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| This is
the car at the Port terminal when we went to pick it up. Dirty, and with a
flat tyre, but MINE! The terminal was about two hours drive away from our
house. |
We used
our Ramcharger to pick it up, with a rented
U-Haul tow dolly on the back. It was touch and go whether the Mini would
fit because it is so narrow, but it did. |
On the
way home on the NJ Turnpike, there was a bad accident involving two or
three trucks. This smoke was visible from miles away. |
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| Here it
is outside our house, with the two Merkurs (Sierras)
parked out front. |
After
a good clean up, the car looked a lot better. The wheels are 13"
Revolutions, and it has a fibreglass bonnet and boot. My brothers
intention was to make a Mk1 look alike with everything but the sliding windows.
He even used a cloth covered Mini Cooper loom, and the indicator switch
with the little light on the end. |
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| After
these pictures were taken, I decided to mess around with the custom made
dashboard. Bad move! The un-fused wire on the back of the ignition switch
touched on the metal behind the dash, causing a short circuit and the loom
wires to overheat, and very nearly setting the car on fire. I looked around
for new wiring looms but they were kind of pricey. Instead, I used a light
bar wiring harness from a Ford Crown Victoria Police car,
this being a harness of some twenty feet of nice, thick wire. The engine
bay picture doesn't really show it, but this is the new wiring that I put
in. The only part of the original harness I could use was the alternator
plug to the starter motor main terminal, the rest of the wires were melted
together. The fuse box is supplied from the starter by a piece of eight
gauge wire running through a 50 amp circuit breaker. Keen eyed observers
might notice there are only four other wires on the fuse box : two in, two
out (red = live all the time, green = ignition switched). I might move the
fuse box inside the car at a later date. |
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| Looking
a bit like a birds nest, here are the wires inside the car. I was unable
to get anything like a match on the standard wiring colours, so I had two
keep a chart of which colour wire did what. It's pretty easy though
because of how simple a Mini is, what do you have really? Once you have a
power wire inside the car, all you have are : starter solenoid; ignition
coil; ignition switched live through the warning light to the alternator;
side lights; headlamp dip; headlamp full beam; left indicator; right
indicator; temperature gauge; oil warning light; and horn - 11 wires. OK,
so I left out the wiper motor and washer pump, but these I ran with a separate
five wire harness on the other side of the dashboard.
Instead of having the switches on the
dashboard panel and having to wrestle with them when I fitted the dash
(which may haved caused the short in the first place), I decided to make a
little panel out of aluminium to hold them. I believe the clocks came from
a Triumph or an MG, they certainly aren't Mini clocks. You might notice
that my brother made the dash panel from an old sign. Later on, I would
probably like to return the car to the original three clock layout like
the early Minis had, but I need some more parts for this, and I also need
to remove the bulkhead box for the huge Weber carb that this car used to
have.
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| Going
on from the pictures above, the box in the bulkhead for the Weber carb was
removed, and a plate welded over the hole. I managed to source an early
Mini instrument binnacle from eBay, which after a lot of cleaning looked
more respectable. Since the dashboard need re-wiring again to suit, I
decided to remove the stock Mini fuse box altogether. A single 8-gauge
wire was run from the starter motor terminal (where all Mini wiring
harnesses start from) via a 50amp circuit breaker in through the bulkhead,
and to a blade-type fuse box located behind where the radio sits on the
passenger side. Another 8-gauge wire runs from the top connector on the
fuse box, through the ignition switch, and then back to the bottom
connector, making the top four fuses constant power, and the bottom four
ignition switched. All the wires were covered in split plastic loom to
stop any more short circuits. All I need now are the top and bottom dash
rails and the dashboard will be finished.
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