Kinda stalled on doing anything with this for a while, but been having a bit of a tweak here & there, mainly doing brake work. When I got the car it had 7.5" Cooper S discs up front, with no vacuum booster. First upgrade I did was to fit said booster...
Before:
After:
Then I replaced the 7.5" solid discs & two-pot calipers with 8.4" vented rotors & four-pot calipers. Had to replace the front lines as well when I did this 'cos the old ones broke undoing the ends.....
Rear brake cylinders have seized, so they need replacing too now.
Poor Mini had been put on the backburner for a while, but got around to having a bit more of a crack at it. Got the rear brake cylinders done a while back, and that's kinda where things stopped - pun not wholly unintended...
I'd try giving it a crack at starting up every so often, with mixed results. Then its battery died, so I'd borrow the one out of the daily Sube. Recent attempts at turning over got absolutely nothing; figured it might have just been the daily's battery getting tired too, which I knew was happening. New battery in the Sube last week, so figured might as well plug it into the Brick & see what happened. Resounding CLUNK as the starter engaged the flywheel which was more than last time with the old battery, then nothing. Fuck!
So, with no engine crane or means of dropping the subframe with engine out, this is a little bit, but not entirely fucked. So figure I'll try a partial deconstruction & at least see how the innards look. Thankfully the A-Series isn't exactly complicated, dating from around 1950, give or take a couple of years, so it's not rocket surgery. Managed to disconnect the radiator, although not removed fully 'cos there's a section of fan shroud restricting extraction of the lower rad. hose, but it's not attached to anything. Inlet & exhaust manifolds off, enabling removal of the cylinder head. Cylinder 1 & 4 bores nice & shiny, just the expected black shit on the pistons. Not so pretty is a bit of surface rust in cylinder 2 & 3 bores. Bugger. Liberally spray bores with WD40 and wipe with a rag; seems to be cleaning up OK. Then, brainwave! With no head on, there's no compression, so with luck should be able to move the car in gear. Slip it into 4th, which is a fairly direct (after the diff) ratio and give it a decent shove. Reluctantly, IT MOVES!!!!! :smile: That's progress. Keep rolling back & forward in the limited space I've got to move, and it gets easier & smoother. Bonus is, as I've learned through the Mini forum, this this primes the oil pump & gets the oil circulating too, which is obviously not a bad thing. So, grab the battery out of the daily & plug it in. First hit with the starter makes a bit of an ugly noise, so a few more pushes back & forward. Next go & it turns over. Obviously with no head it's not going to fire, but it goes around!!!!! Grubby bores seem to have cleaned up alright just from getting the pistons moving again, so hopefully I've dodged a bullet with this one. I'll give the head a clean up while it's off & hopefully this thing will fire up again soon.
