THE Cooper Road Mini, Jemal’s 66 MK1 Cooper S For Sale?

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I have to admit, this one might never be truly finished. I’ve been building it since well before this website or YouTube started even! As a recognized expert and builder of show winning classic Minis, this has been my “proof of concept” showpiece for improvements to the classic Mini Cooper. There is far too much to “list”, but you’ll get a good idea after you watch the 20 or so videos in the playlist below! Then you’ll still have questions.

It’s an intense and demanding car to drive. It absolutely will not be for everyone. The driver must understand and manage the high compression engine with skill and attention to avoid destruction. The close ratio gearbox is geared for ‘reasonable’ RPM at highway speed. First gear is tall making slow driving or starting on a hill challenging. More so with said high compression engine!

The pay off? This is one of the most exiting and exhilarating classic Minis to drive without resorting to Honda power (and weight). It sounds and revs and builds power like few classic Minis could imagine. The legendary Mini driving experience, enhanced with nearly two decades of my relentless (and documented) improvements make this one of the most remarkable MK1 Cooper S cars on the road today.

The trade off? It’s not original. Before you start telling me I shouldn’t have done this or that, or that it is a “hodgepodge” of parts, you better see a few “before” photos. You will notice how straight and rust free the body was even then.

That’s right, it came from a barn! And mostly before every phone had a camera. My lovely assistant had one of the first iPhones in 2006 for those pics. I might have some dusty prints of the original acquisition around 2002!

I never had any intention of being restrained by originality. Indeed I wouldn’t bother. Dare I admit that to a performance enthusiast like myself, most standard classic Minis are quite pathetic! There’s not much appeal in winding through several gears just to get through an intersection! No such trouble here.

This also could be a never-ending-post. I already have a long playlist of videos on YouTube, and dozens more to be edited of recent work as I built the car to it’s current state. There are a number of improvements to the suspension, steering, sub-frames, brakes, and engine that I have not yet mentioned. This playlist goes back many years, so I hope you’ll forgive the quality of my early “single take” clips. There is a lot of history here:

This is a chance to own this car and finish the interior to suit your taste, not mine or anyone else’s. It turns out that I’m much better at building the mechanical side and would much rather change sub frames than install door panels! You can see that I do not have the door sliding windows installed…. I personally find them absurd in our Summer climate! You can see that the velocity stacks are open to the sky. Another reason to avoid rain!

It also turns out I’m better at building cars and have several more in the works. Passing stewardship of this one will give me the attention span, the time and space to work, and some financial bandwidth for the next project. I built every single piece of this authentic California Cooper S, and the next owner will have my ongoing technical support and advice. And should you want the next engine to have the latest Multi-web crank and make even more power, we can do that too!

Engine out without disconnecting the Brake Servo?

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These days CooperRoadMini is in a bit of a holding pattern as my lovely assistant is due to give birth to our son, literally at any moment now!   Little Xaven (or Xayven?,  Xayvyn?, Xavyn?….still working on it!)  is due day after tomorrow as I write this.  Perhaps to help in that regard,  we are tempting fate by taking a picnic and the 4-wheel drive up to a nearly 8000 foot peak about an hour away. Yes we live in a wonderful place!  We’ll escape early August 90s for spectacular views of several lakes and balmy 70s,  and see if the terrain might help expedite Xavy Cooper’s arrival!  OK, you can have some fun with our choice of middle name, but someday, he may inherit this mess!

Well, that’s the “life and times” update,  but back to our title…. the question has come up again about whether it’s possible to pull the engine unit from a servo equipped Mini without disturbing the hydraulics.  A ‘servo’ is what a power-brake booster is called for a Mini. They were installed at first only on the Cooper S models with disk brakes, different than most cars in that the unit is remote from the master cylinder.  In the Mini, it is mounted on the right side of the tiny engine compartment, right in the way of getting to the clutch adjustment, and generally making many maintenance and inspection procedures much more difficult.  That’s why I chose not to run one on my 66 S…. the pedal pressure is just not significant, even with late 8.4″ disk brakes and 13″ wheels with an early single line master.  In any event, they are widely used and viewed as an upgrade from the S model.

So the answer is YES!   In this short video taken just before I re-installed the engine in our last project, we can see how the servo unit is pulled up and tilted backwards with just a slight twist of the two brake pipes that connect it back to the three way junction on the bulkhead.  I show a little trick for tightening up a small brake fluid leak…. finesse instead of brute force!

