My 1293 Turbo **now fully megasquirted!**
Turbo Mini Forums

As its winter time and time for tinkering, I thought it was about time I put some pictures up of my car as it has been for most of last year, and what I'm doing over the next few months.

Rough spec is:

MED 1293, omega pistons, lightened and balanced crank with ultralite flywheel and backplate, grey clutch cover and paddle plate
MED turbo head 36mm inlet, 30mm exhaust, 27.5cc chambers
MED T2 turbo cam, MED 1.5 roller rockers
Rebuilt turbo gearbox, straight cut drops, minisport 4 pin diff with 2.9 final drive
Standard rebuilt T3 turbo and HIF44 carb
Standard dizzy
Renault 21 intercooler

On this setup it made 129bhp (at the flywheel) and 128ft/lb's at 10psi without the intercooler, but regularly ran 15 to 17psi on the road so not sure exactly what power it would be producing.

Here's some photo's of how it has been over the last year, a few off here have already seen it at a couple of events:




















And here she is tucked away in my garage ready for working on over winter:




Planned work is to strip the car down (which has started) for repainting and general tidying up - subframes and suspension components will be refurbed and repainted etc... boring stuff basically. But I will also be moving over to megasquirt, and making a few other changes to the engine bay layout such as front mount radiator etc... I will also be redoing the interior with new dash and possibly new instrumentation.

I'll post up more pics as I actually get some work done - its just a bit cold at the moment!

Edited by Coupe on 30th Jul, 2009.

looks good as is, never ending battle nice to see them kept on the road.

love that straight cut scream!!!
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If you saw it up close its actually really bad! The paintwork is terrible now - time has really taken its toll. The whole car just generally needs tidying up.

What are your plans for megasquirt ???

Just ignition or fuel as well ???

If fuel, wet manifold or port injection ???

Very interested for obvious reasons.....

Schrödinger's cat - so which one am I ???

That looks nice. What are those arches?

Megasquirt will be wet manifold with a pair of 650cc injectors (at least thats how big I think they are - its been that long since I bought them!), and ford edis system. Its the first time I've dabbled with this so I'll probably need a fair bit of assistance, although I haver all the important pages from the megasquirt sites saved as favourites on my laptop!

Arches are group 7's I believe - they were on the car when I bought them and are a little worse for wear now! They're being replaced with a set of miglia's.

Nice simple megasquirt solution - rather than those of us mad enough to be trying port injection - basically an electronic SU carb :)

Why EDIS though ??? With two VB921s installed, MS will drive the coilpack direct.

Are you building your own or buying it ready built ???

Good luck with it though.

Schrödinger's cat - so which one am I ???

Megasquirt was an already built unit from the States. For now I'm just going for the simple solution to get it all going. I may experiment with other things later on. I managed to acquire all the parts for very reasonably prices. I was just sick of carbs and dizzy's and want more control!

Yesterday and today I did a bit of work on the Mini - about 7 hours work in total, but got quite a bit done.

Engine on its way out - again lol:





Brakes, hubs, shafts etc... out:







Trusty A-Series free of its cage:





Started stripping interior - seats, dash, centre console, steering column out, lots of tidying to do with the loom:





Started stripping rest of the engine bay/front end and windscreen out:






Still plenty to do, but got a good chunk done for now.

Good progress - I wish I had enough motivation (at the moment) to do that much in seven days, never mind seven hours......

It's freezing in my garage....

Schrödinger's cat - so which one am I ???

I have the luxury of a propane heater - I use it for about 20 minutes to warm the garage up and then switch it off. That way the garage starts warm and as it cools down I'm working away so don't feel it as much! Every day I have off work now I'm gonna try to get at least 3 or 4 hours done on the car.

I've just put another 2 and half hours or so into the Mini tonight and got quite a bit done. Tonight I have removed the carpets, headlining, rear quarter interior panels, side windows and rear windscreen, door seals, pedal box, heater, various brackets, and also made a start on tidying up the wiring loom which was an utter atrocity!

