Most liked posts in thread: So, Today This Happened.....

Another update.....the Racing Green has been running great but it was time for a few maintenance items. I pulled the plugs as I thought I might replace them but the color was good and there wasn't any wear showing so I put them back in. I also thought I might change the needle on the carb but again, the plugs looked so good that I left it alone too.

I did a valve adjustment - one exhaust valve was a little tight and a couple of intakes were just a bit loose, so all in all good shape there too.

I did an oil and filter change, and I was going to replace the shift shaft seal (say that fast 5 times!) but forgot before I put the oil back in - oh well.

I also reset the ride height as it had settled a little, especially in the right front and was rubbing on hard turns.

Lastly, I came by a good deal on a rear anti sway bar and spent a few hours installing it - the hardest part was changing the exhaust mounts so that the muffler wouldn't hit the bar, but it's all good now. I'll be heading out for a drive in the Am to see if I can tell any difference in the handling with the new bar - it's adjustable over a fairly wide range so I have plenty to fiddle with, but I'll bet I leave it in the softest setting.

 

I haven't exactly stalled out on this project, I've been busy with other things - like I've completely remodeled a bathroom, and boy howdy is that a lot of work! It's still not completely done, I have some hardware still coming - towel bars and such, but at least it's functional again......



The interior repairs are all done on the RG, my floor patch is welded and sealed up, painted and a few coats of undercoat have been sprayed on. I also painted the parts that I cut on and welded on, and painted the bare metal bits that I built to mount the seats with Edd's favorite - satin black.



I've decided I'm going to remove the rear seatbelts as I've never had anyone back there and probably never will and they just get in the way. Usually I leave them down in the companion bins, but as I've removed one of those to get clearance for the seat there's no place for them. While I've been in there I also have cleaned everything - it wasn't exactly dirty, just very dusty.



I've also fixed the rattle in the heater with new foam, and it's ready to go back in.

We'll have a few warmish days this week so I'll be trying to get everything cleaned and painted while the weather is good, by Xmas day it will be getting cold again and stay that way till spring. You can't really paint when it's 30 degrees out and winter will be here in force by the New Year.

So a few pics and maybe this week I can get it mostly back together - the engine and trans are done and ready to go back in. I need to reinstall all the interior bits I took out including all the sound deadening and carpet bits. I also need to clean the rest of the engine compartment from all the oil residue the old engine threw out and change the torn tie rod boots.

Then I'll clean the subframe all up (also coated in oil residue) and rebuild the front calipers and replace the rotors. THEN I can mount the engine in it and put it back in the car again. I have ordered a new exhaust system for it, this one is not exactly past it but I figured now is a good time. The Play Mini muffler must have burned out some of its packing as it's gotten pretty noisy so I'm going with a standard RC40 system with both mufflers - since I've been doing all this work to make the car a better highway cruiser I think a quieter exhaust will be a worthy investment in my sanity for the drive to Wytheville in April.

I'll give it a good test run first by driving the 4 hours to Dan's shop so he can fix the damage to the fender that happened this past summer on our trip to Blackhawk Farms....that should be a good shakedown run.

 

Alrighty then, only 2 months after I tore it down - back on its wheels again......since the weather will be in the 40's tomorrow I'll put the seats back in, add oil and coolant, charge and hook up the battery, bleed the clutch and brakes and it will be time to fire it up.



Not too bad to do a complete engine and transmission overhaul along with the brake rebuild and modify the interior, build new seat mounts and patch the floor.

I have some new windshield washer jets to put in and a few misc bits to do after it runs, then put the grill in and the hood back on too.

 

Well, a little more than yesterday....today I managed to take it for another spin around the block, a little farther this time.....my speedo is woefully off now, so I will be using my Garmin for a speedo - which is what I do anyway.

The engine feels good, the brakes feel good and overall I think it will run nicely. After experiencing all three common ratios (3.44, 3.0 and 2.76) I think the 3-1 final drive is the best combination, but the 2.76 will be better for long hauls, and I plan to do more than a few of those this year. I may have a 3-1 coming to me (a guy might want to go from that to a 3:44 for his car) so it's possible I'll have one to swap out if I decide to.

I didn't get any video as I was hurrying to beat the weather, but I will the next time I drive it. I also didn't go far enough or fast enough to determine if the front end wobble is gone, that will also have to wait till next time.

So far, so good!

I swapped my Clubman S onto the rack so I can do some maintenance on it.....

 

The alignment shop did a great job, and got it set perfectly.....it drives much better now. I had never seen one done quite like this - this shop specializes in racecars - Mustangs, Corvettes and the like - so I can see how doing it on stands like this would be better and easier than on a ramp lift.

 

The solution turned out to be a new set of NGK plugs to replace the Densos that were in it. I doubt they had that many miles on them, but with the new plugs if fires up on the first turn of the key, so I'm calling it good.

But then.........if it ain't one damn thing it's another..............

I drove the Mini about 30 miles across town to a friends place, then later we went to lunch. When we came out there was a nice big puddle of green under the front of the car.....I went in to the restaurant and got a quart of water and it took most of it, so we drove back about 3 miles to his place and I left it in his shop. Yesterday I hitched up the Mini to the MINI and towed it home, at first I thought it was the water pump but on second look I think it might be just the bypass hose - I bought a new water pump anyway under the "while you're in there" theory and I'll change them both.....

Actually I'd rather it happen here than on the road or on one of the CMU runs in Tenn later in the month. I'm also going to rebuild the front calipers, put in new brake hoses, flush the brake system and turn the rotors - I put new ones on only a few thousand miles ago but they're pulsating a little, so I'll take them up to school and give them a light skim on the brake lathe.

Today it's supposed to snow (April Fools on us!) and then we're scheduled for T-Storms the rest of the week, so it's a good day to work in the shop.

 

Today I went after the coolant leak on the Green Mini, I knew it was either the water pump itself or the bypass hose, but once I got the radiator out I found the culprit.....this car doesn't actually have a bypass pipe on the head, but it had the bypass nipple on the water pump, and it had a cap over the pump's nipple and it had split. I could have just replaced that but I decided to do the water pump too while I was in the neighborhood. Good thing too as the pump while not leaking was one of those cheap ones with the pressed steel impeller instead of the better made cast one. Once it was all buttoned up I ran it long enough to get the thermostat open, then let it cool and topped off the coolant.

 

Here's where the other one went, it's on the dyno today....

 

Engine is out. The header was pretty much rust-fused to the pipes, so I could not get it off and decided to try and pull it out the top. I was successful, but there's no way the new engine is going back in the same way, so I will have to bust out the acetylene torch and heat the pipes and see if I can get the header off. It will actually be easier with the engine out as I can rotate the header pipes and work them out once I get them glowing cherry red.

 

A little heat from the acetylene torch and the pipes came right apart!

Next up, clean up the engine bay before I drop the motor back in.....

 

I may have cleared up yet another issue with this car.....the front end has always had an odd intermittent wobble, between 45 and 55 mph, above that it pretty much went away. I bought a new set of pot joints for this SPi engine as I knew that my outer joints were good as I had them apart a while ago and repacked them with grease but I did not do anything then with the pot joints.

The new pot joints are made slightly differently than the old ones, in how the boot attaches, there is a sleeve inside - so when you replace them all you do is make sure the splines are clean and greased and the circlip is good on the end, then pop them on - the new ones already have boots installed and are packed with grease too.

So, back to the green car, when I went to remove the inner part of the old pot joint I found one almost siezed - it had been leaking engine oil into the joint too, which is probably what killed it as it waters down the grease to barely more than the oil. I had to cut the inner part off as it was rusted to the splines, the other one was fine and drove right off the way it should.

So, with new smooth inner joints I'm hopeful that at last I'll have a Mini that drives normally!

 

Well, just in case I ordered 5 sets of these special o-rings from England, had to special order half of them, the rest they had in stock. You'd think an o-ring is an o-ring, but nooooooooo........so I'll have enough for this car and my test stand carb into perpetuity!

Just in time to get my EFI project up and going and I'll never need them again!

 

So, I took it for a spin today and was pretty disappointed in the performance, till I got back to the shop and found the acc cable had slipped and it was only opening the throttle about 30%!

it's been raining a lot here, I hope it clears up tomorrow so I can put some more miles on it.

 

Wound up taking off the big clamp, then pulling the axle out completely. Knocking the pot joint out of the transmission isn't too big a deal, I use a brass drift and a 3 lb hammer, they come out with just a couple of taps...



Once out it wasn't too hard to get the old hard dried up seal out and the new one back in....I found a socket just the right size and put a long extension on it then had Rose bump it with the hammer while I held the socket and watched to make sure it went in square.

The hardest part was getting the boot secured again, it wanted to pull off the top since the suspension was all the way down, so I got out the floor jack and raised it as close to level as I could, then it went into place.

Just took a short run around a few blocks and pulled it back in the shop to see if anything is going to drip....if no puddles in the AM I'll consider it fixed - for now!

 

The last thing I'm going to fix on the Racing Green Mini is the cloud of blue smoke on start up. I'm confident the problem is just dried up rock hard stem seals as it only does it on cold starts and never when driving, on overrun or under hard load. To do that I pulled a head off the shelf - the idea being just to swap it out with the one on the engine. It's had a fresh valve job, new guides and I figured to just pop it on, but.....when I took a look at it I could see it did not have any valve stem seals on it. I got the head from Clancy in part payment for some work I did for him so it doesn't surprise me about the seals as you don't need those or hardened seats on a race engine.

So I dug around in all my parts boxes and I came up with a grand total of 6 stem seals. I called Clancy and he had 2 leftovers so I'll get those on Sat. at the car show he's bringing the Moke to. I went ahead and pulled the springs off and installed the six I had, then I decided I should go ahead and clean it up and paint it to match the fresh paint I put on the engine in the car, so I cleaned it all up, taped it off and gave it a coat of etch, and a couple coats of RustyOleum sunrise red.....turned out pretty good I think. After the car show I'll swap it out and send the one on the car now down to the cylinder head shop for new guides and hardened seats and a good three angle valve job.



From there I'm just going to drive it, even tho both 2nd and 3rd are pretty grunchy, if I'm careful I can drive around the problem and it drives pretty nice these days, so I want to put some miles on it.

Loyal readers will remember that when I had this engine in the engine stand for the first start I was pretty concerned because it had little to no compression on two cylinders and poor compression on the other two. Dan said put some Marvel Mystery down the plug holes, let it sit a few days and see if it comes up, and sure enough it did - on three cylinders, #2 was still quite a bit lower than the other three but we decided to just drive it and see if it improved. I ran a compression test today and I'm happy to report it did just that! All 4 are now exactly the same.

The plugs don't have a lot of miles on them but they're running pretty clean with good color.....



It's probably good that I won't get to it till next week so the paint can harden off too

 

Took my Mini to a Brit car show yesterday, along with a few friends... I just realized......over the years I've worked on every one of these Minis

 

Interior is all done, except for the seats. I'm going to hold off on those till the motor is in and buttoned up in case I have to get under the dash for some reason.

The heater is in, accelerator, all the wiring is buttoned up, all the hoses back in place and so on.



I had to reseal one of the side covers for the trans as it had a small drip, so that's done.

Next clean up the subframe and drop the motor in it, then it's ready to go in the car. Still lots to do but progress.....

 

My Mini is taking a trip to Va and NC next month!