in coordination with my right hand pulling on this cable coming from the outside of the body and in the window.. Fortunately the overdrive switch is on the Steering column, but it is quite a business when coming to a stop, changing down to second, break, turn the steering wheel,  pull on the cable slowly then let it go enough to just start off, indicate, then change gears up having made sure that it was safe to turn and  making sure that other traffic was able to safely pass us. This we had to do several more times but goodness knows what a Gentleman in Blue would have made of our trip home but getting home to Strathalbyn was a relief I can tell you! And glad we took the Old Princes Highway and not the Freeway!

I know that doing this would not work with our modern cars, but sometimes being old has its benefits. Not to mention the joy we get from getting out and about in machines which can be made to proceed with an old piece of cable from a discarded load of rubbish