Kansas City MINI Enthusiasts

Minidave wrote:Is he on Facebook or a forum somewhere?

No, Lyle is a little too private for that. But you have seen his cars at East Meets West. He is always there.

He has several classics - a very perfect clubman woody in blue-green that I am sure you have seen.

Studying the differences between the (now modified) Sprite rear main cap and the Mini. Note the Mini cap is taller. We had to machine off the seal surface on the Sprite cap too as you don't use it on the Mini engine....

First coat of primer on the firewall....

Well it took two tries, but I got the paint on the firewall to look..................eh, OK. I thought they could match it more closely than this, but since most of it will be hidden, I guess I'm OK with it......

Since I pulled the wiper motor to paint the firewall, I decided to overhaul it while it was out. truth be told, it needed it - the wipers would barely move and on disassembly I found the little wheel boxes were practically frozen with old grease and rust - no wonder the little motor couldn't move the blades!

One thing I do not understand, why would someone cut and splice these wires where they did, when there's a plug only about 1 inch from them?

Once I got it all apart, I cleaned all the old dried grease out of the tubes and wheel boxes, then cleaned all the rust off and gave everything a light coat of paint. Now it moves smoothly and much more easily, ready to go back in the car. I need to put one more coat of paint of the firewall first, then I can start putting that much back together. I think I'm just going to solder splice these wires back they way they were originally.

Minidave wrote:Well it took two tries, but I got the paint on the firewall to look..................eh, OK. I thought they could match it more closely than this, but since most of it will be hidden, I guess I'm OK with it......

My firewall is covered in sound deadening material. Just cover it up

That's the plan, it's on order....however, the insulation only goes down partway, it doesn't cover the whole firewall.

Don't forget I need a picture of the hole under the breather on the clutch end of your engine, MiniManiac....also, did you ever find that other air cleaner?

Minidave wrote:That's the plan, it's on order....however, the insulation only goes down partway, it doesn't cover the whole firewall.

Don't forget I need a picture of the hole under the breather on the clutch end of your engine, MiniManiac....also, did you ever find that other air cleaner?

No go on the air cleaner. It must be in a basement box or something - damn movers!!!!

Today was a landmark day, I actually got to put something back on the Mini! I reinstalled the steering rack, and I also installed the steering column drop bracket - the two jobs sorta go hand in hand as you have to rotate the rack to match the new angle of the steering column. The drop bracket allows you to lower the wheel so it's not such a bus-like driving position. I've also been spending time fixing and rerouting wiring, but I'll wait till the engines in to show pics of that, not much to see at this point. I got an email today that the rest of my parts order should be here on Monday - Yay!

Today I found where the artful bodger has been at it again, the rt inner fender had been cut and bent up to allow someone to change a clutch without pulling the engine. While a time and money saver, it makes a mess when they don't repair it correctly. Instead, they just ladled on a layer of bondo and stuck it together.......sighs.

So I cleaned off the detritus, took a cutting wheel up the slit to even it out then welded it back. This sheet metal is very thin so all you can do is weld a tiny spot then move away a few inches and do another. Eventually you connect the dots....in the bottom pic you can see where someone has been at it with a welder too. I'll grind those welds down and linish them back while I'm in there.

I'll put a skim coat over it and prime it and it will be structurally sound if not pretty.

However, this means I'm going to wind up painting the entire engine compartment after all.....

Alrighty then, the DHL man just delivered, and it looks like everything's here at last - time to go to work!

Hard to believe this huge pile of stuff is all going back into my tiny little car!

What's that pink salmon thing do?

That's the clutch and flywheel......

That's not what the box said---

Didn't get much done on Buzz today, this morning I had to finish up some paperwork at school, then I went out to the south 40 and mowed the ass high grass, it get's sorta "stalky" when it gets that tall so I sometimes have to go over it several times from different directions to get it all - took twice as long as usual.

