mk1-forum.net

Hello everyone, I am back on the forum after something like a decade-long hiatus, so practically a newbie The time has come for major surgery on my car, so thought it would be good to keep a sort of journal of that as it progresses.

The story so far

I bought this car in October 2008 when I was a green and, to some extent, naive 18 year-old. I had become obsessed with Minis after learning to drive, but only a Mark I would do. I found myself in the incredibly lucky position of having been given savings by my grandmother that were destined for me when I turned 18, otherwise buying a Mini was a pipe dream.

I don't know what the market is like now, but in 2008 finding a Mark I in Scotland was almost impossible. I looked at a couple: a 997 Cooper in Ireland which I ended up getting cold feet over, and a beautiful surf blue 850 down south, of which the owners decided (understandably) against selling.

AOH 897B had been sitting in the ads for a good 2-3 months at this point, but I'd not taken much interest in it as the car was at the opposite end of the country and "I didn't want a red one". Eventually, after much persuasion, my dad was convinced the 775-mile roundtrip might be worth it. So we ended up going to view the car, I drove it, and immediately fell in love with it. Twenty minutes later my pocket was £3,800 lighter and my dad had the joy of driving this thing back to Scotland on three cylinders.



It was a standard 850. The engine had no identification plate, so might well not have been the original, but I didn't care. It also came with Group 2 arches which, at the time, I wasn't keen on (they ended up staying on it until last week). In the months after purchasing it I started researching what I could do to modify the engine. I picked up a pair of twin SUs (covered in cobwebs) for free, and spent far too much money on a "Stage 3" 850 head that seemed to do little more than increase the fuel consumption.


2009

I hit some black ice on a country lane and skidded into a concrete hydrant marker, knocking it over. The n/s wing was buckled slightly, and a fair bit of filler was involved in straightening things out. In hindsight maybe this was the car telling me it didn't appreciate being made to look like a Cooper 'S'. Later that year I was sideswiped in the rear o/s quarter by a big Mercedes - maybe it's an unlucky car?




2010

After much work, a new engine went in: a shiny reconditioned 998 with various mods in Not-quite-right Green. This was a little smoky to start with but has since proved to be a fabulous engine. The car was then pretty much done as far as I was concerned - it wouldn't change much (except for rust...) for the next ten years.






2011

The entire floor is replaced.




2012-2018

The Mini went through various guises during this period: road-trip companion, trusty daily, botherer of hot hatches. Going through my photos it seems to have been used mostly for getting me to various archaeological digs around Scotland. Along the way it picked up a few more war wounds: in 2015 a friend mounted it from the rear one evening after quite a few mid-excavation beers, denting the roof and cracking the paint. In 2017 a very honest German man parked his motorbike next to it on Mull, only to come back and find his bike had tipped into the driver's side door.




2019

My parents moved house - the place where the Mini had been kept all this time, safe and warm in a garage - and took up residence in a flat with no garage. By this time I had gone to uni, graduated, got a job, and moved to Edinburgh where I could barely afford to rent a flat, let alone a garage for a now 55 year-old car. The guy who does paintwork for me very generously agreed to shove it in a Mini-sized corner of one of his units indefinitely. By the summer he needed the space, and the Mini ended up on my parents' driveway. After a short spell in a neighbour's garage, again out of charity, the Mini was back with my parents.

2020

Last month, the parents moved again - this time to a house and, crucially, one with a garage. Thankfully they don't seem to have any plans for it, so the Mini once again has a roof over its head. With my own life just about at the point where I can invest time and money in the car again, the time has come to start ripping the poor thing apart.



I think I'll leave it there for now. The horror show of close-up photos is probably best left for the next post...

Cheers

Joss

Great story Joss. Well done for perseverance! For some reason I cannot see any photos but will look forward to seeing some in the future.
Good luck with your project.

Jip, no pictures

No Pics for me either.

They are linked to a Google account, so if the viewer isn't linked in with your particular Google account then the pictures are invisible.

It would be better for you to upload them using the attachments tab below.

We have three '64 cars, so looking forward to seeing the pics

There is a real wealth of expertise on here and I'm sure you'll find most of the answers to any questions you post

get yourself an imgur account its free and easy to use for uploading onto forums etc

Let's try imgur this time... hopefully some images are showing now? It's been a while since I used proper old-school forums!