This is how the interior is looking at the moment, you can see how lazy the last people to rebuild the car didn't even bother painting the whole of the floor:



These pictures show how little wiring is left inside the car now compared to the birds nest mess that was there before:





Tomorrow I'm going to start tidying the rest of the loom and moving the fuse box and wiring out of the engine bay. There's quite a bit of tidying to do with it:






Once I've tucked the loom out of the way, I'll drop the front subframe and start stripping the paint from the engine bay.

Tonight I've removed the front subframe and started stripping it, and also rid the engine bay of all wiring for now, and re-taped the majority of the loom which will run under the wing for extra protection.

Gonna be doing some more bits tomorrow, so will update with photo's then.

Keep up the good work dude!

Cheers Nic - I'm trying to keep the momentum going, doing a bit each day. If I stop i have a tendency to do no work on it for ages!

Going to Bingley this weekend so hopefully should pick up some more goodies for the build.

Done a bit more work tonight. First off a couple of piccies from yesterdays work.

Manky subrame out:



Wiring harness pulled back through into the car and most of it retaped:



Now a bit of a before and after - engine bay yesterday after removing everything:



Now engine bay today after stripping and first coats of paint:



Massive difference in the engine bay now - still needs rubbing back a bit and a little smoothing here and there to tidy it up and then a few more coats of paint but already I can see how much of an improvement there is which is spurring me on!

looking good mate!

For what is the big hole in the inner right wing? Curious :)

It had a fan in curiously from the previous owner - didn't really aid cooling much so I ripped it out. I was going to cut the entire inner wing out but there's so little of it left, that it won't make much difference.

No update on progress, but went to Bingley today, had a great day and got some bits and bobs while I was there.

I bought the following:

Brake disks
Rear brake shoes
Rear slave cylinders
Rear brake hoses
Steering column bushes
New engine mounts
Poly bump stops
Pedal box (I fubar'd the studs on mine when I was removing the master cylinders, and this was £5 from the autojumble!)
Various gaskets

A nice pile of service type bits:



And thanks to Lizzie (my other half) for buying me my birthday presents early. As I'm the big Three Oh in March, she deemed it suitable to spend silly money on me. She bought some of the above parts, but also thanks to her I have on order my fibreglass dash which should be with me in a week or so, but also she bought me this:



Which when in use shall look like this:



Combined tacho, digital speedo, fuel gauge, oil/water temp gauge, programmable 2 stage shift light, programmable speed/distance timer (for 0-60, quarter mile, lap times etc...), peak hold, blah blah blah - comes with a complete wiring harness and the required sensors, and should be a whole lot more accurate than the standard Mini clocks. I've been looking at these for ages and got rather excited when I saw one in the flesh on the guys stand at the show, and now I have one of my own!

Need to get motoring with the car now - I wanna see this in action!

been watching those clocks on ebay for a while and like you say it was good to see his range at the show. i will be keeping an eye on his stock.

seems like quite a nice guy.

Yeah, seemed a good bloke. We paid £190 for that one, I notice the price on ebay is now £230 including delivery so I don't think we did too bad on that one.

Been a while since I've updated this so here's a whole load of pictures at once! I've been cleaning and painting various components and replacing some bits, so here's how she's been coming along:

Old manky suspension components:





Painted subframe and top arms:



Painted bottom arms, suspension trumpets and cones:



Decided to start adding a splash of colour (inspired by the colour of my poly bushes!):



My dash arrived:



Got the subframe back on the car and started building up the suspension and hubs:









Hubs fitted:



Disks and drive flanges fitted:



Calipers fitted:






Car is now down on all four wheels so that I can make a start on chopping out the excess metal from inside and get it all painted.

Looks like its coming together quite fast now.

keep it up, looking good

Rick

Good job mate,it's really moving now!!

Warning:Stig in Training

Few new pics of progress - work has moved onto the interior.

I've cut out the rear pockets and excess material on the back seat:





And then thrown a bit of paint at it:






Hopefully will get a load more work done over the next couple of days.