Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Morgan Three Wheeler & Super 3 Chassis Cracks- Lower Front Wishbone Mount

Blimey, that really puts it in perspective surely the legal department must have looked at this and done a few sums. God forbid anything happens to anyone else as it did in the wet in France but I can't help thinking eventually it will with the prevailing attitude surrounding these failures. As the numbers steadily increase in the states with the kind of mileages those guys are doing litigation would be uppermost in my mind were it my baby to hold.

A wing and a prayer comes to mind, is it possible to get these welds and tubes ultrasonically tested in situ. If this is the case I think that's what I would be doing. I hired some kit and an operative to check out on site some 50 metre X 150mm tubular guyed transmitting masts and this worked very successfully.

Good luck with your M3W they really are exciting cars for sure.


Thank you for this insight.

Well as I read that statement there is no ambiguity in it whatsoever.

Just to put this into perspective there have been no "sudden and catastrophic" failures of the chassis lower wishbone mount.

Since first noticing it on my car I drove it approximately 1000 miles before it reached the stage as shown in the pictures on the first page, I was trying to convince myself initially it was just a scratch.

Just to put this into perspective there have been no "sudden and catastrophic" failures of the chassis lower wishbone mount.

I spent the first 10 years of my career working for an American braking system manufacturer which gives me a more than a certain sensitivity to product failure, recalls and litigation.

I fully understand the difficulty that MMC will have in assessing the statistical likelihood of a failure being "sudden and catastrophic" vs a progressive failure on a chassis / wishbone mount that can be anticipated in advance as a result of differing vehicle behaviour. I suspect it is this dilemma which is causing them rightly to be very supportive of fixing issues when they occur so they can also see and touch the failures first hand and determine the likelihood of one of these failures becoming "sudden and catastrophic" as opposed to progressive and observable.

I suspect any other wishbone failures (as opposed to chassis / wishbone mount) if they occur, will never be progressive which in my mind falls into a different category.

Truth is though, I just want to enjoy driving this beautiful looking car, enjoy the strange noises, interesting unreliability, and all its other fantastic idiosyncrasies without worrying about rate of propagation of stress fractures in items which should have been designed not to fail in normal use in the first place.

Bar one, which was sudden but thankfully not catastrophic. Thanks to Rog G's alert, owners who follow this forum will hopefully have checked for signs of stress (although the failure of my front wishbone member was on the underside of the bushing tube and therefore difficult to view; the rear member failure was at the weld to the tube). The newer wishbone and mount do look like an improvement on the original.