Time to reintroduce myself and share the latest acquisition, my 1992 Rover Mini Cooper. You may have encountered me on the forum previously as MiniCarJack (and perhaps you've read about my NZ-built Mk1 which I still own), so hello again to those I've interacted with before! Having recently changed my name in "real life" I figured a change in profile was also in order...
Anyway, here's my most recently purchased Mini which I've now owned for a couple of months, bought with the intention to sort and use as my daily driver after I got bored with my F54 Clubman.
It's an early injection car with a John Cooper Garages "Si" conversion (number 91 on the crossmember plaque), repainted in Connaught Green with full-length white stripes & roof in tribute to John Rhodes' car from the '60s. That backdated theme works surprisingly well with an ever-so-slightly modernised interior - it's adorned with Cooper embossed leather seats and a two-speed heater from a later MPI, ideal for a daily really. I was also pleased to discover that the right-hand fuel filler wasn't fake, it is in fact the real deal with the car having been fitted with a JCG twin tank conversion, a rarely fitted option for injection cars!
The car was set up for motorsport by one of the previous owners, so it's got heavy duty tow points on both subframes, and reinforcing brackets for a rollcage which is no longer fitted. The suspension has almost every upgrade imaginable with lots of adjustable bits and very good cones, so it handles superbly.
There's also a stack of paperwork, original service books and documentation from John Cooper Garages, including the Si certificate which is very nice to have.
I bought the car as a project as it needed a new clutch and some bits sorting for MOT, which was all done just after I bought it in early November. Between then and now I've mainly just been driving it, having covered somewhere between 500 and 1000 miles in that time pushing it to just over 70,000 on the odometer. Up until recently it's wanted for nothing, and the most work I'd done on it was replace the door mirrors and fit a Mk2 S badge to the bonnet to carry on the retro theme.
Unfortunately it was all going too well when, a few weeks ago, disaster struck. On my way back home from London along the A3, oil started finding its way all over the engine bay from every orifice it could find, and the engine showed symptoms that suggested excessive crankcase pressure. I had it towed home and confirmed the next day that compression was lost on cylinder no.2, meaning it's almost certain the rings have gone. Since then it's been dropped off at my local Mini-friendly garage to get the engine apart, assess the damage and take it from there... it's likely that a full rebuild is in order, but fortunately I paid quite a low price for this car and I have some funds available to pursue this.
It's not an ideal start to my ownership now that the project has turned a bit more major than anticipated, but I'm trying to see it as a silver lining as I now have the opportunity to properly refresh/rebuild the engine, and set it up as a really nice usable (and hopefully reliable) daily thereafter. And at least I still have the Mk1 to use in the meantime, as noisy and not-very-well-suited-to-winter as it is!
For now though, here are a few more photos from when the car was still going strong, hopefully more to follow soon after some progress on the engine.
I've opted for an SW5 cam and purchased their "rebuild kit" to go with it, as well as a bunch of other parts which should be turning up from Minispares in the next few days. I'm not chasing mega performance with this build so I haven't gone all-out with the wallet lightening exercise, but I do want to ensure reliability so have gone for a few upgrades with items like uprated gaskets & seals, a centre oil pickup & hardened diff pin for the box, and upgraded pushrods.
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