And after a year a squealing, my throw-out bearing caused complete destruction of my transmission.

Dropped my car of to Steve at Steve's Auto Clinic in Northridge, CA and was planning on just having my clutch replaced and serviced, well today he dropped the tranny and sure enough the oil leak was coming from a hole in the casing. Thank you Mini for installing a $20 crappy throw-out bearing that is now going to cost thousands.

Just wanted to get some opinions on what to do, was already planning on replacing my clutch so I was curious to see if anyone knew any welders in my area, also if it would be okay to have it welded. I am going to look at it tomorrow and take pictures to post. I know that will determine on whether or not it can be welded and I'm sure Steve will let me know. If that is not the case, what then? The car is 11 years old now, in debate if it's really worth replacing at this point. Any thoughts and opinions would help!

Thanks guys,

-Matt

 

People have reported this happening.

There's no harm in trying to patch the hole other than you'd be out the labor and clutch parts of the repair doesn't work.

It's not that easy to weld cast aluminum (I guessing that's what the case it made of). If you can't find someone to do it, then you can try an epoxy type repair. There are really good metallic epoxies available.

 

As long as there was no damage internally done then you can weld the casing. Ive welded one casing already for a MINI.. But any good welding shop should be able to do it for you with no problems. How big of a hole are we talking about?

 

This ^. I had a crack in the alum casing of a transmission on a non-mini. A good welder put a bead on it, worked fine. Moral of the story, what do you have to lose?

 

Thanks for all the uplifting advice! Just spoke with Steve, he cleaned it heavily and found the hole, luckily it's not cracked. Said the hole was about an 1/8" circle and in a location where it can be patched. He sent it off to be welded tonight and will hopefully have it tomorrow and back together! Talk about some GREAT service!

I will keep everyone posted, it's just funny to me because for so long I've known about it possibly shooting through the casing and never thought it would actually happen, sure enough it did haha

 

A good welder shouldn't really have any issues patching that up

Sent from my Nexus 10 using NAMotoring

 

Looks like the hole was welded and the car is pretty much back together, all in all, cost me about $1500 for the new clutch/flywheel, welding, gaskets, and labor. Not too shabby if ya ask me, thanks for the advice, was kinda bummed about it yesterday but Steve acted fast and got it all done!

 

That's not shabby at all thanks for the hope, and saving a mini.

 

I want a shop that moves that quick.

 

Glad this has worked out for you.

Yes MINI used a poor quality Throw out bearing, that being said driving with that bearing making noise for a year makes you somewhat liable for that hole too.

 

I agree 100%, was totally my fault for not getting it fixed, guess I was just a bit disappointed that my clutch went out at 150k. I also didn't get the car until 90k so who knows how the other driver drove.

Picked up my Mini today, the clutch is 8 pounds lighter and shifts great. Traffic is going to be so much less of a headache. They had to take it back apart because it wasn't driving correctly, turns out my front axles were shot too so I had them replaced as well. They took the whole thing back part before they realized it was the axles but while they were in there, they noticed the plug that differentiates reverse from 1st was almost complete screwed out so luckily he caught that!

Extremely happy with the work Steve did, car feels great and it was totally taken care of, am very pleased to do more work with Steve in the future, he showed me all my old parts and man did that throw out bearing tear the entire clutch up with little pieces flying around!

 

The difficulty in that fix is not so much the welding, but more the cleaning. It's very hard to get all the bits of pot metal out of the trans case. Luckily, it's soft metal (especially compared to the hardened gears, but you don't want it ground up into tiny bits that cause the pinion bearings to take a crap.