...needs to be given a big hug and a kiss and then kicked right in the family jewels!

I have a Cooper S Turbo and I have never owned/driven a car that was so much fun on the road. At the same time, I've never owned a car that's had this much go wrong with it. I've got 112K on the clock and had to replace the water pump, vacuum pump, turbo, thermostat housing, oil filter housing gasket and now the A/C isn't working right.

Neither have I owned a car that was so hard to work on. It seems they went out of their way to make it challenging to work on. Just about everything requires a 2/3rds disassembly of everything under the hood and even then it's hard to get to.

 

You probably should be thinking about a new turbo oil line kit too. That would have been easy to do when you replaced the O-rings on the oil filter housing.

These motors are fully assembled before they're slid in from the front on the assembly line. Piece of cake when there's no front end on the car. The 3rd Gen is no easier to work on ,but at least you don't have to unbolt and lay the coolant overflow tank aside to get to the oil filter. The "no dipstick" makes up for that convenience though.

 

Hate to say it but these cars are engineered just like modern day BMWs. Cooling systems require overhauls between 80-100K and they leak like BMWs. But the good part of it is if you address it all at the same time of the cooling system overhaul you can get another 100K miles of trouble free service. I think that if the oil is changed on these vehicles every 5k miles from day one those turbos and chain guides would get a lot more in mileage before needing to be changed. You gotta take the good with the bad. They are immense fun to drive but they do require attention to maintenance. Oh and once you remove the front clip from the car everything is accessible.

 

A piece of weapons fire control equipment I maintained and operated many, many years ago had it's components packed in so tightly, I had a phrase to describe how the engineers accomplished the task of making it fit into the space available. "25 pounds of **** in a 10 pound **** box." (I supplied the stars. Navy terminology might stroke out the moderator.)

Sir Alec had a design that worked quite well. Then the German engineers got hold of it. Another example: The Sherman tank, any American kid could wrench that thing if something broke down. The Tiger tank was so tightly engineered that if anything broke down the whole system was 'Kaput'.