Brakes and rotors done over the weekend. I'm fairly certain the back brakes had never been done as the screws holding the rotors in were rusted tight and I had to drill them out to remove them.


I'll do the R56 caliper mod at some point but unfortunately I started getting a thunking sound coming from my front-right passenger side wheel well. I just replaced the strut mount, tie rods, lca bushings and anything else that was down there 3k miles ago so I'm thinking it's the struts finally going out.

Also, fun quiz: try and identify this liquid!


Is it motor oil? Brake cleaner used on a disgusting engine? Nope! It's (what I'm assuming) the original brake fluid after 103k miles. Gross.

 

Well, I'd like to thank @bump32 for inadvertently embarrassing me and the way my Mini looked. I hate to admit it, but the entire time I've owned the car (and it seems the entire time my mom did too) the MC40 has never been washed. I was staring down what looked like 10+ years worth of grime and dirt. On top of that, she used to call it the Whippet Mobile because she would go to all of her dog shows in it. Did she put a blanket down? Any type of covering? You bet she didn't - not one time. The amount of dog hair was... insane. Seriously.


I was also going to wait until it was completely done but I won't have the bumper/hood fixed for a while and I'm still waiting for the C4 black trim restorer to come in.

Honestly, when I first went into this it was because my ebrake boot was torn off and I wanted to replace it. I ordered a new one online but thought to myself, why don't I make the trim around it look good too? So I tore it up and you wouldn't believe what I found:


While working on this, of course my roofliner started coming off so had to do that too.


Anyways, as I got closer and closer to finishing the roof liner, the next thought passed in my mind: why would I put a new piece of cloth into that forsaken Mini? If the emergency boot looked like that, how bad was the rest of it? I decided I would start with the back carpet and go from there.


DOG HAIR EVERYWHERE. I originally thought the seats were supposed to be grey/white: NOPE. That's DOG HAIR. I figured I'd remove the carpet and work on it in a sealed off hazmat chamber. Let's take a quick look at the rest of the car.





Alright. Well, if I'm going to clean this and have it look anywhere close to as good as bump32's then I need to do it right. Time to start removing ****!


Oh. My. God. That carpet. Why's there no throw-up emoji?!?

Fine! Let's do this!!!


I took every piece off and decided I'd clean them one by one, reinstall them again one by one and just take my time making sure I do this right. This car is my pride and joy. I've basically replaced all of the engine components, interior components, and just bought all new springs, struts and camber plates. Why the hell would I not want it to look as good as it can?

Carpets first! The water looked like cola when I was done.


I won't bore anyone with the minutia of the rest of the details but it was a LOT and took me about two weeks to do. This whole experiment has made me realize that I am also WAY out of shape. My hands have been hurting non-stop for the past week from all the scrubbing. I cleaned every interior trim piece with Orange Cleaner and then put on two to three coats of Black Wow for each piece. I also dropped the front seats off to get re-dyed since they looked like poo.

In the end, I think the juice was absolutely worth the squeeze, even though I won't be able to squeeze anything for a while now lol. My brother also used to be a professional detailed and came over and polished the car for me. One of the best parts of this whole scenario too was all of my neighbors coming up and asking questions and talking about how they've noticed the difference in the car. One of my neighbors across the street started working on his old truck that was sitting in his garage; a friend of mine also bought an old 96' Ford to work on because he was inspired by what I was doing as well.





It's not completely done yet but I wanted to share. Currently I'm trying to find someone to redo the clear-coat on my Carbon Fiber JCW 5-piece Trim Kit but haven't had any luck so far. I also need to drop the rims off to get resurfaced/refinished and once I get the C4 trim restorer in I'll do the trim around the vehicle. I found Panther Black pillar trim that wasn't outrageously expensive from a junkyard in the UK and am waiting for that to come in and I'm still keeping an eye out for a Chili Red S-Hood to replace my damaged one (if I have another good quarter at my job though I might get a new carbon fiber one).

