1984 Mini - Simplify and add weight

[N Dentressangle]

17 hours ago, Nibblet said:

When I saw the 'leg shot' my initial reaction  was 'FFS he's only gone and dropped the bloody gearbox on his foot'...

That engine block has come up tidy, they look good in that gold paint. 

Yeah, I'm not planning on repainting it.

Yellow blocks are for 998cc engines, red ones for 1275cc apparently.

[N Dentressangle]

New gearbox has arrived:

Parcelfarce seem to have managed to get it here without anything obvious being smashed 

Anything I should check for, Mini experts?

[Tamworthbay]

Usual stuff really, check the synchro on each one, they can wear badly if abused. Chipped teeth, worn bearing etc. They are reasonably robust. If you are rebuilding it then minispares used to do a full rebuild and bearing kit for sensible money.

[Sir Chocolate Teapot]

Happy memories 

Happy days

My 2nd ever car in 1986.

If only we could roll back time.

[N Dentressangle]

Having managed to fuck my back up getting a pan out of the cupboard two days ago, I thought some work removing heavy things from an engine on the floor would be just the thing*

Because of the non-original diff ratio and the fact that the twats who did the job never bothered to change the speedo drive, the speedo has always read way out on this Mini. Comically so - 70mph comes up at a trueish 50 - so how accurate the mileage is I don't know. The clock says 75k, but it's got to be at least 10k fewer than that.

Rocker cover was clean as a whistle inside, and the rockers look good too:

HG wasn't blown, and it's all just a bit grubby:

Good de-coke needed here I reckon:

I'll be fitting the Mini Spares stage 1 kit, so we can say goodbye and sod off to this massive lump of wheezy cast iron:

Valves look pretty much as expected, with no obvious damage. This engine ran sweetly with no nastiness other than some smoke from the rock hard valve seals, so it'll all get stripped down, cleaned up and the valves lapped in again before it goes back together:

More soon!

[N Dentressangle]

I thought I might as well sort the head out ready to go back on whilst it was off.

All valves removed and seats reground:

The seats were generally pretty good. Inlets were obviously fine, and just needed a little clean up. One of the exhausts was a little pitted, but cleaned up well and I've no great worries about it. The head itself responded well to ghetto skimming, as you can see - all looks good with no obvious nastiness. It's a pretty low mileage, gently driven and well-serviced car, after all. Not that that usually matters with BL engine wear. My S2 Land Rover was far worse, with all valve seats needing lots of work, and some marginal damage.

Only 4 valves had the top hat type oil seals like these, and there were only 4 in the head kit from Mini Spares, so I refitted the new ones in place of the old, and managed to get the tiny fiddly frigging rubber ring seal over each valve stem too. There was no evidence of any old ones of these, so I guess they were long gone:

So, all back together:

I'll put this to one side now, and start the job of splitting engine and box.

Any bright ideas? I've thought about turning the engine upside down, or maybe onto the timing case and front pulley (supported by blocks) to make the job easier and have a better chance of reassembling it with fewer leaks. War stories appreciated ?

[N Dentressangle]

Before I went further I wanted to check what speedo drive parts I needed. The Mini speedo is driven by a normally utterly inaccessible worm and pinion, fitted on the end of the gearbox behind the engine mounting. As I've said, the one I had was way out. Luckily Guessworks has a little calculator widget which told me what I would need:

http://www.guess-works.com/Tech/ratio.htm

The new 3.1 diff should mean I need a 7/17 worm and pinion. I knew I had a 17 tooth pinion on the shelf, but wanted to check what the worm was in my 'new' box. Finding that out means removing the engine mount support, which is easy enough until BL decide to use a countersunk pozi screw instead of a bolt for one of the fixings. Well what a little fucker that was. The hero of the hour is @richardthestag who advised the purchase of one of these bastards in a recent video:

Having bugger all else to do in the last few weeks meant I just bought one on spec, given that it's the kind of tool you only find you need when you really need it. Which will be at 6pm on a Bank Holiday, or when you've already fucked the screw head up by trying to manage without one.

Even the impact driver needed a good blast on the screw with the blow torch to help things along, but eventually we got this:

Rusted in like a proper shitter, that was.

Anyway, rather anti-climatically the worm turned out to be the right 7 tooth one (it's hidden under the oval shaped closing plate to the right and above the rusty screw), so the screw went back in with plenty of Copperease and I moved on to the 'old' gearbox.

