Concrete in the Crossmember?

Hi All,

I ran into something yesterday that boggled my mind. I'm redoing the front suspension on my '64. I flip over the front crossmember to look at the underside and the center section is filled with what looks like old dirt clods. I figured it's just a bunch of old dirt that got stuck in there. So I start cleaning it out. I wind up with a pile of what my architect wife identified as lightweight concrete...10-15 lbs. worth! The thing was full of it and what came out was completely homgeneous. At some point someone must have deliberately filled the crossmember with concrete.

Have any of you encountered anything like this before? Did it come like that from the factory? Why on earth would someone do it?

Thanks...Jim

a typical weight centering device. adds balance.

Keep an eye out for Jimmy Hoffa under there.

Jim - I think that you may have just won Spikemichael's 'Dumbest DPO contest'
Cheers,

was your car ever in iraq? concrete there will also help protect the occupants if a bomb blows up underneath you.

Ballast. Keeps the shiny side up.

What sits on a hilltop at night, howls at the moon, and has cement in it?

A coyote. I put the cement in to make it harder.

Maybe they thought it would do the same for the crossmember? :D

Factory option

I found a golf ball mixed in with the dirt.

I think the MGB is at something like 52%-48% on weight distribution to begin with - and that bias is towards the front already - can't imagine why you would need to add weight to the front....

I would suspect some type of old dried out undercoating. Probably some dealer applied or after-market for big $$$.

Well, there are a lot of things that I don't know.

I have taken the front fenders off an MGB and found what appeared to be adobe bricks in the void above the rocker panels.
They were quite solid and similar to lightweight concrete.
It could be that the car lived in a dry dusty climate and the stuff just accumulated in there.

Rich

As crazy as this sounds, perhaps the car had a vibration that some useless mechanic couldn't cure, so he attempted to shift the natural frequency of the car's front end by packing the crossmember full of concrete.

Sounds silly, I'll admit, but I've seen a factory service manual for an old American car that advocated hanging large lumps of ballast behind the front and rear bumpers to move the car's body away from its resonance frequency.

I have noticed when carrying 150# of sand during the winter, the ride becomes smoother and more comfortable.

If you didn't find any reed bar, he was for sure a DPO.