Craig's mini engine Re-build. 1380 NA this time!
Turbo Mini Forums

Absolutely!!!

Okay did quite a bit today :)

Finally got around to working on the mini this weekend as I have been busy the past few, first thing was to fit all of the stainless steel studs to the cyl head and get the engine ready to be put in.

Manifold studs:




Got the thermostat studs in place and I already had stainless heater tap studs from the turbo:





Changed the coreplugs as I had bought some more:









I got a bit of the sealant on the engine - this soon cleaned off with some white spirit.

My dad had made me a new bracket for the FPR and this fit perfect:



Got my new radiator, trigger wheel sensor, oil filter, Thermostat and housing, all the water pipes plumbed on and engine mounts on:








At this point it was ready to go in so a couple of hours later with my girlfriends help :





Managed to get the engine mounts to line up easy enough - I bought new 'genuine' units instead of the captive nut ones I used before as the captive nut ones don't fit very well and whilst it was easy enough to sit on the engine and get them to bolt up whilst the subframe was out the car, I didn't fancy the same issues with the subframe in the car, with teh genuine ones from minispares it went together far too easily





Got it all bolted up and I had had enough for the day as we had been working on it for about 6 hours so got the car back on the floor until I have the bulkhead box made for the weber then it'll be a case of getting that to fit and a day to re-assemble everything and it should be good to go :)


















Thanks for reading :)

Edited by Craigie-B on 13th Apr, 2014.

Always good to see the engine back in the car

Yeah always one of the most rewarding parts to me second only to getting it running the first time

What are you going to do if this one smokes? 850?

Great progress, wish i'd got that far this weekend.

What the mind can conceive the mini can achieve
MITP 2012 17.01 seconds 1/4 mile against "The Don"
MITP 2013 16.83 seconds 1/4 mile

If this one smokes andy, ill rage quit a series sell everything off and start buying honda parts after I have re-built the shell as its RUSTYYY

Thanks Lee

Past couple of days been sorting a few bits out, got the last of the custom work sorted out for the mini, going to spend tomorrow bolting the car back together and hopefully if the new HG turns up next week get it running!


Got the T's put into the manifold for the Megajolt as I'm running an MAP type as I used it for the turbo, have been told to tee off of both branches on the manifold then put it to a fuel filter then to the ECU to iron out most of the pulsing.

Dad turned the end of the pieces down in the lathe so that it was near enough flush with the inside of the manifold:



Found these air filters for the weber on ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...em=351054094007

Look nice and thin don't they, this made me wonder if by using these I could avoid cutting the bulkhead, so down to the mini to mock up the weber without the large k&n:





Winner! So I got them bought and they have turned up and look like so:



I really wanted to keep the AFR Gauge I had installed in the turbo to keep an eye on this engine and so obviously needed to install a lambda boss in the maniflow Y piece, so drilled out the hold and tapped it with a hammer and then did my first bit of welding on my cars :) Got it painted in the same High temp paint that I used on the manifold:





So as I had to replace the clutch slave cylinder because I'm using a pre-verto setup now, one of the things that REALLY pissed me off that I didn't sort out the bracket and left it ugly and rusty as you can see below:



It now looks like:



Lovely :)


Hopefully should have some proper progress tomorrow night, Im going to get up and spend the day there and hopefully have it ready for the head gasket :)

Cheers for reading!

If you are running pre-verto, why have you painted up a verto slave bracket? Please don't tell me you're going to try and run a short clutch arm on the pre-verto clutch lol

Let's see your welding too.

Oh I thought the pre verto cylinder would fit the verto bracket, Ill get you a pic tomorrow mate, did I post the man I made when my dad taught me to weld??

It's not the cylinder, it's the arm....

Ohh the engine has the long arm mate :)

OK< loose the bracket then. Bolt it straight to the top of the transfer case.

Ah okay, so the pre-verto clutch cylinder will bolt straight on the case? I seeeeeee I'm still yet to buy the pre-verto cylinder

Ahh yeah! I can see a pre verto setup on the moke in this month's miniworld, ah well nevermind ill put this on the turbo engine incase I ever need a verto setup

Pretty massive update and a load of bad news...

So the new head gasket turned up:





Perfect!

Got back down the unit to finish building the car up, last time I had some issues with the bottom braces as I have tilted the engine forward because of the weber to allow enough clearance. This time I thought i would loosley put the engine braces on, put the top one on and then tighten it all up, worked like a dream! Got the gear linkage back on too





Put the head gasket on and torqued it down, then went to fit the maniflow manifold and because of the engine tilting it doesn't fit! Arrghh, so took it home and added 38mm to the downpipe to extend it so it reached underneath the car and could put the exhaust on:





and voila!



Got the weber on:





Put in the new spark plugs, put the HT Leads on, used the old rocker cover as I haven't modified hte shiny one properly yet, fitted all the coolant hoses :





Then went to put on the clutch slave cylinder:



I then thought I had a problem with the clutch and swapped the spring over to the bleed nipple, I then realised I had both wheels in the air and there was nothing wrong with the car LOL!





Did all the wiring for the Inertia starter and the leccy fan, fitted the whole exhaust system and filled it with fluids.



Now this is where we get the bad news....

Went to start it for the first time after giving it a once over, starter motor is turning the engine over and over and nothing, hmmm not even a cough or a splutter.

Pulled a plug and turned it over - sure enough was getting a spark. Okay fair tnought pulled a fuel hose and turned it over and fuel was pumping out and the pump was running so there was fuel getting to the carb?

