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Mini Moke’s Monster Engine Going Together

After Letterman, lets see what’s going on in the garage. Late night fun and games, putting the final piston in.

Well, I wasn’t watching Letterman. Here I’m getting last of the piston assemblies into the engine block. These are the Russel Pistons from Australia. I really like the design of these… A modern three ring piston that is available in a bigger oversize without having to bore the block to 1380. This leaves a lot more room for reliability, specially when using pre A+ blocks.

Ah, yes, my Grandad’s hammer. I’ve had this thing for 40 years and have used it to put countless pistons in engines.  It’s perfect for the ratcheting style ring compressors like I’m using here, and the perfect weight to gently tap in the piston with the wood handle. Or maybe I’m just sentimental!   Anyway, my lovely assistant ran out of memory just before the final tap, so here is a brief re-enactment…

And we flipped the engine on the stand and pulled the rod down the bore. It’s different being under time pressure because her iPhone has too much junk on it!

Then finally after she deleted more old stuff, I put the cap on the connecting rod and make sure all the animals are in. Turn off the music, it’s 1:46AM!

’67 Mini Moke Rebuild Continues

Mini Moke Engine Rebuild

Follow along as we rebuild a Mini Moke.

After a few weeks of distractions around the holidays we have still managed to sneak in a little work on the Mini Moke rebuild. We got the engine back from our friends at Reibe’s Machine shop in Grass Valley. Jemal has worked with these guys going back to his years building MiniMania’s custom engines.

He’s assembled the shortblock up in the garage, but tonight we are down in the basement where the four snycro remote gearbox the we brought back from Wales a few years ago is strewn all over one work bench. This gearbox came out of a Cooper S that his sister owned in the 80’s. It’s being modified to accept the magic wand case and linkage to retain the Moke’s originality, yet still have a serious gearbox under the big 1345cc engine.

Mini Cooper 1380cc Engine Headed for Hawaii

This is a Mini Mania custom rebuilt engine for our friend Peter in Hawaii. We rebuilt the engine and transmission that he sent us out of his Mini. This is a 1380 cc engine built as a nice torquey street engine mated to an original Cooper S style remote-shift 3 synchro gear box with Hardy-Spicer outputs. This is going into a Traveller Woody wagon, so the extra power will be really nice.

Sprite Race Engine, Mini Cooper Trans Update

JKat presents a brief description of his Sprite Engine rebuild

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bpXANtUv70M%26hl%3Den_US