Clutch cover surrendered easily enough, as did the bolt holding the clutch on. Yeah, that'll be because the professional* mechanic who worked on it last never bothered tightening it properly or bending over its lock washer tabs:

So, onto removing the clutch itself. The machinery of battle was placed in position:

but there's no fucking way this cunt is coming off without a fight!!

So far I'm up to one 2' breaker bar + a big length of tube on it, with no sign of it letting go. So, time for a cup of tea thought I, and we'll see if it's still feeling so lucky a bit later...

 

[cobblers]

Tighten it up as much as you dare and then beast the end of the black bolt on the puller with a lump hammer, it'll all shoot off with a bang so have a bit of carpet or something soft to catch it.

[N Dentressangle]

2 minutes ago, cobblers said:

Tighten it up as much as you dare and then beast the end of the black bolt on the puller with a lump hammer, it'll all shoot off with a bang so have a bit of carpet or something soft to catch it.

Yeah, that's been my strategy so far.

Hasn't worked, mind! ?

[cobblers]

Bugger! always worked a treat for me, I think the record distance was about 4 feet.

[N Dentressangle]

Ha ha - I've just given it another thump and started damaging the frigging bolt! Aaaaaghhh!

[tooSavvy]

23 minutes ago, N Dentressangle said:

Ha ha - I've just given it another thump and started damaging the frigging bolt! Aaaaaghhh!

Blowlamp/spotflame heating of clutch bit *not the crank...... ?

[N Dentressangle]

12 minutes ago, tooSavvy said:

Blowlamp/spotflame heating of clutch bit *not the crank...... ?

That might be on the agenda  ?

[N Dentressangle]

29 minutes ago, The Mighty Quinn said:

Just keep tightening the bolt..........you have removed the big locking washer, No.11.............?

You mean this one, on the back of the big central bolt?

[N Dentressangle]

1 hour ago, The Mighty Quinn said:

Just keep tightening the bolt..........you have removed the big locking washer, No.11.............?

Winner winner chicken dinner @The Mighty Quinn?!!!!!!!

The HBoL isn't very clear on the washer count, and I thought the one with the bendy tabs was the only one. Just removed no11, and flywheel popped off like a cork

I owe you a ?

[N Dentressangle]

Go ahead gearbox. Make my day

No surprise really that this thing was pissing out as much oil as it was, Whoever put this together had found a Hermetite spring in the back of the garage. The front crank seal was especially reliant on it - the rubber seal was rock hard:

No obvious damage to the old box as far as I can see, but it's filthy inside:

[Isaac Hunt]

It reminds me of my days ‘flippin MG Metro’s’.   I used to buy a ‘down at heel’ car, sort out what needed sorting and a young Mrs Hunt (Miss back then) used to run around in it whilst I sold the previous car and worked on the next.   

Anyway, a black one appeared in the local rag one week, good price and I was over to it like a rat up a drainpipe. It needed a wing BUT it popped out of second ‘regular’ so the price was negotiated down suitably.  When it got the box out it was fooked.  IIRC it was where the input gear sat on the splines, IIRC the nut had come loose.  I wound the nut up real tight and all the ‘play disappeared’ so I whizzed off for a Cheepo exchange box.   The guy was ‘pouring all over it’ presumably looking for an ‘out’ on not applying the surcharge reduction. After a good few minutes he says ‘wots wrong wi it m8’.......by now I was gettin a bit pissed off cos he said nowt about the old unit ‘being mint’ after I had travelled 70 mile......which it wasn’t gonna be cos if it was I wouldn’t have been buying an exchange box, so I just said ‘bearings whine a bit m8 innit’  after all, that’s probably all the ‘recon’ had inside it.

I recall the drive shafts were a bastartd to pop out.  I’d never done an A Series before so I phoned a friend (in the trade)  he said they just pop out. I replied they don’t come out easy, to which it got a response, use a bigger fekkin bar !

[paulplom]

I remember a mate stripping the engine and box from a 1983 mg metro in about 1990. Not sure why or what he did wrong but once reassembled it would suddenly lock up every couple of miles.

It was absolutely terrifying being in it. The anticipation and waiting for the random moment when it would screech the front wheels and put you through the windscreen was really something to experience.

 

Anyone know why it would do that out of curiosity?

[cobblers]

I wouldn't imagine you'd be able to select two gears at once, have it lock the wheels up and then have anything other than a smashed trail of cogs and gearbox casing pouring out from under the car, let alone have it be able to drive off and do it again! Who knows? 

