I have done my best to dig around to find something on this topic and couldn't, sorry if it was here and I missed it.

I have an early production 2002 base Cooper with 160K on it that I have owned a year and a half. I normally do not buy cars with such high mileage but this was a one owner car with a solid service history, was in beautiful shape and frankly, after driving a totaled car with no windows for nearly 5 weeks in the wake of a tornado, I was getting pretty desperate. Used cars were in very short supply and I felt really lucky to not only find a car in such nice shape but one I had wanted since they first came out.

It has been relatively trouble free other than a dead cooling fan, loose hatch hinge bolts and recently, the notorious manual shifter clip and it also looks like I am doing control arm bushings next weekend.

Looking around on the forums made me realize that there are problems that are typical to these cars and I wanted to give the car a good once over to see if I was getting ready to have any of them.


Something that has bugged the living daylights out of me since nearly day one is a creaking noise from the front end on acceleration from stop, especially with the wheel cranked one way or the other. I have been over it time and time again and I can find nothing loose, no contact marks and I can't reliably repeat it either.

The things I have checked so far and are not the culprit are CVs, motor mounts, ball joints, sway bar bushings/end links and the rack mounts.
The struts appear to be OEM. I do plan to replace them but for right now they ride nice, tires wear evenly, it drives straight as an arrow and corners like a slot car.

Here's where I got puzzled; looking at the threads about strut mount failure, I looked real close at my mounts and they do not look like anyone else's I have seen. The only thing I could find in my paperwork was something listed as recall 51 03 03 that was performed when the owner complained of wheel and tire concern.

This mount is all steel, with only a rubber coating in the middle (for sound deadening?) the bearing must be under the plate because it isn't in it.
My first thought: it must be an aftermarket part but then I found a Mini part number on the strut and it looks old. So this led to all kinds of questions.
1. Why are these different?
2. Should it have been retrofitted as a part of a recall when it was new?
3. It is all steel and didn't punch its way up through the strut towers after all this time, why would they have changed the design to a failure prone rubber one?
4. When I buy struts are they going to fit these mounts or am I going to have to buy new failure prone mounts too?

Anyone know what the deal was here?
How about any ideas about the creaking noise?

 

A good website is realoem.com
Put in your vin or production date, and the schematics and part numbers for each area of the car will pop up.
Some early 2002 cars were made with preproduction/prototype parts....so not sure...i know my mounts look very different. From posts i can say the suspension parts and engine mounts on 2002 cars do vary....and some parts are trial and error....waymotorworks know mini's inside and out, and can get anything cheaper than the dealer with low shipping cost...might save you a few trips to find the right parts.

 

The creaking could just be spring bind...which wouldn't surprise me at all at that age/mileage. Those strut mounts are indeed puzzling, though...never seen anything like that.

 

Hmmm, those mounts look more robust than what we all have. Bearings should be somewhere under those. Do you have any mushrooming?

 

No mushrooming at all. That is why I am puzzled. If they already had the answer to the problem, why change the part. I am going to have the front end apart to do bushings, when I do I will lower a strut so that I have a good look at what is going on here. I will post pictures and hopefully it has part numbers that are still valid. Stay tuned

 

According to my Bentley manual, the upper strut mounts changed in 3/2002. Yours is the older version. The washer on top under the nut is called the "articulated disk", which the newer versions don't use / have. The upper spring seats are different, too. I'm not sure if the mushrooming / cracked upper strut mounts are only applicable to the post 3/2002 mounts, but digging through the endless threads on these two issues may yield the answer (I suspect that is so, as you haven't experienced any mushrooming with high mileage).

(I just changed my upper strut mounts last week due to cracking in the rubber )

 

pictures of the upper strut mounts:

(the first one is pre-3/2002, the second one is post-3/2002)

 

Cars usually driven with 16' rims rarely mushroom....
I remeber back when i got my craven std's (strut top defenders) they flatly said that unless i ran 17's, i did not need them....i run 15's in winter, 16's summer....
I suspect you car has been driven with 15's..them stock 15' size...16's were the optional upgrade, but early cars were generly pre-speced so the dealers could have cars ready for the opening....wait lists were still months long..i waited 6 months in in late 2004 to get my 2005.....a year was commonpre 2004 for ordering a mini.
Hopefully joplin is getting back to normal...lived there for a bit back in 2001-2002 down by the "park" area.

 

This is the stuff that needs to make it to the top of the stickies.

Yes, it does have 15"s, oddly enough though, I got the window sticker with it and it said the car was supposed to have 16" runflats on white painted rims. The car actually has 15" silver 5 spokes on it, which I prefer, reminds me of the old Minilites from the '60s. I am the second owner and got all the service records with it, I didn't see anything about a wheel swap but whatever.

This should prove interesting...according to a dealer parts page, that part number in the photo was used on cars made from 9-'01 to 3-'02, wonder what the odds are of getting an aftermarket strut to fit that mount are.
I have noticed that sites like Rockauto show parts listed for 2002 as production 3/'02 on. I wondered why, now I guess I know but they don't have earlier listings in their catalogs...as if they weren't made before then.

Thanks for asking Zippy, Joplin is slowly getting back on it's feet. I lived by and work for the hospital that got K.O.ed. It's been one hell of a ride, but on the bright side..None of my family was hurt, insurance paid and since my kids aren't small anymore I got to junk my 4 door "family car" and buy a Mini!

 

If those mounts are still bolted to the tower the same way (3 studs) I don't see why you couldn't swap them out if you wanted to.

 

The struts, their articulation with the front sway bar, the springs,
and the mounts were different for 9/01 - 3/02 compared with later cars.
You can change the whole works to the later parts, but not piecemeal.

 

Nevermind my last post then

 

Well, I did the control arm bushings and ball joints....wow what a difference. Not that it handled bad before or anything but the difference is night and day.

While I had everything apart, I got out my spring compressor to look at that mount.
Here is what I found...Mini replaced one crappy design with an even worse design.

Once the tie rod was disconnected and I was free to rotate the strut, I could get the pop sound to repeat over and over. I noticed the spring was moving slightly every time it made the noise.

I took the mount off and then it was obvious..the bearing upon which the spring rotates was supposed to be held in place by three tabs and now wasn't. The only thing that was supposed to keep bearing in was the tension of the spring. The bearing was doing a see-saw motion on two of the tabs and that was the pop noise. I would guess that at some point the previous owner either hit really deep potholes or was trying to re-enact "The Italian job" and the spring jumped out of the tabs.

I used some urethane adhesive under the bearing and on the tabs after I cleaned it really well and after I got it all back together, the pop was gone. All it would have taken was three riveted tabs to keep this from happening in the first place. Both sides were this way, but on the bright side, at least the strut towers aren't mushroomed.

Now before everyone jumps me saying that I should have just got new struts and mounts, remember I took it apart for the bushings and just wanted to look it over because mine was the odd ball. Besides, I already dropped a couple hundred.

 

FYI to anyone that has the old style front strut mounts and struts I have a couple sets of lowering springs that will fit these early style ONLY that I can sell for $50 a set.

 

How much of a drop? and do they end up causing bump steer?

 

Thanks, this was a very useful thread.

I have an early 2002 R53 and it has the earlier struts. The mounting plates are about twice as thick as the newer ones; that's why there's no mushrooming. Unfortunately the bearing on one side has failed, so I need to swap

I have struts from a wrecked 2006 R53 and the strut mounts themselves are mushroomed.

 

Yep and here are the part number.

pre-3/2002, 31306758309


post-3/2002 31306778833


I also remember people have there whole suspensions changed out to the post 3/2002 at the dealership.

 

Thanks

 

Welcome.