Anyways, next update will be when I install my Vorshagg Camber Plates, Koni Yellow's and TSW lowering springs. I haven't done much with suspensions in the past and am a little nervous but I'm sure I can figure it out. At least the car will look good while I'm doing it .

 

So fresh and so clean 👌

 

I think as I had mentioned before, I started getting a clunk coming out of the rear passenger wheel well whenever I went over bumps. I decided that it was probably a good time to just get everything done.


I was going to get started on it today but for some reason I am utterly intimidated by this leg of the project. I've done the strut mounts, bushings, etc. already but this just seems like a whole different level. I think it might be because I don't know much about camber or how soft I should set the shocks, and that I want to be good and ready to make sure I get this done the right way. Problem is, I've been sitting on these parts for a few weeks now and I don't feel any better about it. I called a local mechanic to see how much they would charge to get it done... yeah, definitely doing it myself after what they quoted.

I've read in other threads that for a daily driver, set the Koni Yellows all the way to soft, then give it a quarter turn to half turn. This is what I came up with:


Hoping someone who's done this before can tell me if this is correct, or if it's too soft and I'm going to blow the shocks out...

Someone recommended a camber of -1.75 deg in the front and -2.25 deg in the back but I'm not 100% sure how I achieve that: this might be another reason why I haven't tackled this yet either. Hopefully I'll get cracking on it this weekend, but any advice would be majorly helpful (should note that I originally had aspirations to track this car but that's probably not going to be done for a while, and when I do it will be few and far between).

 

I believe a good alignment shop would be able to dial in the camber settings the way you want after you have all the suspension installed.

Also, correct me if I am wrong, but can the Koni Yellow's be adjusted (stiffness) after they have been installed in the car? I thought they could; if so, it may be a good idea to experiment with the stiffness as the settings you like will likely depend on the road conditions in your area. I don't have Koni Yellows, but have the orange street set on my car and have been told that it is like riding with the yellow's on full soft (I also have lowering springs though). I really like the ride quality of mine, firm but still comfortable for daily driving.

We had a set of Koni Yellow's on a few BMW E36s before and would run them on full soft all the time since it was more comfortable. We never had an issue with the shocks blowing out in the 5+ years we had them on full soft.

 

Thank you everyone for the help!

I *finally* finished the suspension over the weekend. A couple of quick notes:

1. Apparently the strut mount and the top washer (concave) need to be drilled out a bit to fit the Koni struts in the rear.
2. I don't know if I was doing something wrong, but compressing the springs enough in the front to fit the Vorshlag camber plates was such a pain in the butt.
3. Zip ties do not work that well on compressed springs like the guy at Autozone told me. I'm happy I knew that was probably the case and didn't have anything crazy fly into my face. I'm also aware this is probably common knowledge but anyways...



Overall, once I figured out one side the other was a lot easier to do, as was the whole process in general. Just having never done suspension work before and being the crazy worry wart I am I tend to overthink things. I'm pretty happy with how everything turned out, though I still need to get it aligned and have the cambers properly set.


But of course, this being my car once I fix one thing something else is bound to break because why not? As I detailed before, the entire front end was practically rebuilt from a bushing/joint perspective... except for the CV axles. I had the bottom of the LCA with the rotor and caliper sitting on my jack and was in the process of reinstalling the final strut when I started to hear a weird bubbling sound.

I looked down to see huge chunky globs of grease spurting out of the CV boot.


I thought I was finally out of the woods in terms of maintenance. I was looking forward to saving up for more fun things like a header, exhaust, tint, a non-damaged hood, or any number of other items on my "want" list. My brother in law has been my sensei through a lot of this as he does a ton of work on cars himself and recommended I just buy new axles. I don't think he really knows how expensive they are for the Mini's but it's another thing to add to the maintenance list.




Welp, next thing to do is fix the exterior trim on the vehicle and hopefully my Panther Black stuff from the UK will be here today or tomorrow while I wait for everything else to come in.

 

My inner cv boot did the same...

lookin good this sir

 

Well, between Thanksgiving and going out of town for most of the weekend, I didn't get the opportunity to actually work on the Mini, but boy howdy did I start getting things lined up to get going this weekend!

For those of you who have looked or are currently looking, Panther Black interior trim panels are stupidly expensive for whatever reason... unless you get them from a wrecked Mini out in the UK! Took a few weeks to get here but well worth the wait. Found both sets of A, B and C pillars for well under the cost of 1 of them brand new.


Secondly, I've been on the search for a donor car for a new hood. Most of the wrecked Mini's though have front-end damage so finding one is rather difficult, and when they do pop up they're generally at specialty yards that charge a lot more. I've been keeping an eye on nearby junkyards for the past few months and one popped up about an hour away a couple of days ago. Of course, between Thanksgiving, my little dude's birthday and going out of town it wasn't going to be easy and I had a very limited amount of time to try and get out there.

Sunday I woke up at the butt-crack of dawn, and running on only about 4-hours of sleep I got out there as soon as it opened. There she sat: my donor, finally:

I had convinced one of the workers there to shoot me some pictures the day before and I knew exactly what I was going for: the hood and the chrono kit (and the headlights for good measure). When I got there though, the exhaust looked peculiar. It definitely wasn't stock but I couldn't find any markings on it whatsoever. Was it just a cheap knockoff?

After I got what I was looking for, I had a little bit of time left so I decided to pull the exhaust off to see if I could identify it. I saw a tiny bit of writing, so like an old timey prospector I spit on it, rubbed it hard... and found gold!

Looks to be a full Invidia catback exhaust! This Mini is an '05 though and after doing a bit of reading I'm not sure if it'll fit my '04 without doing a ziptie/wire hanger mod for the middle hangers; doesn't seem to be a big deal though. I also want to get it good and cleaned up to see what exactly I have as I had already decided my next big purchase would be a Milltek exhaust and this certainly puts a kink in things! In preparation though, I ordered all new gaskets and bolts... just in case .



Got home, and had yet another package waiting for me, this time from RMW!

My new CV axles, capable of withstanding HP I will probably never achieve. I spent the extra money on them as I never want to worry about them ever again.

Next step is to find someone around here who will paint the hood and won't charge me something ridiculous. Also, in doing my research to see if I can add the chrono pack to my Mini it's very confusing. Either I can install them super easy and drive over to Mini and they'll flash them for me, or they'll only partially work/won't work at all and it will throw error codes non-stop. If anyone can comment on that, it would be greatly appreciated as most of the info is over 4-years old.



Looks like I'll have my hands full this weekend! I plan on getting the trim installed first and foremost, then the CV axles, then spend the rest of the time banging my head on the wall when I hear prices to paint the hood. If I get the gaskets in before the weekend I might look at installing the exhaust too as the Invidia seems to be highly recommended. I'd love to hear opinions on how to clean and restore the exhaust, if there are things I should be worried about when putting on an exhaust that I'm not sure how old or used it is, if there's a way to negate those things, etc.

 

Let us know what you get for paint estimates... I am thinking of having my hood done this winter as well and would be nice to have an idea.

 

Wow, getting a new MINI.
I do know what a lot of work. I have the nearly the same tasks behind me.
Some still have to do, but therefore other tasks are ready.

Please think on by swaping to the Crono.
The VIN and the milleange are stored in a blocked area on Chip.
If you only swap, the faulty VIN is give out by checking via OBD. This is not so importand, but the milleange.
Is the milleange in the chrono more than in your car, it will overwirte the origin milleange in BC1, EWS and ECU.
In other case, the dash won´t show you a milleange.
The solution is, to desolder the appropriate Chip out of old cluster, read this out, write to a new Chip an solder it into the Chrono.
Issue for one who knows how and what to do.
At least the swap must coded with NCS.

Hope this was understandable. Sorry for my bad english. I´m not used to speak and wirte in this languagge.

 

Sure thing .

