While working on your Mini, some of you may have seen the letters MOWOG etched into various parts. Some of us were wondering what this meant. After extensive research on the subject, here are some of my findings.
At first glance, it would appear that MOWOG is an acronym, for Morris Wolseley Garages. This was a company formed in 1938 with the amalgamation of Morris, MG, Wolseley, and Riley. This company went on to join with Austin-Vanden Plas in 1952 to form BMC, and in turn British Leland in 1968 along with Daimler-Jaguar, Triumph, etc. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In actual fact, MOWOG has a much more colorful story than this.
What Does MOWOG stand for?
Contrary to popular believe MOWOG is NOT the name of the gorilla that over-tightens the bolt on the flywheel pulley, or strips the nuts on the front-end. BUT a Mowog is a type of Troll who jumps up and down on the valves to open them! Hence the name on the casting, specially designed to hold a Mowog! He is made of very heavy metal so that his weight will open the valves against the resistance of the valve springs. When your engine is cold, the springs take more effort to open, so the ticking noise you hear is him banging his head on the cover. Unfortunately they bounce a bit too high if you over-rev the engine, which is what the tappity tappity sound is.
Mowogs were supplied free of charge by the factory for the benefit of the local dealerships and repair shops. However, they were a little too zealous in their work and forced a large number of their owners to begin fiddling with the cars themselves. In the process of tracking down a nagging little problem, the owners often came across the little critters and gave them the boot. This soon led to a large number of unemployed little MOWOGgies running around the countryside.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and they soon found out that the Morris, Mini, MG etc, with all of its hard to reach spaces, could have a number of the little fiends residing in the same car. The critters soon came to realize that if they each specialized in one area of the car and worked in cooperation with one another, they could soon wreak havoc on the owner's sanity and he would be forced to take them to the local garage, where the grateful mechanics would pamper them during their stay and even let them do their dirty deeds to some of the non-MOWOG cars in for service, as long as it didn't relate to the problem the car was in for currently. This is one of the reasons that the service technicians don't like the customer to watch them work. The MOWOGs are so at ease around the mechanics that they will come out into the open while the car is being worked on to see if they can “help”!
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