How strange - tried starting it again nothing, got a can of easy start sprayed it into the air filters and it coughed! So I pulled the float chamber cover on the weber and it was full of fuel. Whats going on!? gave the pump on top of the float chamber a few presses and it squeezed out a few air bubbles, so turned the car over whilst pressing that down and it coughed and spluttered - were getting somewhere. Put it all back together and kept pressing the throttle repeatedly and turned it over and it started, I let go of the throttle by accident and obv because its cold it stalled. Fair enough - I think were there! Went to turn it over again and "Clunk" from the inner wing solenoid. mmm Tried again. Clunk - tried hitting starter with hammer - Clunk tried removing and re-installing it - Clunk. FFS

Took starter out and brought it home and called it a night,



My dad re-built the starter for me:

New brushes, new bushes and a new bendix as it was cracked in 4 places. Went to try it yesterday, put it back in the engine - I had the battery freshly charged turned the key and Clunk - exactly the same! FFS maybe its the solenoid, I put the battery on the starter direct to test and nothing at all. Great!

Jacked one side up put in gear and removed the plugs, I could not turn the wheel at all, took the passenger side apart to get to the bottom crank pulley to see if the engine is seized and it undid the bottom pulley bolt instead of turning - mmm

Head off time then I guess,







Bits spreading out everywhere:





Took the head off and number 1 and 4 pistons were near the top and there are no marks on the valves to show contact with the pistons, checked the pushrods to see if any where bent and they were fine. Eventually got the engine to rotate again - I cant remember how and it became apparent that it got very tight when 1 and 4 reached the top of the block then as they started coming back down it loosened up again. Obv something was very wrong so it was time to pull the engine out and have a look at the bottom end and see what's broken :( needless to say I was pretty fucking pissed off at this point.








Got the engine back out and started to strip it down, usual flywheel pulling problem - in that the puller wont actually remove it so I have left it until next weekend when I may be in a better mood to look at it.





So I wont be going to L2B :( anybody want to buy a ticket? :(

This weekend was the first opportunity I thought I would have to strip the lump down, turns out my gf made plans for the weekend so I managed to sneak in 4/5 hours with my dad today.

FINALLY got the flywheel off.

My old man had spent a fair few hours in the week trying to get the fly off and hadn't managed it, we took another look at it today and the washers that came with the puller looked like this:



Not really suprised, they were piss thin and the amount of pressure we had put on it, so my dad made some new oens about 4.3mm thick:







Greased up the centre bolt so I could get maximum torque on it:



Whilst my dad was making those I took the cam cover off to see if there was anything obvious and I found this:



As you can see it all looked a bit rough and on the timing gear I found these marks:











I had the cover off and the engine turned over much more freely! Thought maybe I had sussed it, ground down the casing so that it was smooth:



Put it back together and it still turned over freely and then it locked again, took the casing off in case it was still catching and it was still locking so it wasn't that at fault :(

Back to the flywheel then...

Put the flywheel puller back in place and did it up with the compressor powered impact gun - nothing warmed the flywheel and hit the flywheel puller bolt with a hammer and nothing at all, kept trying to tighten up the flywheel puller and still nothing, warmed it up to cherry red and beat shit out the bolt with sledge hammer - nothing. My dad beat shit out of the bolt with sledgehammer - nothing. Me and the girlfriend held the engine and flywheel in place while my dad used my 4 foot breaker bar with another 4 feet extension bar on it and got another half turn on the bolt - still didn't come off. Just about giving up so got dad to show me where to warm the flywheel with the torch while dad beat shit out of it with sledgehammer again and about the 5th smack the flywheel shook. Gave it a light tap and it had popped. Took us about 4 hours in total!



I was hoping it would fly off with drama but it just like flopped to the side - was well pissed off! It was like "oh I give up" and just - like a fart in the wind.

Anyway so got the fly off and now I can spend next weekend tearing it down to find out why its locking:



Crank taper:





Flywheel taper:







Took all the clutch and fly off:



And I found this by the oil seal, the turbo engine didnt have one what is it???



Flywheel all multi coloured:



And the engine at the end of the day:




What a fucking pain in the ass - everything has been fighting me so far with this engine. Even down to the pulley bolt on the timing cover.

Lets hope I have more success next weekend :) but I'm pretty sure I'll need a new clutch plate since we could smell it burning when warming up the flywheel.

That's it till next week - big thanks to you guys who gave me some advice on getting the flywheel apart! Let's see what happens next week shall we?

Hopefully all the problems are over now!

Quite an ordeal to go through indeed!
Hope you get to the crank being stuck issue soon.
The red washer thing is an oil seal protector, I think it was introduced with the verto clutch. Possibly to protect clutch when oil seal is not sealing completely anymore.. (?)

Dazed and Confused....

Cool I'll put it back on no harm, be interesting to see what we find when the box is off

Yep, as per Yo Han comments.

Great news on getting the clutch off.

What the mind can conceive the mini can achieve
MITP 2012 17.01 seconds 1/4 mile against "The Don"
MITP 2013 16.83 seconds 1/4 mile

If you could get the engine turning over fine without the timing case on, but it went back to sticking with it in place, surely this is your issue? Or have I misread what you wrote above?

Thats right Carl which is why I carried on removing the flywheel so I can get the gearbox off and see whats happening with the bottom end :)

Not sure why nobody else has mentioned this yet, but if I were you I'd throw those 'air filters' in the bin. They're probably ridiculously restrictive yet don't filter probably. You'll be losing power and wearing your engine down at probably an alarming rate with those fitted.

I've seen a few cars with these on Carl, made by webcon - theres 2 layers of mesh with filter material inbetween them