I was rumaging around some old boxes and found some pics of my '62 Cooper S. It was a German export model I think because it had a locking steering column that said "Farht" and the speedo read in both kilometers and miles. I re-did the whole car from stem to stern over the large number of years I owned it - from about 1968 -1979.

When I got it it had been hit in the left side, and the door and quarter window did not fit. I don't remember the details now, but someone gave me an empty body shell that had been hit on the right, and my local body shop cut the good side from the orange shell and welded it into my (then) white one. Too bad I didn't notice the holes in the floor and cut and saved the floor pan too, I later had to make new ones and weld them in. I did a so-so job since this was my first attempt and all I had was gas welding equipment. I remember cutting right thru a brake line with a sawzall when I was removing the old rusty floors!

Anyway, I stripped it down to bare metal, rebuilt the motor, trans, clutch, brakes (discs!) and made a new interior for it. I made a dash out of some flat aluminum I covered with vinyl and bought some gauges from the local parts store, at least then I had a tach! The dash was hinged at the bottom corners, just like on a Jag E-Type so it would pivot out so I could get to the wiring behind. I even had a new Blaupunkt cassette stereo in it, back when those were the ones to have.......

I bought some seat cover kits that had extra sized bolsters and those seats really fit nice - I couldn't begin to get my oversized butt in one now, but then they were comfy, and looked cool as hell. Some new alloy wheels topped off the look, but at the time the biggest tire you could buy in a 10" radial was a 145, that was recommended size for the 3.5" to 4" wide wheels that Minis came with, and there was no way I could stretch them over the 6" wide mags I'd just bought, so I wound up buying some boat trailer tires! They were hard as a rock and stiff as hell and I only ran about 10 psi in them or I would be running on about 1" of tread in the middle of the tire - but they looked cool as hell! Some screw on fender flares and I was in bidness!

The engine was a stock 1100, but some one had added twin 1 1/2" carbs off an MGB (I think) the angle of the manifold was wrong from one car to the other so the float bowls didn't set level, but that didn't bother me! It ran like a scalded cat to about 85-90 mph where it ran out of RPM

These pics were taken in Colorado Springs just after I moved there so I still had my JoCo plates on it, and you can see the muffler I added just before the trip, I had been running a megaphone like the Baja bugs did at the time, and it was just too noisey, but it looked and sounded bad to the bone!

Sorry about the quality of the pics, dimini did his best to fix them and they're much, much better than before, but they're old photos and very faded..........
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