50 Shades of Rust...
Mr Croker and his infamous role in 'The Italian Job' can be held almost entirely responsible for every tear, drop of blood and swear word that has contributed to the restoration/tart-up of my 1980 Mini 1000. Indeed the hidden costs and infinite worrying about whether or not it will ever be finished has all been, to an extent, worth it. The endless charm and unparalleled character this car presents is enough to keep one going through even the toughest adversity and fortunes spent on tea. As I sit here writing this, with shredded fingers and covered head to toe in blood, grease and oil, the car is yet to be completed. Although I hope by writing about my experience on this page I can share my love/hate relationship through to the end, and to that ever impending meeting with the MOT garage.
To begin at the beginning, a long and exceptionally naive search ended in July of 2015, when I finally found the car I had been looking for, and that my rather unhealthy bank balance could justify. The blissful ignorance I suffered at the time resulted in a very excited young boy travelling down to Kent to pick up what was thought to be a car needing only the brakes renovating (something we've all fallen victim to at some point...). After agreeing the the car was as advertised, in hindsight perhaps not, the months and years of pain began.
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For the first few weeks I didn't get the opportunity to work on the car, apart from one occasion when I attempted to get the car started, and by the time I got round to replacing the coil, seawater had worked its way into the block and hence the engine ceased as solid as a rock. So the first major task of removal and strip down of the engine began and the can of worms that was the body work was opened...
I was aware of a few scabs and bubbles on the surface. As time progressed, some of these 'scabs' became holes plugged with ancient newspaper and putty. This is of course expected from any older car, and anyone with any experience in restorations will tell you that rust is always there, yet this doesn't better the feeling of dread when a large lump of mush falls of the body of you car, leaving behind a seemingly irreparable orifice.
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Initially, I though I had gotten off fairly lightly, and in some ways I still think I am lucky that the car wasn't too 'swiss-cheese' like. The first patch I noticed was the passenger side A-Panel, a panel notorious for corrosion. Indeed the little bubbles I saw originally hid a horror of patchy repair work underneath, and with a poke with a screwdriver from inside the wheel arch sure enough left a hole worthy of a few cups of tea and some swear words.
Moving round the car there was the drivers side quarter panel. Where there was evidence again of a nasty repair job, but thankfully it was only a small hole underneath, that had been poorly repaired in the past so all it needed in the end was a slightly better patching. The right hand A-panel proved to past muster, as did most of the rest of the exterior. The engine bay was a bit of a mess, with both inner wings having quite nasty holes and, aside from rot, the dissolving sound deadening that somehow was absolutely everywhere. General scabs around the headlights and other usual places left me with a long list of body work related jobs to complete. However, if only I had known the extent at which the bulkhead had rotted away where the vent was, I could have sorted it in a much more practical way than what I actually ended up doing, and consequently my advice to anyone undertaking a minor restoration of any car is to fully uncover any secrets it has to offer before carrying out the majority of the work. As all horror stories go, it was a dark and stormy night when I shone a torch up into the wheel arch to disconnect the blower piping, and to my ever more pessimistic self the sight of newspaper protruding from the seemingly solid metal was too much to bare. The resistance to the temptation of pulling at it was futile, and as expected a few seconds later a 20cm diameter, inch think wad of newspaper and filler came flying out in a cloud of 35 year old dust, mud and misery, and resulted in more swearing and tears than was probably necessary. As evident from the photos, the vent itself was more or less screwed into nothing, and all the metal around it was completely gone. Although I suppose I was expecting something along these lines in terms of hidden horrors, it never fails to make you feel somewhat lacking in motivation.
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Nonetheless, we imported the most economical (cheapest) welder to patch up my hole stricken roller-skate. It has to be said that the job wasn't brilliant, and did little to improve some of my problems. The A-panel had a piece of metal welded near it, and the rear quarter panel was forgotten about entirely. However the worst by far was that the hole behind the dash was patched over, which would in any normal circumstances absolutely fine but there should be a nice circular hole (an intentional one) for a certain air vent. So now I need to make holes, not repair them...
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Going back to the engine removal, this all went fairly smoothly. I found a very useful guide on a website somewhere that gave precise and easy to follow instructions for the entire process, and included is the refitting process which I hopefully will be needing very soon. This guide I will attach at the bottom of the page, and I must stress that I did not write this and all credit goes to the original writer. It took me down the root of lifting the engine out of the engine bay from the top, as opposed to dropping it out on the subframe and raising the body of the car. With the engine out I began the comparatively easy task of stripping it down. With this done it was straight off to a engineering works for a full clean and rebore. Whilst the block was undergoing surgery, I had the crank and camshaft crack tested and the cylinder head refurbished and converted to unleaded. All of this was in quick succession and got my hopes up for a speedy recovery, and to be back on the road by the time I passed my driving test in July of 2016. This of course was exceptionally optimistic as I expected the rebuild to be as quick as the strip down.
Something I would say to anyone about to undertake a project such as this is to ensure that all of your parts are properly organised and labelled as they come off the car. A phrase mentioned nearly as much as all the swear words is: 'I need a bolt for *insert random, exclusive and forgotten about part here* and it doesn't exist'. It's a good idea to make a list of parts you need to replace as you go, instead of following my flawless example and throwing it in the bin, never to be thought about again until that one day were all of your progress is relying on zed part.
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The rebuild was a time consuming but strangely pleasing process. There is something rather magical about lots of very shiny and very smooth bits coming together to create something vaguely resembling an engine. Although it did seem as though I was having to go back and forth to a certain local DIY store (rhyming with salfords), engines seem to have a tendency not only to require obscure tools (and those weird circular things for holding the piston rings together that have no other use in the world), but also for eating old tools, much like washing machines that consume ONE sock of each pair.
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A problem that I had, and I would appreciate any consolation from people who have experienced the same problem (I hope you exist), is the locking tabs for the main bearing bolts. The bolts themselves have a ridiculously high torque settings, understandably so, and as I torqued them up, the locking tabs rotated, twisting themselves around and deforming as they went, rendering them completely useless. To this day they remain in this state, and it is a constant worry that it will cause a problem in the long run. I did check and they are clear of any moving parts, and they were but that offers little comfort at this stage...
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