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Wenn die Spitfire Flugzeug war eine M3W würden wir alle werden jetzt Deutsch gesprochen.

You owe me a beer for that had it not been for last week my friends over from Tuebingen . We both had to try to speak in German and English to the Sat nav . Our wives asked when will you two grow up.

Sehr lustige Jack spricht besser Deutsch als Englisch

Well, if all goes according to plan I am 1,5 months away to leave boot camp and go on my first mission. If what has been happening in the squadron is to be continued, odds are I'll be put down shortly after take off. In fact, I have it all:

- M3W
- Brooklands
- With Suplex kit

Sure, it's a 2014 model, so the "cracked/bent chassis" part is not my greatest worry. However, is this dealt with?

#1 - see "Exhaust pipe sheared off new 3W!"
#2 - see "Suplex fitting and first impressions" thread
#3 - See "oops" thread
#4 - See "Boom" thread
#5 - See "It's finally happened to my car.." thread
#6 - See "Has anyone else heard of this happening?" thread


When I visited the factory last February I asked for extra care with all nuts and bolts, because the car would do a big maiden voyage, followed by first service in Lisbon, follwed immediately by another several hundred miles trip to Caramulo, followed by a hill climb event, followed by a return to Lisbon. This is all the Plus 4 did, and has been doing for the last 4 years without ANY problem, so this is what I expect from the M3W, nothing less.

I have a few specific problems you lucky guys in the UK don't have. To begin with, sending the car back to the factory if something happens will probably be costly, unless the factory tells me that they will pay for it regardless of where I hit problems.

Then the fact that I don't have in Portugal a dealer network or even a mechanic shop dedicated to Morgans. Simply put, there are not enough Morgans in this country to justify any of it. So the portuguese dealer is nothing else than a businessman from Lisbon that is a Morgan lover, a Plus 8 owner for severa decades now and that along with his other businesses, also represents MMC here and deals with the bureaucracy involved with the orders, with getting the cars here / importing them and with getting them registered with the portuguese authorities.

If we were talking diplomacy I would say that MMC has no embassy here, not even a consulate, just a diplomatic "attaché" to deal with small, paper-related issues. I know more about the M3W and its issues than he does, because he is simply too busy to visit TM and the factory, I suspect, doesn't spontaneously talk about these issues, even with their own dealers.

He is a nice person, though, and I still regard him very highly, won't forget when I first talked to him on the phone and how he offered me the keys to his own Plus 8 when I simply asked him if it was possible to test drive a Morgan before deciding to buy one. I found that gesture amazing, especially because we didn't know each other at the time.

But if I don't need a great dealer so I can watch Morgans on display or even test drive one, and I never felt - with the Plus 4 - the need of a Morgan-dedicated workshop and mechanics (basically it's a Ford engine on an old school chassis and suspension, any old school mechanic will know how to service it), things are a bit different with a M3W.

Especially because, as far as I know my own M3W Brooklands will be the first new generation 3 wheeler to reach Portugal (there was one other in Algarve, but it belongs to an english guy, not sure if still in this country and in any case the portuguese dealer didn't know anything about it), so I expect ZERO knowledge on this car and this engine by the mechanic that has a contractual commitment with the portuguese dealer to service Morgans in Portugal. I got to say this is my main concern ATM and I'm really pondering if I shouldn't simply contact a Harley dealer to properly service this engine?

I never thought I would be in this situation, but after (using the OP's analogy) seeing so many fellow M3W pilots fail to return safely to their home airfield, I do fear my own maiden voyage ends up in some sort of crash landing somewhere over continental Europe.

And I do hope MMC is listening, my car will soon be built (starts end of this month I think) so there's not much time left to sort the detected problems and correct what is failing.

I'm going ahead anyway. As I think I already wrote in TM somewhere I plan to write a blog about this trip, and I'll publish my entries here also so you guys will be the first to know how it's all is going. I have also been invited by a portuguese classics magazine, and already accepted, to do a write up of my experience, and they also asked if I could let them do a feature on the car, a few days after the Caramulo hill climb. This means it'll be good for MMC if all goes well, although I suppose the portuguese market is not big enough for them to care much.

So, I'm not expecting the closeness you UK guys are lucky to be treated with, but of course if the car ultimately proves to be unfit for purpose, with no easy way to keep working on it until the problems are all ironed out, I will know (or learn) how to deal with that. And that'll make me another "X" on the board. Something I really, really, REALLY don't want, or else I would be mad to persist in this buy, as I am persisting. The car must turn out to be a good, reliable one, I still have faith it WILL.

Sorry for all this wall of text, anxiety levels on the "up" as you can imagine.

Wy ya buggah a didnt nar tha cud tark and reet Jorman. As ne braggin kidda but ah can de bowth Geordie and English old chap.

Ah yes, Ten Little ******* as it used to be known.

And of course, Agatha Christie wrote another yarn relevant to this topic, The Man In The Brown Trousers.

Has any manufacturer ever launched a model with so many inherent and serious problems?

Most of them

No actual crash, but my "bird" is definitely grounded. Over forty days at the dealers, and still no delivery date.

Not regretting the buy yet, but no longer smiling... (except when I start thinking about driving it again, and then I can´t help myself).

I think we are all nuts.

Indeed, I think there was a huge book of reasons internally at BL as to why the Austin Allegro shouldn't be launched. Disregarded at the time of course.

Don't know if the Quartic steering wheel was amongst the reasons but the writing was on the wall for that just about straight away when a police force very publicly ordered some with normal wheels.

I used to have lunch frequently in The Oddfellow's Arms (yes really) overlooking the MIRA test track. The BL testers used the pub too and I got to know some of them. They were good guys.

Once I asked why it was that they spent day after day hacking around the track and then something like the Allegro, or the Marina, or the TR7, or... etc would be unleashed unready upon the general public. One of them took a deep breath and told me that they produced reams of paper full of comments on what was wrong and what needed to be done before production, ending up with a document the size of a telephone book. "And do they take any notice? Do they ****", he concluded. "I don't know why they bother with us."