Good to have you back, Joss.

And we'll look forward to seeing progress with the car, sounds like it's had an eventful decade!

Al

Joss_D wrote: ↑Thu Oct 29, 2020 5:56 pm Let's try imgur this time... hopefully some images are showing now? It's been a while since I used proper old-school forums!

thats it mate imgurs gr8 ,,, lovelly looking mk1 that, im in carluke

Nice, looking forward to seeing some updates on it.

Arches will look good with sporty wheels

Nice to hear about another car that has got under someone's skin - minis have a habit of doing that

Finally found time for an update, almost two years later. I'm playing the long game!

Disclaimer: these images look pretty enormous in the post preview, so if they are way too big please let me know and I'll see about resizing them.

After 14 years of driving in all weathers, the bodywork was really beginning to show its age. This was my main motivation for taking the car off the road. Up close, the amount of rust quickly becomes apparent:







I'd known all this was coming for a few years, but a detailed breakdown of the rust I could see before I started stripping the car was as follows:
- Both wings beneath the headlights
- Front panel
- Wing/A-panel join (both sides)
- Wing/scuttle join (both sides)
- Scuttle panel
- Both rear arches (bottom rear edge)
- Leading edges of the sill 'dimples'

This car's front end was of an unknown age when I bought it in 2008, so it doesn't owe me anything. Given the state it was in, I decided it was time to replace the lot, plus any other patches of rust around the car. I figured it made sense to get the entire car repainted afterwards; it was already a bit of a patchwork of faded Tartan Red (a colour I've struggled to find easily replicated) and Flame Red (a much later colour but a surprisingly close match to whatever paint was used on this car).

I pulled out most of the interior and some of the glass over a year ago. In the last couple of weeks I've pulled out the rest of the interior and removed the rest of the glass. The front and rear screens came out surprisingly easily, though the sliding windows were tricky. A single retaining screw in the o/s gutter refused to give up and I eventually drilled it out. While easing the glass out the back edge of the door (I couldn't see any other way of doing it) both pieces suddenly came out at once, with the front half clattering off the driveway. To my amazement (and deep relief) it survived without a scratch!



One thing I am struggling with is the bottom two retaining screws in the speedo housing. Both have unscrewed only a little before seizing up again, and no amount of WD40 and gentle wiggling is moving them any further. The housing looks to have cracked during a previous removal, and I'm wondering if a previous owner encountered the same issue and just yanked the thing out... any tips welcome!



I've taken inspiration from artefact recording in my previous life as an archaeologist, and been bagging and labelling in everything in bags I'm more used to using for small finds and soil samples:



Removing the interior has also revealed some hidden rust patches. These are beneath the rear seat, with evidence of the o/s area having been patched before. I'm a little unclear on the geometry of the car here, but I am guessing the subframe mounting points are underneath? It's the same story at the front, where the floor meets the bulkhead. Rust is threatening to bubble through into the footwells, well-obscured on the outside of the car by the usual oil-dirt-insect layer.



I've also been pulling off every other bit of the car that I can in order to get it down to a rolling shell. The rear (and only) exhaust box had become very rusty, particularly around the tailpipe, I suspect from spending a few years in a poorly-sealed garage with the rear of the car facing the garage door. This came off without too much trouble, but both nuts on the box's U-bolt sheared off in the socket.



Removing the headlight housings was particularly eye-opening, with fossilised dirt falling out of the wheel wells as I unscrewed everything. Both housings were pretty well-rusted in, and pulled paint and now-mineralised bodywork with them. Gentle prodding with screwdrivers and fingers has given me a better idea of just how much the rot has spread.

Next up it's the fuel tank and the engine, before working out what else I can do myself before the invasive surgery has to start...

Thanks for the update

Looks like pretty "standard" Mini rust. We have all seen a lot worse resurrected !!

Hope it goes well.

The lower speedo housing bolts often have a clip and a nut on the engine bay side, worth a look

I had a problem with one those lower pod screws. I have a mini grinder and managed to take the protruding thread off. I guess the heat helped as it came out easily after that.

Funny, who would have thought it is beneficial to be an archeologist* when it comes to restorng a Mini.

* I wanted to become one as a kid, but then found the necessity to learn latin and ancient greek to exhausting

Good luck with unearthing loads of non-rotten structures hopefully.