Phew, it's all going to be OK
Just had a reply to my email to the organisers of the London to Brighton run, some 15 minutes after I sent it! My ticket will be sent out later this week.
E232 WMA and family are going on the run. Yippee!!!!
Was I Too Late?
I've still not received my entry to the
London to Brighton Mini Run. I sent my entry off at the beginning of March and it still hasn't arrived.
I've emailed the nice people organising the event to find out what's going on, watch this space.
MOT Failure
I mentioned a while back in my first
post that my latest mini is in a bit of a sorry state. Here's a bit more info on just how poorly it is. Here's the result of the last MOT test that it had.
Notification of a refusal to issue a MOT certificate 200kbAs you can see it is in a sorry state. Here's a complete list of the defects listed on the certificate.
- DIP and Main Beam switch Broken
- N.S. Steering Mount loose *
- N.S.F. Suspension seized
- O.S.R. Radius arm worn to excess
- O.S.F. Shock Abosorber worn to excess.
- N.S.F. tyre worn to inner cord *
- O.S.F. Tyre worn below 1.6mm Limit
- Rear exhaust mount broken
- CO Above 3.5% limit
- Jagged edges bonnet *
* These defects mean the car is dangerous to drive.
That's a long list, I'm a little worried. The other factor is it's a year since this MOT and I believe the car's pretty much been standing around, out in in the rain. The £80 I paid for it suddenly seems quite a bit! This week I'm going to get the chance to give the car a proper look over and see just how bad a state it's in. I also intend to fit the
new bonnet, hopefully that'll prevent any rain entering the engine compartment. I'll try and take some photos so you can see what I'm up against.
Amusing car ads
Thanks to
Steve for these very amusing
Car ads
Picture of one of my minis
I thought you might like to have a look at a picture of one of my minis. This is the mini that gets used day to day. As you can see she's pretty much a standard mini mayfair. Unfortunately I haven't got any pictures as yet of the other mini, I will try and take some over the next few days.
A Bonnet in My Boot
Picked up my
replacement bonnet today. I'm very pleased with it, just like it looked in the Ebay picture. I love the scale of the mini, everything is so wee, the bonnet fitted nicely in the boot of my Renault Megane with room to spare!
A mini club in my area!!!
Just found out that my home town of Eastbourne has it's very own mini club the
Eastbourne & Districts Mini Club . They've only recently started their mini adventure and I'd like to wish them the best of luck. Hopefully i'll along to one of their meets soon.
Learning to weld
There are many things that I need to get done this year and one of them was learn how to weld. One of the self imposed rules in owning the minis is to become mechanically self sufficient, avoiding garages as much as possible. Now I'm quite happy with a spanner or a torque wrench but I've had to use the local welding shop whenever my cars were attacked by the tin weevil. With this in mind I signed up earlier this year at the local college for a two day welding course.
This course finished last Saturday and was a great success. The course had a very simple structure, take one mig welder, lots of pieces of metal and practice joining them together. I read somewhere that mig welding when its going well can be as simple as drawing a line with a pencil, well maybe it is for some people, but my early attempts were laughable. I made all the classic mistakes, wrong feed rate, wrong current, no gas, wandering like a drunken fool(my weld line, not me!), starting the weld in totally the wrong place, the list goes on. The only consolation is I was not alone, all my other classmates were making the same errors. All except one lad who seemed to have the knack straight off, making everyone green with envy.
Practice paid off and by the end of the two days my welds started to look quite respectable, not perfect, but with care and a grinder I feel confident enough to tackle the minis panels.
Next job: Find a cheap mig welder, anyone got one going spare?
And after that: Replace my A Panels
Another great new link
This is great, starting a blog is a great way to find other like minded people whos sites are great resources. Here's another one sent in by Gabe from
Motoringfile.com, this looks a great site. I've added them to my links list.
MotoringFile is a MINI weblog dedicated to bringing you news, views, and every other little bit of interesting information from the new MINI world. In short this is a site that aggregates the best news of the day and commentary for anyone to comment on. Through that and together with tips and suggestions for stories from other people I'm able to put forth what I hope is a good snapshot of the days best MINI related information. All this has combined to make a surprisingly successful and rapidly growing site that is, on average, doubling it's daily hits every two to three months.
As ever go and have a look.
New Links
A big thanks to Steve at
Mini Mechanic and Don at
DBMinis.us for adding my fledgling site to their blog lists. I've a long way to go before this site has as impressive a content as these guys.
I've added their sites to my links, go over and see them.
Steve's Triumph Herald Blog
Just like to wish Steve lots of luck with his new blog
Dented the bloody Herald again. Looks like its going to be full of lots of amusing anecdotes.
ATOM or RSS Feed, it's up to you
I've added a
RSS feed to the site as I am aware that some readers cannot use
ATOM. This
RSS feed is a conversion of my
ATOM feed and is carried out by
2rss.com. Unfortunately as I am using their free service there will be adverts in the feed. If you want the
advert free feed use
ATOM, if you must use
RSS feed then it's there for you.
London To Brighton Mini Run
Just sent my entry in for the
London to Brighton Mini Run 2005 on the 15th May. This event is organised by the
London & Surrey Mini Owners Club. I've left it a bit late, the latest
News is that places are going fast. If you wish to apply you need to get hold of a copy of
Mini World which has the official entry form.
See you there.
Hopefully ...
New Bonnet
EBay is a wonderful thing, you can find all sorts of great bargains for your mini. This is my latest auction win.
This is for Mini 2, the MOT failure, it's bonnet has rusted all along the front edge which is not very pretty and rather sharp. The best news is that this replacement is the correct colour, Moonraker Blue, so I won't need to respray. I hope to pick up the bonnet at the weekend.
The Story So Far
About 15 months ago my wife Tracy and I brought a little red 1987 mayfair. It had got a long MOT and had been well serviced so seemed a good idea. The car was only meant to be a cheap run around town kind of car. We didn't do much to it in the first few months just fitted new seat belts, red to match the car and left it at that.
Then the dreaded MOT date drew near, I gave it a quick service and put it in, it failed. It failed quite badly and I had to do the following jobs. I had to do them myself as the garage had quoted over £500!
- Rear Trailing Arm
- Wheel Bearings
- Ball joint
- Exhaust
- Welding (I let a local garage do this)
- Steering Arm Gaiters
- Track Rod Ends
I discovered several things whilst getting to know my mini
- The MOT garage failed components that on inspection didn't need replacing. I replaced them anyway, the bits were out of the car by then.
- I actually enjoyed working on the car.
- If we wanted to rely on the mini as a form of transport we needed a spare mini to swap out when repairs are needed.
Enter Mini number 2, we managed to pick up a MOT failure for £80. My wife saw the colour and announced that this was to become the main mini, it's MoonRaker Blue which is a bit more interesting than red.
I guess you get what you pay for, there's quite a bit of work to do on the car, mainly rust and some work on the suspension before it will pass the MOT. It will be a fun project and I intend to get the car on the road before the end of the summer.
