I recently bought a 2005 MCS from an acquaintance with 24K miles on it. It has been in service for 5 years and the day before I took it over to the dealer to get another OEM battery and the cabin air filter changed, it puked a little fluid on my garage floor. I thought it might be an oil leak from the drain plug or filter but the fellow who had done the oil change checked it out and said that the oil pan was dry. I drove the car over to Jacksonville, Florida from Tallahassee and the technician diagnosed the problem as leaking L & R output shaft seals coming out of the transmission. He said that the parts were only about $50 but it was going to be 3.5 hours of labor by the shop manual to replace the seals. The technician said that they have been seeing a fair amount of water pump/housing fail but few output shaft seals from the transmission. He said that if I continued to drive the car, I could leak out enough oil to hurt the transmission so the car has been idled until my next appointment this coming Friday. I searched the archives and had not seen this as an identified problem for the first generation MCS cars. I must say that having driven Toyotas for so long that I am not really used to cars requiring as much maintenance as these fun little mini's seem to require. Thank goodness that my friend had purchased a 45K/3 year extended warranty which I transferred a couple of weeks ago into my name.

 

Well, nice ending to an interesting chapter in my new ownership of a 2005 MCS. I took the day off and drove from Tallahassee over to Tom Bush Mini in Jacksonville, FL and they changed out the defective transmission output shaft seals. The labor was 3.5 hours worth and it is a fairly tricky little job. The technician, Regan is superb and very knowledgable and the service manager, Joe Tadisco was very pleasant an accomodating. They also rotated the tires as they said that Mini's need the tires rotated about every 3K due to the extreme angles of the rear tires. They were also kind enough to diagnose and fix the source of a rattle that was irritating. I must say that Mini's association with BMW seems to be a very good thing in that they seem to be used to dealing with high end cars and treated the MCS like it was a high-end BMW. I was able to get 28 mpg for the entire round trip and it only used 3/4 of a tank of petrol to make the round trip. Now that the car has 25k miles and everything is ship shape (changed the battery and cabin air filter on my first trip to the dealer two weeks ago), I plan to have a lot of fun with this little jewel. I probably did not mention that I almost took European delivery of a MCS in 1967 but my travelling companion talked me into driving his new MGB around Europe for the summer and I abandoned my plans for the Mini. Well, 42 years later, I am in my dream little Mini. The only thing that was not part of the dream is that it is Chili Red with a White top and I was going to get a British Racing Green with a white top back in 1967. Oh well, it was worth the wait. Bob

 

I forgot to mention how nice and how easy it was to install a set of billet aluminum shock tower stiffeners to by 2005 MCS yesterday. Simple as removing three nuts on each side, placing the piece of aluminum on the towers and then tightening the nuts with 25 foot/pounds of torque. After reading all of the threads about shock tower metal deforming from a pothole or bad bump, I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't spend $129 and have better piece of mind about maintaining the integrity of the suspension/alignment.

 

Congrats on finally fulfilling your MINI dream! Is your your MINI a manual (MCS) or an automatic (MCSa)?

 

It is a 6-speed. I get to row the gears and listen to the whine of the SC. It also has an Alta CAI and a MagnaFlow Cat back system. Other than a lot of other chrome bits, it is stock. Bob