My Mini is an Austin Mini Cooper 1963 y.m. I bought the car in 1991
from a place that used to be an old BMC workshop. It had been standing
there with a broken head since 1971, when the workshop moved to a new building.
There were other cars and tons of spare parts just lying there. We bought
two cars, the Cooper and a Morris 850 1964 y.m., and a lot of parts.
I have done "some" restoration on the car . I started with stripping
it totally, sandblasted the bottom and the front subframe. Then I cut away
all the rusty plates and welded on new metal parts, such as sills (inner
and outer), wings, luggage floor, the sandplate and some minor holes were
covered.
Then it was suddenly time to move out from the workshop(it was to expensive), so in a hurry I brought the car to a paintshop and and had it resprayed in almond green, without anything done to the bumpy roof. I therefore told the guy that "dont put your soul on the roof paint job, I will fix it and be back later to have it sprayed in white".
I moved into a garage, where I only was allowed to do minor work on the car. There I assembled the car. All the mechanical parts had been cleaned, resprayed and renovated, except for the engine, the original 997cc, it was still lying in boxes. I took an old 1100 cc engine, cleaned it, resprayed it and put in to the car. It worked fine even though I didn´t renovate it.
My Cooper came out on the road about a week before the Mini 35 Jubilee in England in 1994, and of course did we drove the Cooper there, and after the meeting we drove to Ireland for holiday. We were away from Sweden for about 5 weeks totally, 3 adults and a baby 8 months old. Fun !
During winters is it standing in our workshop( see picture, gif animation or qt-movie), it is an old stable that has been cleaned out and it is good to work in, we can weld there and do what ever we wants to do. There is no permanent heater there, so it is a bit cold during these months when we have about minus 20 degrees outside. We have a portable hotair-fan that gets the temperature up and when you work hard you never notice the cold.
My Cooper was on the street from the 17th of April 1996 til August 1996.
There was an old 1100 engine with low oil pressure in it, but it worked
all summer and it took us to the IMM96 in Germany. We drove 1600 km to
that meeting without any bigger problems .During summer 1996 I was caught
by the Police twice !! The first time with to wide tyres and and at the
second time I got a speeding ticket , £110!! (Driving 73 km/h on
a 50 km/h limited street.)
The Cooper came out on the street in May 1997, a couple of weeks before
the departure to IMM97. It worked fine with the engine I got from Joel
Kjellberg. It is a 1000cc engine from a 1982 Clubman Estate. I have a 12G295
head on it with extractor system, 1 1/2 inch Su and 3.76 final drive. It
took us to Ireland and the IMM97 and back home to Sweden and it still works
fine after ~6000 km. We drove it on a vaction trip to the west coast of
Sweden for a couple of weeks in the later part of the summer 1997.
During 1998 we drove the Mini for many kilometers but unfortunately
we missed the IMM98 in Switzerland. Ee did drive to the north of Sweden
on the Summer meeting of Mini Club Sweden. But we had some problems with
the valves in the head, they burned and we had to stop at a Mini friends
house to borrow an old Cooper head. It burnt a lot of oil so when we reached
home we pushed the Cooper into the garage where it still stands, now without
any engine. Time to restore one. I have an old 1000cc engine lying on a
shelf that is healthy enough to put in but I also have the original 997cc
lying, maybe it is time to put it together.
Austin Seven 1959, chassienumber 11XX, produced in 15 August 1959, shipped
to Sweden 15 September 1959.
I bought it in October 1998 from Nils Brandt, Uppsala.
If you have any parts to this car please let me know, because I miss
practically everything. There is a body with bad doors all windows except
one of the door sliding windows and there is the interior of the roof but
the rest is missing. It was stripped sometime in its history, seems to
have been a car used for racing.
So if you have mechanical parts as subframes, engine, wheels and other
parts as all interior parts, sliding windows to the door and other things
let me know, please. I will digest a list of the parts I need and whats
specific for these 59 parts and publish on this site.
The car that used to be our everyday car is an Austin 1300, 1973 y.m. While it is waiting for some restoration is it resting in an old barn outside Uppsala. I have to take the engine out, it is very thirsty on oil, and I will have to do some work with the suspension, no leaks, but the mountings has rusted away. It was in traffic all year round until the summer of 1995, exellent winter car !
