Back in the summer I bought a genuine Morgan luggage rack from a guy on EBay. Comes complete with fittings etc and is as new, was fitted briefly to the guys Plus 4.

With one thing and another I finally got round this morning to fitting the rack, in theory a 5 minute job but knowing how things can be, I have a clear day so no time pressure.

First mini frustration was removing the over riders from the fixings. Having established the right sized socket, I then found there wasn’t enough room for my ratchet lever to fit, so back to the tool box and used a suitable open ended spanner.

However they are still fixed at the bottom by a cross head screw. After much faffing around I found the right sized screwdriver head and then found the screwdriver handle was not working, a ratchet style handle that now seems to only want to screw things in and will just spin in the “lock” or “undo” position. More ferreting around found a suitable substitute handle and the over riders came off.

Should now be plain sailing I think.....how naive!

The Morgan luggage rack is a detachable rack which fits on two prong style brackets that attach to the bumper mounting, and is also held on by the spare wheel spindle. So you can unscrew the spare wheel spindle, lift the rack off the prongs and put the spindle back for the occasions where you don’t want the rack fitted.

I loosely assembled the two brackets on the bumper fixings, but try as I might, the central wheel spindle just won’t line up. In effect the lower brackets were holding the rack about 1 to 1.5 inches too high.

Tried swapping brackets round but to no avail.

Conclusion drawn is that:

Morgan have changed the bumper fixing bracket fitted to the car and the rack I bought was fitted to an older car (mine was a November 2018 build)

The car it was fitted to was not fitted with over riders despite me being told by the seller it was, so the brackets are wrong

I’m not putting the rack together right.

I’m attaching a picture of the lower bracket and the masking tape shows where the hole would need to be to make the prongs the right height..but if I get a workshop to make a new hole where indicated, the angle of the prong will be wrong (ends up pointing too vertically to get the rack to fit)


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So I put the car back together and decided to grease the kingpins. A job I’ve not done before as I’ve only covered about 1700 miles and the car was serviced by Oakmere at 1000 miles so I just thought it was time to do it.

I don’t have a jack or axle stands so thought I’d use the “full lock” method.

Ok, can see the top nipple easily enough but not the bottom one. Back into house to get headtorch and no, still can’t see it. So a bit of groping around, I find the lower nipple behind the shock absorber. How the hell am I going to get a grease gun on that - I can barely get my fingers in the gap. Plus I can’t really see as without my reading glasses on it’s all out of focus and with them on it’s still out of focus.

By now I’d had more than enough, been out there 2 and a half hours..

So I’ve cleaned up and come back in the house.

I’ll get my local garage to do the kingpins, I know the guy well and he’ll probably let me use his ramp and my own gear - or only want a tenner to do it for me.

But the brackets have left me baffled, so if anyone has any thoughts please let me know! I can see myself having to get a local fabrication shop either adjust the existing brackets or have some new ones made up.