But, I did replace the rusted out headlight panel, and I sanded a lot around the engine compartment.....I even shot a little primer just to see what it would cover and what it wouldn't. One more day of sanding and priming and then I should be ready for the final color coat in the engine compartment, then I can really start putting things back together again.

I think I'm going to be OK with it.....

This is a very cool project, Dave! Thanks for sharing your progress!

Today's progress, master cylinder, wiring repairs, headlight install, front bumper, fresh air tubes, firewall insulation and more......

Started on the front suspension and subframe yesterday and got stymied almost right away - the upper control arms have needle bearings in them and when I took one apart all the needles fell out - they're not supposed to do that in case anyone didn't know. The shaft was completely knackered too. Looking for any other "issues" while I was ordering parts I noticed one of the front wheel bearings was a little grunchy too. For the cost of one ball bearing I was able to get two kits with the newer style tapered roller bearings in them.

What the heck, it's only money....right?

Today I had moderately more success......got the rear springs and Hi-Lo's installed, thanks to Dimini. I don't have them set yet, that will wait till I get the car on the alignment rack but I felt the car was too low before on the donuts. Even tho it looks cool to have it dragging the road the ride really suffers, so I'm going to go for a more reasonable height.

I also got the final drive gear changed out, but the pinion will require a little work yet - the bearing support housing will have to be enlarged to accommodate the bigger pinion gear. It's not a hard job, you just take a die grinder to it and open it up a bit. I'll get to that later tonight.
Once that's done I can reassemble the entire transmission. One more thing off the list of to-do's.

I marked out the area on the retainer that I needed to remove, and after about 20 min with a die grinder it fit perfectly!

But I seem to have bound up the internal shift linkage somehow, so now I have to figure out how to un-entangle it before I can finish assembling the trans......time for a break while I think it thru.

I've been completely thru a bunch of these trannys over the years, but this is the first rod-change gearbox I've been in and the linkage is done differently. I also pulled the layshaft back out so I could see how the center mount oil pump pickup fits in, looks like it's going to be a rubic's cube putting all these pieces back in together - should be interesting.

Well, as it turned out, it was just a matter of pushing this while pulling that and holding my mouth just right and it came free, so on to the rest.....

I had modified the bearing retainer to fit the bigger pinion gear, and I had to do a little fine tuning this am, but once that's done it's time to tighten the pinion retaining nut - to 100 ft lbs!

The only way to get the shaft to hold still for that is to put it in two gears at once which locks both shafts together - it's the common way to do this and I've done it many times over the years in many different transmissions. However, this AM I got in a little bit of a hurry and pushed the operating sleeve just a smidge too far, the result was this hole and a detent spring and ball that went whizzing past my ear to who knows where.


I figured I could spend three hours looking for it (probably unsuccessfully) or I could drive 20 min to Victoria British and buy one for less than $2. I decided the car needed gas anyway....

Some progress made today, the transmichigan is back together, new ratio final drive is in, ready to be reunited with the engine - some day!

Victoria British comes thru again! That little oil seal goes in the speedo drive, and the old one was leaking - it wasn't available thru the usual Mini Parts sources but after some sleuthing I found one in the VB catalog that looked right and Viola! I'm in business! They've been a real asset for some of these bits and bobs I've needed.

Today I started on the engine assembly.......

The block is clean and ready, so the first thing to do was install the rings on the pistons....it helps to have the right tool to do that.

Speaking of the right tool, I had to go get a smaller ring compressor as the one I had was just a bit big for these tiny little pistons.

Once the pistons were in I added the lifters and then the cam.

Now I was ready for the crankshaft, I installed the crank bearings and then dropped the first rod bearing in.........oops. Wrong rod bearings.

So I'm stuck for a bit while I get the right ones in from California....I still have parts to clean and paint, so I'm not completely stopped. I'm also going to match the ports in the head to the manifolds, and the cam came with new valve springs so I'm going to swap those out too. Still lots of stuff to do......