A few replies have trickled in this morning: one was asking me to bring the hood and the vehicle in so they could be inspected (lol wut???), the other came back $500 - much better than the $1,000 I was expecting at least. Ideally I'm looking for around ~$300 though I don't know how possible that is. I also just found out the dude my brother works with has a sandblaster so I might try my hand at that to save some money.

Totally understand! I actually have read some of the same stuff but others have said it is possible. The VIN thing was also something I've read and so it is absolutely not installed yet and won't be until I get confirmation. I just called my local Mini Service Center and when I asked if they could reprogram the dash and steering wheel gauges the person on the phone said it should totally be possible without hesitation. He's going to get with another Service Adviser to triple check the feasibility and they're going to call me back with a price later. I'll update my post when he does.

 

Changing VIN is not the task. This can done with NCS writing in UIF. But this is only three times possible. Changing mileage can also done by retail Tools. But there I‘m not so deep in theme.

 

I mean, I explained the exact situation to the guy on the phone, that I had salvaged the dash and the steering wheel components and wanted to see if I could get them to work on my car and he said it shouldn't be a problem. He could also be completely clueless lol.

 

I try a similar task at present by myself. Waiting for different tools for testing.
Let us stay in contact. 😬

Try also to get aces to the BC1. Spare parts are at Home. Want to swap from PFL to FL.

 

Yeah, will do. The actual technician just called me and didn't understand what I was trying to explain to him so I emailed him some pictures. Waiting for him to call me back.

 

So is my experience too. First, „all ok, no problem“.
But when they have to deliver their promises, nothing. So that’s reason why I try by myself.
Snd mostly find the solutions.

 

I heard back from another autobody shop who quoted $375 sight unseen to repaint the hood. I'm planning on trying to follow-up with them either tomorrow or Friday.

I also had dropped off my JCW Carbon Fiber dash to get repaired and went to go pick it up today. Folks, even though this was one of the only people who didn't quote me something that I felt outrageous, I guess you get what you pay for. It looked worse than when I dropped it off. He said he could do a better job and wanted to airbrush it to fade it and make it look better so I told him to go ahead. We'll see how it turns out but I'm preparing myself for disappointment and my dash being trashed :(.

I got around to installing my axles from RMW today.

It looked like my passenger axle was a little worse off than I thought it was so I'm glad I replaced both.

I also followed-up on my call to Mini about retrofitting the Chrono Pack and got a hold of a tech who seemed to know a bit more. He told me it would be $200 for them to flash the software or whatever it is they do, but it was a 50/50 shot that it was going to work (and of course the money was non refundable). So on a whim, I decided to plug in the tach/speedo. Initially a lower mileage popped up (oil change I believe?) but what appears to be a higher mileage is now on there (I believe I was about 103k). Both the tach and speedo seemed to work just fine. I then went ahead and plugged in the dash and it worked - partially.

The coolant temp and the fuel gauges work but the oil temp and pressure do not. Likewise, the traction control and tire pressure lights were on and wouldn't turn off. I had taken the bumper off, and also reinstalled the back wheel well covers so I'm wondering if I knocked something loose. I put the regular speedo and tach back and the higher mileage still appears to be there. If I can figure out how to get the oil pressure/temp gauges to start working that would be killer, or, if since the rest of it works, maybe I have a better than 50/50 shot to get Mini to flash it and fix it. It seems like I have to get them to do it now anyways to correct the mileage.

 

Looking good - I'm probably going to do the axles down the road as well. That price you were quoted for the hood is around what I was expecting - was thinking for a hood that small maybe 400 or so. That's material, sand, prep, paint both sides and clear on the top? Thanks for letting me know - appreciate it!

 

You have to code the Chrono with NCS.
Use NCSDummy there you can easier see which codings are possible.
Also VIN with NCS. Or Tool32.
Than you get it work.