Finally, this last week I’ve been helping our friend Steven back in the great state of PA figure out what he needs to assemble the brake pipes to his Mark 1.   He acquired the car in milk crates and coffee cans, so bits like the “three-way connector” are just “junk in a box”!   Here you go Steven, you can see the layout of most of the engine compartment brake plumbing, and your car will be very much like this one!

Weber DCOE a Tight Fit in a Classic Mini

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While we don’t have a current guest project in the works at Cooper Road Mini, the question of fitting a Weber side-draft onto the standard engine configuration often comes up. I took this video when I was reassembling our friend Mike’s 67 Mark 1 to show how these end up being a bit of a compromise as they seriously crowd the instrument cluster in the center of the dash. Most classic Minis well into the 80s came with the iconic “center binnacle” speedometer. I’ve described these set-ups as “trying to suck the speedo out of the dash”, and you can see with the two slightly different DCOE 45 combos I have, how the one with the “OER” carb just WILL NOT clear the speedometer and bulkhead without some chopping! This is the same combo I was hoping to run on our previous project Moke, but it would have required cutting the bulkhead on a painfully original English Moke! There is a reason that lots of knowledgeable Mini folks just don’t like the Weber on a street car…. A race set up won’t be concerned with modifying the dash!

Fun and Informative posts by Jemal

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As part of my day job, I moderate and answer questions on the Mini Mania Forum.  As part of minimania.com, the forum hosts an international and diverse group of Mini Cooper owners and enthusiasts.  Sometimes people ask things in funny ways…. perhaps something is lost in translation, perhaps they didn’t read the words they wrote, so we have some fun with it!

This was a thread about the notorious failure of the classic Mini odometers, which often get stuck when turning over anything with more than three nines in a row!

Funny topic!  This one brings back memories…  My childhood Mini Van in Iraq had the typical odo failure at one of the 999s.  My father patiently took it all apart till the dials could be poked and prodded.  For some reason, Arabs like to clean parts in gasoline, and so it went wrong!  First, the paint on the numbers came off, then he started a fire in the kitchen sink!  Somehow the unit didn’t melt down and after cleaning soot from half the house, he actually got it to work again…. for a little while.

Years later, he was attending KSU in Manhattan, Kansas when the odo on our 66 Chevy Impala got stuck.  Apart it came and into a tub of gasoline…. you guessed it, in the kitchen sink!  Off came the numbers, and BOOM from the stove pilot light.  Lots more soot for my poor mother to clean!  A trip to the junkyard to replace a melted speedo.  Not an idiot, eventually getting a dual Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics PHD from Stanford, but I bet he still cleans parts in gasoline!

Perhaps Palo Alto Speedometer is not such a bad deal.

Jemal

Here is the full topic and comments by members of the forum:

http://minimania.com/msgThread/115313/1/1/Need_a_fix_for_a_stuck_ODO

 

Let’s do one more…. This was in response to a question posed by someone new to Minis, wondering if a Classic Mini would be a good choice for “primitive” conditions….

If you mean the roads routinely have as much as a foot of water, there won’t be too many cars that won’t “malfunction”!  Have you considered a Bush-era Hummer? 

Keep in mind that Minis do come from England, where it is known to rain on occasion.  Rain can cause rust, and Minis certainly have rust, so logically, Minis must be ok in the rain!

You’ll find that we’re a supportive and helpful group! What do you think so far? 

Jemal

The full thread:   http://minimania.com/msgThread/115236/1/1/Buying_my_first_mini

OK, I can’t resist one more, about using a Classic Mini as a daily driver:

Now in my fourth decade as a motorcyclist, I’ve learned to ride and drive as though I am invisible. I do not rely on being seen, and I do not drone along, absent-mindedly next to a semi on the freeway, just hoping for the best the way so many complacent drivers do.  Obviously you can mitigate risks to some extent but ultimately, the physical universe won’t allow two objects to occupy the same space at the same time.  If the two objects are a Crew-cab dually and a classic Mini, well, I hope it’s not your Mini!

IMHO, the biggest fault with a Mini as a daily driver is the wrong kind of driver. It simply will not survive at the hands of someone inattentive to what the car is telling them.  You can’t be multi-tasking with your various devices expecting the Mini to take care of you and itself the way a modern car does.  You must devote attention to the sounds and smells and vibrations, constantly look for leaks, smoke, fumes, flames, a myriad of things the Mini might do to tell you what it need before it hurts itself or you!

It can be done though! Numerous members of this board have the right stuff!  I don’t anymore, but as a child, our 66 Mini Van 850 was THE family car, and the ONLY Mini in the country. Banging around Baghdad, Iraq (back when it was semi-civilized!) for nearly a decade, we only had one minor fender-bender. Ultimately we drove it back to Wales, had the 850 rebuilt, then drove it back to Baghdad! The British newspapers of the 70s thought we had very much the “wrong stuff”, a family of FIVE, making that trip in a Mini Van!  There was no back seat, let alone seatbelts!

