I'm going to be honest, any work under the hood scares me because I don't know what I'm doing. I've been reading up on the mushrooming thing since I'm having my strut mount fixed by MINI next week and I want to get some of the craven plates. But I'm scared silly to put these on myself, the more threads I read the more I get overloaded with information and the more unsure I become.

I have a local shop that I like where I used to take my Honda and they have inspected my MINI and done oil changes and whatnot for me but they didn't even want to talk to me about installing these things. Any recommendations? Yes I know I'm a wuss.

Edit: I'd also be interested in the VA area say out closer to Winchester.

 

You might want to meet John Behe at Behe Performance (it used to be called Lucky Dog Garage -- see http://www.luckydoggarage.com/). He is located in Glendale/Glenelg on MD97 (a.k.a. Georgia Ave) about a mile south of I70, midway between Frederick & Baltimore.

John is the favorite tuner & independent MINI wizard for a number of us. His garage can handle anything between an oil change and full race preparation. He is world famous for his firmware for earlier MCS's. My 2002 MCS shows ~200 HP on John's dyno .

 

Great! Thanks for the recommendation.