 

The original axles I was looking at were made by Sneed4Speed. Poking around on teh interwebz for reviews and whatnot though were a lot of bad reviews, stating they had issues with them after a year or so. In addition to all of the RMW (I guess Insane Shafts) reviews being incredibly positive and mostly a plug-and-forget-it, one of the most logical arguments I saw was the S4S "is rated for 450hp but it's half the cost of the RMW." That's what ultimately made me decide to spend the extra money.

Also, with the pricing I'm seeing for painting I'm thinking it might be more economical to wait for a wrecked Mini to pop up in my color car. It's not super unique, and I scored this Silver hood for $50. There seem to be others popping up online for anywhere from $150-$300 dollars, so even with shipping it would be cheaper than getting this guy repainted and I wouldn't have to worry about prepping or color match.

I don't know what any of that stuff is lol. I'm wondering, I pulled it out but prior to redoing (in the process of doing still? lol) the dash, I had the JCW dual guage at the bottom (pardon the mess, it's clean now):

This shows the battery power (which only worked infrequently) and the oil pressure (though that never worked). Could that mean that the ECU is already programmed for the oil gauges, or maybe I could reroute the wiring from the gauges to the chrono dash?

On a side note, I plugged the original tach/speedo in this morning to drive to work. As soon as I started it up the correct mileage appeared (I was correct about it being around ~103k), though the TPMS/traction control lights were still on. After I started driving it though they went off. Could the chrono kit be storing the old Mini information in it? Maybe still configured for the other tires? I did the reset thing (put in 2nd ignition position, hold sensor below e-brake for 30-seconds) but didn't drive it around afterwards with the chrono on it.

 

Welp, after getting bids of anywhere from $400-$1,000 to repaint the hood, I figured the best thing to do would be to wait around for a red Mini hood to pop up. Unfortunately, I have my new facelift headlights waiting for me that I can't install because my existing hood is impacted and I'm an impatient SOB so I bit the bullet and ordered a Seibon CF hood .

In the meantime though, I wanted to figure out what I had in this Invidia exhaust. I reached out to them repeatedly to see what the best way to restore it was and didn't get a single response back. I didn't see a sticker on their site either and inquired about that as well... nothing. I guess they're busy and/or don't care about salvage pieces. Oh well. I turned to trusty ole' Google and decided to give it a go myself.

This is what they looked like before (the muffler on the right I had already started cleaning a little... also, those are my little man's feet in the picture, not mine lol):


I found a guide that said start with 220 grit sandpaper and work your way up. I did a 220, 600, 1000, 2000, and 3000 on each piece.


I thought the titanium tips looked rather dull compared to the stainless steel on the rest of the exhaust so I blowtorched them to get the blue back. The one on the left doesn't look quite as good because I need to polish it still but I think they turned out pretty good.


I know there's some debate as to the "ricy-ness" of blue tips but we'll see how it looks when I get it installed this weekend. My wife was also didn't understand why I was spending so much time working on something nobody would ever see.

Yeah, got me there. I don't know either.

When I had my Mini in my garage at my old town home, some of the fondest memories I have were when I would walk out there, start wrenching, and my neighbors would come out and hang out with me, drink beers and talk crap. There were many times when I'd start out there by myself and before I knew it there were 8+ people all keeping me company. I mention that because it seems like every time I work on the Mini, someone will come up and start asking questions, complimenting the work put into it, what I think about Mini's in general, etc. My neighbor across the street started working on his old truck in his garage; one of my friends also bought a 96' Ford to work on.

The other day though, someone came up and knocked on my door randomly. I opened it to see this kid and as he started talking the first thing I thought of was to point to my "No Soliciting" sign and to tell him to go away. As I started to do that, I saw a red R56 parked in the street. I snapped back to the conversation and realized the kid didn't live in the neighborhood but drove through it to his parents house and had seen me working on my Mini and figured I might know something about them and asked if I could look at his! I guess I'm starting to be "The Mini Guy" in my neighborhood? I don't know much about R56's but I'll give myself a pat on the back because he explained what was happening, I told him I thought it was his strut mount, popped the hood... and the strut mount was cracked lol.

