Caesar the 1275 E - Diary of minor changes

[Vinay-RS]

This weekend was extremely productive. The weather was miserable on Friday, so I decided to take the day off and work on the Mini in the garage.

I painted the firewall behind the carbs with some spray can red since everything was out of the engine bay on Thursday evening. It's not great but it looks better than rust brown. I applied rust converted by the master cylinders to try and make it look neater too.

So, first task was to get the drive shafts fitted again. Slid them into position, fitted the hubs and discs. I think I had compressed the brake pedal with the discs off and the pistons had compressed too far out. I felt annoyed so I left this job.

Moving on, I fitted the exhaust manifold. Took a minute to work out how to do it. Luckily I found a thread on another forum (not sure if I can share the link here) that explained how to position the pipes so they could get into place. I couldn't get the y-piece fitted, as the plating was a bit thick so they couldn't slide on.


Then, I got the twin carbs and manifold into place (finally!).


Getting the centre nuts tightened is really annoying by the way. Good suggestion from a friend was to take out the springs so that a socket and extender bar can fit in the gap.
Now at this point I needed to get a new throttle cable and was rather tired. So I got the new cable and then stopped for the day.

Saturday came around and it turned out the cable I got was damaged, so I went and got a new one before the shop closed. I have been keen to tidy up the wiring loom with some black loom tape (I think it looks neater than electrical tape.) So, I got busy with that job and taped up the loom while there was space. It also meant that I didn't have to tackle fitting the cables on the carbs or the brake issue. I also bought some sound deadening material from Minispares and wanted to fit that. So, got started on that job. (It makes a real mess with all the fluff coming out.)


The side by the master cylinders went in fairly easily, but the other side was proving to be troublesome.

On Sunday, I removed the pads and compressed the pistons back. Slid the calipers onto the discs, popped the pads back into place and torqued up the calipers.



Next, with the help of a friend, I got the cables fitted to the carb and got the second piece of the sound deadening fitted.


Started up the car and it started first time, which was awesome.
I lowered the car onto the ground, torqued up the castle nuts to book spec and popped in the split pins.

On Monday morning, I got the rear exhaust mounts removed, chucked it into the car (sticking out the window) and drove about 2 km to the exhaust shop down the road. The Mini sounded like a Harley Davidson!



The shop fitted the exhaust, I needed a new piece between the flexi joint and the y-piece. They also got on the y-piece and used some cable ties on the pot joint gaiters. I need to get some longer metal cable ties to secure them properly.

And that's where the Mini is up to now. It really needs a thorough clean around the subframes front and rear and the lower end of the engine. Going to get some assistance to tune it properly, as it is not running too well right now.