MGB Meets Deer

I was on my way home from work after dark with the top down enjoying a beautiful Texas evening doing about 50 MPH. Suddenly the pick up in front of me swerves so he can straddle the dead deer in front of him. Of course he clears it no problem. I had little time to react and decided that it would be better if I didn't hit it with my tires so I straddled it too. Of course I did not clear it. There wasn't all that much noise or that much of a bump as I went over it and the road was real busy with no shoulder so I couldn't pull over right a way.
When I was finally able to pull over and take a look under the car with my flashlight, what a mess! Blood, meat, and hide everywhere! There were chunks on top of the muffler and in the drivers side coil spring. I could not see any structural damage, so I drove immediately to a self serve car wash and spent a good 15 minutes laying on the wet cement with a flashlight in one hand and a spray wand in the other.
I got it all cleaned up and still I can see no signs of damage except for an exhaust leak where the manifold attaches to the front pipe. This connection has been giving me problems in the past because the studs need to be replaced which I am going to do right away now. The front valance was not damaged (no more dents than it had before). The car still drives straight. It doesn't pull either way. There is no shimmy at speed.
Did I dodge the bullet? Is there anything I should be checking or worried about?

Sounds like you were fortunate. Coulda been worse, as in the deer could have been alive instead, and ended up sitting beside you!

Of course, perhaps that's how Shonk ended up with that thing on his head in an earlier post:
http://www.mgexperience.net/phorum/read.php?1,1277272

Hi Mike,

The suspension is pretty tough. There are stories of factory race cars going off course through fences and fields and still finish the race in a strong position.

I would do more than a visual inspection though. Get the car up on jackstands and tug, pull, push etc to see if you can feel anything that may be amiss. Put a wrench on all the nuts and bolts that you can get to while your at it.

PS: Good thing you have a rubber bumper. That extra inch in ride hieght helped no doubt.

Yes. I'm very lucky it was a dead deer (not that I like to see deer killed by autos). If it had been running across the road, It could have easily come through or over the windshield.

Wow. Mike. You were very lucky.

One of these days I'll scan the picture of my 1965 MGB after it hit a cow. Luckily I didn't have a passenger, as the right side of the windshield was smashed flat against the seat back.

The cow walked away.

But then, the MGB drivable again after pulling the fender from the tire.

Yeah, you should be ok, like Tim said, the suspension is pretty tough, I seriously doubt meat would bend anything down there. Did you mess up your valance?

I ran over a dead dog once in a 1980 Ford Fiesta. It was a big German Shepherd and it launched me airborne and crunched the front fender behind the wheel.


Imagine being in the car behind you when you ran over that deer. Yech. Hope his windshield washer was working.

Amazingly no damage to the valance (no more than it all ready had).

When I start the work on the exhaust system( manifold to front pipe), I will be checking things out per Tim's suggestions.

Deer ain't nothing. I hit a donkey at 95 in my pickup once. Now that's fun.

Lucky you just ran over it. I've hit 4 deer in all, but two at separate occasions in my old 66 B. The first one was at night in a heavy fog when several ran in front of me and I hit one squarely and after it destroyed my aluminum hood it landed behind me, never touched the passenger compartment. That one was on the coast of Maine. The second one was ten years later in Oregon and ended up being the last hurrah for that car. I'm hoping that my GT lacks the deer magnet that the 66 had. I see deer all the time and they don't seem to be interested in my car. Let's hope that lack of interest continues.

In my youth......My parents lived on top of a mountain in North Georgia. After a date, I would drive home at night and one January I counted 32 deer that had came across the road as I drove up the mountain. I was fortunate that I never hit one. Of course, the drinking age was 18 at the time and I was known to have a couple so maybe it was actually just 4....who knows! LOL

A friend hit a horse with a Jeep.....what a mess! They had to get get a truck with a little crane to lift it off the Jeep. Yuck.

Deer are everywhere up here, EVERYWHERE !

Night or day they are BIG hazard and being carefull to not hit one takes a lot of fun out of driving these days.

Two hit-that-animal stories.

One, in an earlier life, and an earlier marriage, my first wife and I lived across the road frorm her parents. One night there was a big bump sound from out front of the house and a little later my father in law showed up at my door asking for a little help. I went out to the road with him and helped him load his dead cow into the back of his truck. We spent the better part of the rest of the night stringing that big old cow up in his garage and "cleaning" it. I knew right then that I didn't want to work in a slaughter house.

Two, I ran across a family over in Bethel some years ago that had a daughter, fully grown and still living at home. You could tell that she "wasn't quite right" but it didn't come out until much later that she had been zipping home one night and had the misfortune to run head on into a mule. The mule's center of gravity was a little higher than the hood of the car so it naturally slipped right through the windshield and landed in the poor girl's lap. The physical and mental trauma of that episode must have been unspeakable.

Jack

Okay, most of you guys are trying to top one another with how big of animals you've hit (I'm waiting for the elephant). I'll go to the opposite - how many little creatures have you hit?

Many years ago I was zipping along in the B when a *flock* of starlings (about the size of cuckoos) flew out of the ditch. There were hundreds of them. They hit my windshield like machine gun bullets. I'll bet I took 25 or 30 on the windshield. They left these gross red splotches. I looked in the mirror and these birds were being deflected about 75 feet into the air. I managed to use the wipers and get the windshield relatively clear. But the whole car smelled of death! When I got to the next major town I pulled in for gas. I looked at the grill (1971) and there were starlings wedged in between the slats. The kid at the pump said, "clean your windshield?" I said, "Sure, and get the dead birds out of the grill" - and I went inside to get a soda.

Well, when I came out this poor kid had managed to pull all of the birds out of the grill. I couldn't believe he did it. I was only 17 myself, and I also worked at a gas pump. I told him that there is no way I would ever have done that if somebody had asked. I have him a $5 tip (which was pretty big considering it was around 1974 and I was just finishing high school myself).

:)

How's the deer? hahahahahahaha

I'm terrible.

Man, with my "urethane" air dam, I would have been in a world of hurt. That thing is only about 2 inches off the ground. It would have completely ripped the front of the car off. You have a 79, and the valance slops under, so it helped, and the ride height is MUCH higher than a 67.

WOW, you are one lucky camper.

This weekend, I would get under the car at home with the garden hose, or power washer if you have one, and jack up the car and get under there and clean everything up. Check the Battery box area, up above the rear axle, in around the trans area, etc.

Without jacking up the car in the car wash, there's a small chance that you still have some deer burgers up under there.

YOU HAVE TO REMOVE THAT STUFF. It'll start sticking something awful if there's anything there still.

b

Might have shared this before, but my poor wife was driving on the highway and saw the traffic in front of her moving to avoid a freshly hit mallard on road (feathers still flying...). Just as she centered the car to pass over it cleanly, it's mate swooped down to the road to 'help'. Took me quite a while to clean the all bits out of the grill. Knowing that ducks mate for life, my wife was heartbroken...