Jemal

MiniVan

The “Wrong Stuff”!    That’s me on the right at 10 years old!  This photo appeared with our story in the local press circa 1973,  North Wales near Chester and Liverpool.

 

 

Project Wrap-up, Start-up, and Test Drive

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In between spring rain and snow, I had a chance to do a couple of quick test drives after getting our fabulous Mark 1 Mini  all back together.  This car really shows how quality components AND superb workmanship and attention to detail add up to a car that is a pleasure to work on as well as drive!  The engine compartment is a tight fit with the brake servo, oil cooler, and the related lines and hoses, but everything went back together just as it should.

Here then is a last look at our engine compartment, now nicely packed with the quality components every well-dressed Mini should be wearing:

 

Probably the single most difficult task of the entire project was getting the four bronze washers back into the proper sides of the bonnet hinges on the bulkhead! I elected to remove the hinges along with the bonnet, rather than leaving the hinges hanging over the engine compartment.  I forgot how hard it is to start those  screws, particularly with the bonnet attached.

Perseverance and a calm and collected demeanor eventually paid off, with no damage to me or the car, and the Mini was ready to start:

 

After taking it off the jackstands, we had dark clouds but no rain, so off on it’s first drive:

 

And finally, a few rain drops on the window, ride along as I verify that our gearbox shifts fantastic, the engine runs and sounds great, and we successfully wrap up another Cooper Road Mini Project.

Getting the car ready and the engine back in

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Here are a series of short clips showing some of the details of the engine compartment, the types of things you can address while the engine is out.   Now is the time to deal with items like the inner CV joints, motor mounts, shift linkage, making any repairs to the brake lines, steering, radiator shrouds, and so on…. any kind of work that is usually MUCH more difficult with the engine in the way!

We’ll start with a general look and clean up of the engine compartment:

 

And as we fix a few small items and get ready to set the engine back in:

 

Now, the engine is hanging on the hoist as we shoehorn it back in:

 

Finally a little help from our lovely assistant with her smaller hands:

Gearbox Back Together

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We’ll try to catch up a little…. Our gearbox is all back together!  We’ve covered various details of building them before, so just a quick look at what we did to cure the grinding 2nd gear, and a last look inside our A+ Rod change gearbox, and the usual set up of the differential bearing shims.  You can see that I installed a center oil pick-up, and really put this together from scratch, including cleaning and painting the case as I would for a complete rebuild….  You can’t go much deeper than replacing 2nd on the main-shaft!

Physics Tricks: Make the gearbox 8 feet long

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I’ve explained to quite a few people how to bolt a length of 2 by 4 to a gearbox to be able to keep the thing from rotating as you go to loosen or tighten the big pinion and input gear nuts. Or bolting the box to a stout bench… If you don’t have air tools, or don’t want to use impact against the gears, you can get an easy grip on the case to apply lots of force GENTLY.
Here, I’ve locked the box in first and fourth. I did not capture how to do this on the rod-change linkage… you must rotate the shift stub shaft out of engagement to be able to move the shift-forks independently, then manually slide the hub collars to engage 2 gears at once. As all gears are in constant mesh, nothing can turn with two different ratios locked. Now if you can grab the box securely, you can apply the necessary pressure gently to get it (un)done!

If anyone wants to see the linkage trick, leave a comment! I probably have another case I could show.  Specific questions make for good relevant content, so ask away!

Inside the Gearbox: Finding the Grinding

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As expected, once we got into the gearbox, we find that the synchro or baulk ring on second gear had worn all the way down such that it did not synchronize the gear speed to the shift-hub, resulting in that big crunch going into second. In this video, I show how you can spot a worn synchro, very useful if you want to get an idea of the condition of used gearbox without taking it apart.

Disconnecting the shift-linkage and axles on a Rod-change Classic Mini Cooper

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Let’s continue with our repair of second gear for Mike’s beautiful Mark 1 Mini. Unfortunately, getting to 2nd gear does require a complete disassembly of the gearbox, so that means getting the engine out of the car. This one is a bit more challenging because this car is so nicely detailed, AND has the proper servo-assist Cooper S disk brakes, adding to the complexity and care required for working in the engine compartment. But of course, we’re the experts, so we can do it!
I often get asked about getting the shift linkage and axles separated from the engine, so here’s a short video showing me doing most of the required under-car work to get the engine out! Thanks to my lovely assistant Tisha for doing the camera work.