I am insured with Cherished Insurance (MGCC) no problems with ECU, Brake and wheel upgrades. However it was at circa £300 a lot more than we pay for either of our other two cars, although since it was an additional car it had no NCB
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I have had two cars written off in the last five or six years, the first one was where my 17 year old "go to work/mobile skip" VW Polo had someone reverse into while parked, not even the body shop looked at it and the insurance company offered £1250 which I grabbed because I only paid half that for it, I continued to drive it with the cracked bumper for a couple more years. The second was where another driver cut across me on a roundabout and damaged the front bumper and upset the tracking, again no inspection but written off just from photo's supplied by me, again we were very pleased with the pay
out that was in my bank account less than two weeks after the collision. The car was due to have had over £1500 of work (major service/water pump etc) on the following Wednesday and if you added that to the settlement figure we got within £500 of what we paid for the car five years and 76,000 miles previously.
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With F/TF values where they are it would cost an insurer nearly as much to interrogate an ECU as the cars value. They would just pay up if the damage did not involve personal injury.
It's not the cars value that might determine an investigation but other consequences. One of my sons had it explained to him after writing off two cars within five months of his seventeenth birthday. His insurance company was facing a claim after a car a car hit and killed a man on a push bike. Assuming the man might be married and had children they immediately set aside ten million pounds for a liability claim. Within a few days they discovered the young man was not married and had no children to support and the ten million was reduced to one million. Over the next few weeks various witnesses confirmed that the young man had been drinking in a local pub, blood tests obtained showed that he was well over the legal limit and other witnesses gave evidence that he was cycling all over the road, within weeks the claim had gone from ten million to zero. However this was twenty three years ago and those amounts would have increased substantially. It's not about the value of your car it's the cost of a third party settlement.
The answer is to shop around for insurance, we were considering having my wife's car remapped and went onto the various comparison websites and some of them actually have an ability to list all of the modifications and get a quote, in the end we gave up due to the power increase being too high to fit the criteria. Not long afterwards I was in a small garage that caters for a lot of young lads with modified MX%'s having the TF's hub bearings pushed out, one of these young lads was in there and I asked about insurance for them. His reply was very simple find a broker that deals with young drivers and modified cars, very often a car that has had modified brakes, wheels, a remap and a spoiler etc can be accepted as a kit car. His insurance was less than mine (less than £200) for a heavily modified MX5
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Due to having a MGB that I am restoring I go onto this forum on a regular basis; https://www.mgexp.com/forum/mgb-and-gt-forum.1/ There are regular discussions about both heat and sound insulation, the heat insulation is not really relevant but the sound proofing is. The camp is divided in two groups, one say's that Dynamat is the ultimate product and nothing can better it. The other group say that Dynamat is nothing special just clever marketing, they use other butyl rubber pads that are slightly thicker and a lot of others use bitumen based products like the Bostick one. Back in the day MG themselves used bitumen based pads, my GT has them on the door skins and they are still intact forty six years later. I personally think that the push to butyl rubber is due to environmental concerns rather than it being a superior product.
These are still available to dampen vibration and to level the floor in MGB's
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/325632543497?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D1110006%26algo%3DHOMESPLICE.SIM%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D277105%2C276749%26meid%3D29b4692b495f48319f447c4aec358a8b%26pid%3D101875%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D4%26sd%3D315864121555%26itm%3D325632543497%26pmt%3D1%26noa%3D0%26pg%3D2332490%26algv%3DSimVIDwebV3WithCPCExpansionEmbeddingSearchQueryRecall&_trksid=p2332490.c101875.m1851&itmprp=cksum%3A32563254349729b4692b495f48319f447c4aec358a8b%7Cenc%3AAQAJAAABEEK7FTfzsGw0VauxYyX1IOHjsuXJ1NPjVWebvOca%252BJbVzh3VqcrGnLFKHjKk2M42BtfNs8bK1jFneKBZqmubi3Lyx3Riq12idUYNq7TsB94Peew0lx0QOGmHeHYjyU7tR44IVH3xF0qaosz%252Fxja6%252FPvMdr1ZqRzUjIQ2Fd1lJMhPU60IjYh2rtDma2zzNmK0XkF9HV5FtH2JmL1o5pM8vcIN7QOvEvVJNE9o4nVj%252Fexyy8zbTLht1lt3oRM7qFK2KvNeWs%252BkVX%252FLivMOTYvRDlFGfKsQRrcAZkOqOzbki4XBYFaaoH4%252FbIVN3IBxe6%252F0QISSXenSyc%252FrsG1P8Ai3%252Fa%252BBNVj7fmQBGAwnlDe3tjoz%7Campid%3APL_CLK%7Cclp%3A2332490&itmmeta=01JCZBKQNJG4N2FJ3B83HE18BD
Incidentally the product that I linked to is available in widths up to a metre wide
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I haven't used it on a car but have used a similar product to repair corrugated metal roofs, providing the surface is clean it will last for decades. What I used had a thin aluminium foil to reflect the heat of the sun. There is absolutely no reason that due to being thicker than Dynamatt it will not be equal or even better at damping panel vibrations.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bond-Flashing-Tape-225mm-10Metres/dp/B0057FU69I/ref=asc_df_B0057FU69I?mcid=705e1e13a54d38439eba36997cef9ec5&tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=697313183651&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6121744564645961281&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9212541&hvtargid=pla-740920208825&psc=1&gad_source=1
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Thank you Airportable, my heads now too big to go through the doorway! Maths and Physics (inherited from my mother) were my best subjects at school and I enjoy solving problems. I am always surprised to see five year old higher performance cars from the likes of BMW, Audi and Mercedes fitted with cheap Chinese tyres. If only they read how badly some of these tyres perform in the tyre tests conducted by Auto Express and ADAC they would spend a bit more on quality. The same with brake pads, ADAC tested ATE, VW, Brembo, Zimmerman and a cheap unbranded pad. The test include pad, wear, disc wear and repeated braking and a simulated mountain descent. What is surprising is that the two high performance brand’s failed to match the VW own brand pads or the ATE ones but the test equally revealed just how bad these particular unbranded ones were.
One option for the rear on a TF would be MX5 NC calipers, same piston bore, the brake cable fits into the caliper bracket and only a small modification needs to be done to the actuation lever. They are designed for 276mm discs and have the bonus of being lighter weight.
I know that this “upgrade “ isn’t needed but the challenge is there. I have an engine-less TF, I may yet experiment. 1.png
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