A few years ago I purchased a 1991 Rover Mini Cooper; a beautiful bright red young lady named Nushka.
After a year or so of happy carefree* driving she started to have issues with a loss of power. I took her to a Mister Clutch branch in Hemel Hempsted and she was diagnosed with a broken clutch… an expensive fault. Of course I wanted her fixed so I asked the garage to go ahead with the repairs. After an absolute headache with them (I shan’t go into details here as it makes me angry) I now have her back… but now she’s diagnosed with a “borked oil pump” and possible gearing parts in the engine!
Due to a prior lack of space, equipment, knowledge and skills (let’s just breeze over the laziness) I’ve only just got around to looking into getting her fixed up and back onto the open road. This delay however has added complexity to her resurrection plans since parts of her have not enjoyed sitting still for so long. Oh I suppose this is a good point to bring up the incident where she was broken into by some low life scum.
Anyhoo moving on… thanks to my love of driving minis I’m now going to attempt to fix all the bits myself. I’ll of course get some professionals to replace the engine and I’m sure I’ll have a helping hand from my good friends and budding mini enthusiasts Chilli and Marcus and of course the lovely Badja.
The decision to undertake these works came about as at present we have no real need to have a car on the road and also that I hope to keep driving minis my entire life. Thus this work will be as much of a training exercise as anything else.
So onto the list of jobs… this is only an overview and I’m sure some more will be added once Chilli has given her the once over;
- Engine replacement (inc oil pump)
- Replace steering wheel (busted by the thugs)
- Possible steering column replacement (also busted by the thugs)
- Some electrical works (windscreen wipers don’t work, other circuits playing up)
- Ball joint replacement
- Front and rear brakes (straight parts replacement for the time being)
- Rear quarter light replacement (thugs again)
- Fix exhaust (at the moment she sounds like a tank… or at least she did last time she was started)
- Some added/replacement bling (Petrol cap, eyelids, bumpers, etc)
- Steering stick housing (not sure what this is actually called… due to thugs again)
- Handbrake service.
- New wheels and tyres
- Fit carpet and sound proofing
- Some ICE… you know for when I’m in Watford or the engine is off
- Rust (there’s quite a bit which is visible… and probably a lot more which isn’t)
I think I should make it clear at this point that I’m not mechanically minded, though I have replaced a fan-belt previously and re-wired one of the front indicators…. oh and also fitted a new dashboard with the help of Chilli. As you can appreciate this may all take some time and I’m sure the list will grow.
Anyways, first things first I need to replace the rear quarter light to make her watertight(ish).
* of course there were issues with leaking windscreens, corroded fuse boxes and the like but that’s all part of owning a mini.