Also got all my black trim pieces installed finally:



Just ignore the drivers side visor for now. ECS sent the wrong piece but I think the new one is on it's way. The trim turned out way better than I expected. Did a quick wash with some water, a spray with some simple green and then polished it with Black Wow. Installation was super easy and the car looks way different now.

Last up, something I've been wanting to do for a while: tint and roof wrap. I was tired of getting blinded by everyone behind me. I also think tint 100% of the time just makes a car look better. I'm also a big fan of super dark tint in the back with a black roof wrap so it looks like it blends in with itself.

If you ever find yourself in San Marcos, Texas, Sal at Sal's House of Tint is literally one of the best tinters in the world. Not only does he have a ton of local accolades, but in 2017 he won Best Tinter in a worldwide contest. During the summer he has to schedule people 1-2 months out because of the demand for his services - and this is all through word of mouth. I highly recommend him and his wife.




I LOVE how my car came out. It looks brand new to me and it came out exactly how I was hoping it would. I didn't have the spoiler wrapped or attached because I'm talking to someone currently about a GP wing. I also need to buckle down and finish painting/updating the trim so it looks way less hooptie than it does lol.

Next up is the exhaust, followed by the hood, and I'm looking into aftermarket gauge faces. Hopefully Mini will also respond back to me at some point to get my Chrono Pack configured. I honestly have no idea why I'm not getting a response... maybe too low a price? Maybe they don't like that they're not installing it?

 

Well, I was hoping to make an update that encompassed everything but I'm at my wits end and nearly bald from pulling all my hair out.

First the good: I got the cleaned up Invidia exhaust on and I think it sounds great. It was incredibly easy to install and all-in-all only took about an hour or so.


Well, the reason for me pulling my hair out is because I finally got my hood in. Should have been a time of jubilation and happiness, or maybe not if I would have had any idea whatsoever what I was about to get myself into. In trying to research the installation of the hood there's no media out there for the Seibon in particular. Someone had posted about installing their VIS and that it took them something like 30-hours and "wasn't for the faint of heart." Yeah, whatever bro, I got this (no, no I don't).

First thing I wanted to do is install the new JCW grill I ordered. Well, I looked at it and noticed it was't pre-drilled for the grill. I just got a Dremel for Christmas so this was a good excuse to try it out. Except that wasn't the only thing that was't pre-drilled.

Almost literally nothing is pre-drilled. The two cuts you see on the side for the hood hinges? They're off - by quite a bit. Oh, and they're also not the right size either. I drilled out the right side to widen it out but getting the hood onto the actual Mini itself was just the first of many, many issues. The holes in the hinges don't line up. When I got everything fastened down there was more than an inch gap between the body and the hood. I've gone back and resized and re-drilled the holes an embarrassing amount of times and it still doesn't fit. I've also adjusted the hood latches more than a handful of times too and it doesn't seem to make a lick of difference.

Here's how it will look when I'm done:


My wife came outside and asked what's wrong with it? It looks great! Yeah, except for the fact that it's not fastened down. When I start getting it bolted down, the hinge is way off, almost like it's at an angle meaning the holes where they enter are still in the wrong place.

I'm going to revisit it tonight. The idea came to me to grab the previous hood and line it up back-to-back with the Seibon hood and meticulously measure everything out bit-by-bit and just make sure it's accurate. I have some fiberglass leftover from doing the roof liner that I'll use to repair the inside it if I widened the holes too much or damaged the integrity of the hood. I really, really wish this was easier and came pre-drilled, or the instructions/Seibon website said that this was more than a simple bolt on.

Hopefully the next update will be more positive .

 

Exhaust looks great man! And so does the tint job! I wouldn't mind tint, but up here in ND, that is pretty much the *only* thing that will get you pulled over by the cops. Hope you get that hood wrangled soon!

 

What ever happened with the carbon fiber hood? No go?

 

The distance between the spring perches with the Vorshlag camber plates on Koni Yellows is less than the stock setup. It’s a really annoying combo to compress when the springs are Swifts. Ask me how I know...