mistakes you should better not talk about.....

[almondgreen]

Let us start a new topic.

Some of us have made mistakes while working on their minis, that are very difficult to explain and should not be told anywhere.
I start and tell my latest one.....

Today I changed the head gasket of my Mini.
The old one was blown between the two owner cylinders.
I thought to make it better, take a Cometic gasket.
Everything went fine, engine run nice again.
But after a very short time the temperature went high.
I wanted to check the thermostat and found out that there was no water in the head.
I filled some water in, removed the radiator and could not explain why the water stayed in the head now.

I checked the package of the head gasket and found out that I have been sent a head gasket for a dry deck head...

That happens, when you do things without time in a hurry.

(There have been a couple of mistakes with this gasket, The british dealer put the wrong sticker just under the original writing of cometic, and the
german dealer, where I got t from did not check, if it was the right gasket. I did not check it too.)

[mk1]

That is a cracker Andreas!

I think my worst ever blunder, which was in all fairness many, many years ago, when I purchased a beautiful NOS C-AHT 222 ST cylinder head that was made for a competition 998 engine.

I spent ages building my "Ultimate" 998 and eventually got it into the car & began the starting procedure, oil in, water in, battery connected, oil up to pressure, add fuel ALL OK.

I turned the key & the engine spring into life almost instantly. It sounded fantastic! apart from a very faint metallic tinkle, tinkle sound that I didn't expect.

I revved the engine to see if this funny sound would clear, it didn't.

I walked round to the front of the engine about to stick a screwdriver against the rocker cover to try & locate the mystery noise and just as I did so, the whole fucking thing let go in a cacophony of noise, smoke & steam out of the exhaust pipe.

It transpired that the exhaust valves of my beautiful head were "JUST" big enough to touch the edge of the bore & while not enough of a problem to stop the engine from turning it was enough to ensure that the head was snapped off the valve within 5 minutes of starting, wedged vertically in the top of the piston it hammered itself into the exhaust valve seat of my exquisite head.

As the head was made for a 998 I never bothered checking the valve to block clearance, despite the ST sheet saying the following.

That was a REALLY bad day at the office.

[almondgreen]

image

[velopackrat]

It's sad but I could write a weekly column in this regard...
So this week, I was spraying some engine parts MOWOG green, including the little aluminum engine tag 1275. I collected up the painted bits and then threw away the stinky newspaper... With the 1275 tag still camouflaged and slightly attached.
These are hard to find in the U.S., btw.

['S'-type]

I hate making mistakes, but no matter how much care I take they still happen. Rushing usually results in some kind of cock-up. Most of the time it's no harm done, just the time wasted to re-do something, but I really hate it if I inadvertantly damage something on the car through a lapse in concentration.

I recently torqued down the head on a Mk 3 and forgot to attach the coil bracket under the end stud. Solved by putting on another nut over the torqued one. Looks a bit naff. Never did think that was avery good place to attach the coil.

On the same job, when originally removing the head I took-off the head, rocker shaft and push rods all in one, only to find I had managed to partially dislodge one of the cam followers that had stuck to the bottom of a push rod. Wasted half an hour removing a chest plate and fishing it out. Schoolboy error not to twist the push rods and remove one at a time.

When using rattle cans in the past I have been known to scrape the freshly painted panel with the bottom of the can on the final pass.

One of my worst ever mistakes was to put a spare battery in the boot unsecured. A few enthusiastically taken corners later I had one empty battery and a boot floor full of acid. Horrible clean-up job and not the safest practice. Needless to say I haven't done that again.

I'm sure I can think of some more gut wrenching moments when having fun in the garage.

[mk1]

velopackrat, PM me direct, I have a present for you. M

[Chalkie]

Worse thing I've done so far is had the great idea to lift sub frame & engine as one unit so had engine sat in frame and lifted the body off the sub frame as we did there's an almighty snap and engine falls over and we roll shell back and lowered it onto a pallet turn round and there's half of my sector shaft for rod change sticking out back of the gear box! gutted thought we had removed it. Yet again 10pm job to get stuff done.

Made a new one though! 10 mins on a lathe

[mk1coopers]

Does accepting the job offer from my current employer 4 years ago count

[anis]

I was doing a little job on the shell with the angle grinder… next to my wife's car. i was very careful to grind in the right way not to damage her car
but i didn't realize the wind coming from behind the corner of the house that was gently carrying all the small hot little bits on my wife's car windscreen
it was only 2 hours later, when she left the house and reappeared 2 minutes later backwards with everything else than a smile on her face that i realized what happened.

[Lakeland997]

When fitting the carbs I managed to loose one of the nuts down the inlet manifold. Murphy's law dictated that it went down the port with the open valve and dropped straight into the cylinder. No problem I thought I'll get it out of the plug hole using a magnet. Except I was using stainless steel nuts. That'll be the head back off then...

I almost repeated the mistake when attaching the heater valve and dropped a s/s nut into the water jacket. Careful fishing around with a greasy stick resolved that one.

Stay away from stainless steel fixings if you've got a habit of dropping your nuts!