[paulplom]

We drove to Whitley Bay and back from Blyth in it. About 16 miles. I couldn't wait to get out!

It wasn't when he was changing gear. It just did it randomly iirc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[bunglebus]

Liking the "MAD" plate on your 25. I miss having something simple to mess about with, last engine I had apart was my Renault 5, and before that various MK! Fiestas. 

Nice to see it hasn't actually fallen to bits like Minis seem to with regular boredom

[N Dentressangle]

Bit of slower progress on this lately - sodding back pain which refuses to bugger off, plus more pain from the ankle op site, as well as some really boring work Skype meetings to sit through.

Ah well. The mating face of the block is now lovely and clean, and ready for the gearbox. I flipped the block over onto its back so that I could really get rid of all the Hermetite:

Read some stuff about setting the endfloat on the primary gear - the big un on the end of the crankshaft:

Feeler gauges gave 6 thou ish, but turning round the C clip on the end reduced this to a comfortable 4 thou, which I'm happy with. I couldn't believe how expensive the shims and new C clip were compared with most other Mini bits, so good job I didn't need any of that stuff.

Gearbox has been prepped, with correct 7/17 speedo drive gears fitted, and gear selector fitted with a new roll pin (the old one was broken in 2 when it came out...). It already had a MiniSpares leakstop collar fitted, but I fitted a new rubber seal on the outside anyway, and packed the gaiter with grease:

and all the bolts torqued up to the correct spec. The joints all look good to me, so I'm going to risk leaving them as they are and refitting the box as it is. They do have silicone goop in, but all looks recently rebuilt to me (as the seller claimed), so we'll see.

Trial fit of the gaskets shows they don't have cut outs for the locating pegs, and the fit over the oil pick up is odd:

Is this likely to cause any issues - should I cut them out? - and what else have I missed before I put this back together?

[Lankytim]

Loving this thread and lamenting all the £50 Minis I passed up back in the day. I never got to own one! 
 

I removed the flywheel from a 1300 Allegro engine a while back though, similar issue with the puller on as hard as it would go and still no movement.  I was sat with the thing on the floor between my outstretched legs tapping it with a hammer when predictably there was a bang and the flywheel hit me straight in the balls with some force. I opened my mouth to scream but nothing came out. Lesson learned! ??

 

[Slowsilver]

1 hour ago, N Dentressangle said:

Gearbox has been prepped, with correct 7/17 speedo drive gears fitted, and gear selector fitted with a new roll pin (the old one was broken in 2 when it came out...). It already had a MiniSpares leakstop collar fitted, but I fitted a new rubber seal on the outside anyway, and packed the gaiter with grease:
 

Don't forget my post about gearchange oil seals from Apr 8 on page 1 of this thread.
Any grease that you put into the gaiter will just get forced out when you engage second, fourth or reverse.
And it won't stop the gaiter staying compressed after a while.
 

[N Dentressangle]

Yes, it's got the MiniSpares leakstop ring in, which ought to help, plus a new seal. I don't mind a drip or two - just draw the line at a full on Sea Empress renactment

[Slowsilver]

7 minutes ago, N Dentressangle said:

Yes, it's got the MiniSpares leakstop ring in, which ought to help, plus a new seal. I don't mind a drip or two - just draw the line at a full on Sea Empress renactment

Don't have any experience of the leakstop ring. Would be interested to know what it does and how it works.
What else other than a rubber seal can you use between a sliding rod and an aluminium  casting?
 

[N Dentressangle]

https://www.minispares.com/product/classic/MSSK050.aspx

[Slowsilver]

Thanks for the link. But can't see how an alloy ring can be oil-tight on a steel shaft. Maybe it just reduces the amount of oil which gets on to the outer seal. It also says "The dust cover fits up against the seal to prevent road debris getting at the seal". The problem is that, as I said in my first post, after a while it doesn't. Would be interested to know how long this stays leak-free.
 

[Uncle Jimmy]

On 4/26/2020 at 11:49 AM, bunglebus said:

Liking the "MAD" plate on your 25. I miss having something simple to mess about with, last engine I had apart was my Renault 5, and before that various MK! Fiestas. 

Nice to see it hasn't actually fallen to bits like Minis seem to with regular boredom

MAD is common in these parts. Has the Mini a dealership sticker in the rear screen?

[N Dentressangle]

3 hours ago, Nibblet said:

MAD is common in these parts. Has the Mini a dealership sticker in the rear screen?

Course it has. The sign of kwality: