That is some serious Christmas lights! Lots of detail, multiple themes? Lovely, more please! Merry Christmas Eve, hope everyone is warm and full of goodness. Have a great Friday off. . Don
My older son needed to use my truck so I drove the Helmet to work. What a great Mini. I haven’t got to drive it lately I forget how fun it is.
Man...a Lotus AND the Helmet! It's a good thing you normally drive your truck to work, 'cuz if you start driving those other cars to work, there will be NO PAY INCREASES FOR YOU, Buddy!
LOL so true. Finally all 4 kids are out of collage and living on their own, that was a huge pay raise!
Ah, have you heard about the boomarang affect, good luck keeping them out of the basement and kitchen in the next 10. Don
Coming up to 290,000 kms on my car. Time for another oil change. I noted some grinding noises coming out of my front suspension, getting a bit louder when turning right. The noise started after I had the ABS sensors replaced, and seems to be getting louder. Now, having this much mileage on a car, I should be expecting wear and tear on such things as drive shaft cv joints, suspension bushings, transmission oil seals, etc this service coming up is going to cost me. None of those things have been replaced before. Does such suspension work require the car be put in to service mode? If I throw in a clutch replacement, I'm looking in the 4 digits just for parts. Is it worth it to fix or just toss the R53 and get a another car? I'll have to book an appointment sometime this week or next.
If you're going to pay others to do this work, it will be spendy for sure....here a clutch is about $1800, and they can do the other work while they have the subframe and front suspension out of the car.
If you have and are still enjoying your R53, spend the bucks, find a reasonalble shop that will give you a price break on labor or at least find you quality parts at a reasonable price, if you are flush, your dealer loves you and your cash. Today we took the 2011 Countryman down to Lowes and see customer service, one of the bath mirrors we ordered from Lowes and cancelled was shipped to us from Georgia (communication problem in the supply chain). Anyway, local Lowes really did not want to help get the large box out of our garage, said call Corp, we did now the local Lowes folks get to schedule a pickup. Box is 44x44 square, does not fit in a Countryman or the 20 Clubby. So when I get a survey watch out Lowes. Our master bath remodel is now at 8K over basic labor and installation costs, in Colorado nothing is cheap. Yes, this is a bitch. Lucky most of our online ordering has been with HD and shipped from Third Party warehouses. We shall see as we have a few items yet to go. Don
Hey Don, take a hammer & modify that mirror. Bet it could fit in a 5 gallon Lowes bucket or at worst 2 of them.
My take on parts and maintenance.........worth it if you want to keep the car. My MCS is now over 17 yrs old. Put $3500 worth of parts and labor in it last summer. Cheaper than buying a new car.....
My MINI is a fun car for me, but I did a similar deep mechanical dive when I bought it a few years ago. It's worth it if it stops me from having a mechanical failure in the middle of nowhere on my vacation (like driving to MOTD). I learned that lesson when driving the car home from the purchase (Austin, TX to Charlotte, NC) and the idler pully bearing died late at night on a rural section of a highway.
If you're going to put a new clutch in I'd recommend going with the Valeo unit - comes with new flywheel (single mass, not dual) and works beautifully - feels light like a Honda clutch and smooth as butta.....also about 1/2 the cost of OEM including the dual mass flywheel.
This will be my 2nd clutch job. My current clutch is already the single mass flywheel by Valeo. It does not grab as hard as the stock dual mass unit, nor (I perceive) did it last quite as long. But for less than half the price of the stock dual mass unit, it was the better way to go for reliability.