[bryan]

Complete rebuild of a '69 Mini 1000. Couldnt get the engine to start.
Nice fat spark
Timing ok
Compression spot on
Wet plugs.
Into the second day, towed it up and down the road - not a flicker.
Despondency set in.
Dad came and looked.
Turns out he had recently filled up my spare petrol can with weed killer, which I had tipped into the Mini!

[AndyB72]

Many years ago when I had my first Mini I was doing some job or other which involved removing the rear wheels, probably painting the rear drums red to make it go faster or something like that. After my bit of handywork it was always custom to go for a blast to see if my modifications had made any difference. I drove into the village only to hear a knocking noise from the back end... then after going round a corner the front end shot up into the air with a load ginding noise from the rear. One of the rear wheels had come off, luckily the wheel nuts were still sat in the roof gutter where I'd put them for safe keeping

While I remember, a bit of a tip when removing a stuck steering wheel to put the nut back on for a few turns first

[mk1]

Those are a couple of classics Andy.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the tooth extraction via steering wheel before now!

[Lord Croker]

There are a few things I have done in the past that I am not proud of, one Friday night, while reassembling my rally Cooper S engine after a precautionary strip down, I bolted the engine & box together, but for some reason the transfer case wouldn't go on over the 1st motion shaft support bearing, the unanimous decision was "It's Friday night, lets go to the pub!" I agreed & halfway through my second pint, I leapt up shouting, "I forgot to torque the big end bolts!", so I had to take the engine off the box & do it properly, when I'd done that, for some reason, the transfer case slid straight on. (I swear that car looked after me!) Same car, on another occasion, I was replacing the clutch slave cylinder, a nice day but a little breezy, so I was working outside, did the job in a matter of minutes, fired up the engine & selected some gears to make sure the clutch was now releasing, all ok, so I engaged the clutch gently in 1st gear to check the operation of it, it worked fine, but with some awful noises, (anyone guessed yet?) I ran over my own bonnet because while I was in the car, the wind had blown it away from the wall I had carefully leaned it against!

[mini63]

hell i think the worst thing/s i can remember from my 'official' mini black hand apprentice days was removing engines/gearboxes without disconnecting;
a) the earth strap and ripping it appart
b) the choke cable and ripping it appart;
c) the speedo cable and ripping it appart
and/or
d) all of the the above all at the same time....

i reckon I'd forgotten to put these things back on odd occasions annoyingly in the case of speedo cables, but the first time I can recall was the earth strap on a customer Morris 1100 and the choke knob dutifully came off the shaft all sticky like....of course.

I cant really remember destroying valuable internal componentry though so I'm not quite in the same league.
M

[Old English White]

I laughed when I read the "steering wheel" mistake - I did that myself once Only once though.
And I've forgotten to attach the engine earth lead once - funnily enough that was also on a BMC 1100 like the previous poster.
Another favorite is fitting the starter motor while the distributor cap is absent ............and trapping that clip
And, as we all know, when you've serviced the car you do have to ensure that the rocker cover gasket is correctly fitted all the way around the rocker cover before you fill up with oil........as well as making sure the drain plug has been re-fitted.
Mind you, the biggest Mini mistake I can think of - and NOT of my making - happened at the garage I worked at. A fairly new Mini Cooper was up on a ramp with an apprentice sitting in it. When the mechanic below asked him to "start it up" he did so without checking to see if it was in gear Quite a bit of damage to repair THAT day......Actually, that wasn't the only car we "lost" off ramps and down pits in those happy days before health and safety came along
And while I wasn't responsible for THAT mishap I did do a similar thing: We had a Mini pick-up at work as a runabout and I'd taken it home one winter day and parked it in the drive for the night. Next morning bright and early on a frosty morning I opened the door a bit sleepy and reached in to get a scraper out to clear the windscreen. Decided it would speed things up a bit if I also started the engine too, so reached in again, pulled the choke out and turned the key (I've got long arms)........the engine fired up but having not checked that it wasn't in gear, the choke giving it a bit of revs, and the handbrake not being too effective (probably the reason I'd left it in gear) combined with me not really being inside the car..........meant that it set off down the drive When it reached the road, with me chasing it, the camber made the steering turn just enough for it to steer into road and carry on for some yards before I caught up with it, was able to get in and switch the engine off
Luckily, this was a long time ago when the roads were somewhat less busy and once I'd got my breath back I was able to drive off to work with no harm done. I was a bit more careful after that though.

[Sean1380]

not checking the size on the big end bearings, the box said they were 10s, BUT in fact they were 20s.

Nice rattles once the motor started up !!

[LDR209H]

Come on then,own up. Who's driven over their own bonnet cause they couldn't be arsed fitting it on properly ... 'I'll just take it for a run round the block,she'll be right'

[phil82]

changing wheels - not on a Mini: forgot to swap the jack from front to back and started to take out the bolts from the rear wheel with the air wrench - noticed something strange when the last bold didn't really come out... luckily I could solve the situation with a second jack without damaging anything.

regards Philipp

[rich@minispares.com]

Come on then,own up. Who's driven over their own bonnet cause they couldn't be arsed fitting it on properly ...

I did that the other week in my sprint


I just turned it over, jumped on it and it (just about) boinged back into shape