Forums Forums turbo_stu : mini

indeed mate, spent 2 years building it, not gonna just let it sit on the drive being broken.

i'd say your right in thinking its an alignment problem, you should have set it to toe-in slightly. The road will pull the wheels out when driving/accelerating.
i took my car to the alignment centre in liverpool (they are THE BEST) got digital printouts, even tho i had set it pretty much bang on, they did adjust it slighly, deffo worth the money IMHO

(another thought could be badly balanced wheels?)

well checked the allignment in work again this sat, couldn't believe i missed something out! forgot to take measurement of the length of each side! well to say the least it was way out! set about getting it within 3mm tollerance.

the way a mini is usually set up it has a degree of toe out up front, don't know why but it does. set mine straight this time instead, also the camber on the fornt wheels doesn't look to be equal. i have all the stuff at work to set it up, just need to spend a day setting and testing.

another day of driving on sat afternoon, see seem alot better, still like to go where it wants on boost, but it is easy to handle. don't like doing high speeds in it though. can't really trust my speedo, its under-reading so when i'm doing 30 it say 25 and i think 70 it shows somewhere between 50-60. so i'll need to either get the speedo re-calibrated or change the pinion and spur wheel.

plenty more testing and adjusting to be done in the near future.

Lol, good to hear its running better. Good job your a mechanic lmao!

bad news, head gasket has gone. good news i get to play around with the engine again! i think (yet tbc) that it started when i took it on the motorway earlier this night. gave it some stick and heard piniking from the enigne, so got off at the next exit. everything seemed fine. gave it some more right pedal and a boost pipe blows off. pull over, put it back on, just pulled out to check if its still boosting, and it belowed out white smoke!

new gasket is already ordered, hopefully i can sort it out! will get pictures up this weekend when i get round to fixing it......

Gutted for ye about the HG, hope it dont need skimming, you will know all about that better then most though lol.

As ye say you get to take it to bits again lol!

i just hope it has done any damage to the engine while it was pinking. might have to get on the blower to the rolling road guy again.........

hope you get it sorted buddy,glad to see it on the road now looks very well done.

Think you should be ok

big-ish story so go and get yourself a cuppa....................


right, it turns out that my engine steady bush that bolts to the engine melted! don't know if was down to inferior materials, or whether the engine just got too hot. that has been replaced with a new polyurethane bush. i wasn't running a thermostat for about 3 days when it first initally got on the road. what happened with the cooling system was when stationary the engine reached a certian temp, but as soon as you started driving it went straight to the blue on the gauge. so it was overcooling the engine effectively. so i put the 82degree thermostat from the 998, and drilled 2 4mm holes in it, as my bypass for the water pump has been blocked off. so this has made warming up the car alot faster, and keeps it at a stable temperature.

turns out my headgasket went on cylinder 2 into one of the coolant passages. the damage may have been caused by pinking (pre-igntion/detonation) and was finally blown threw due to the boost. it turns out that my actuator (doobrie that controls the boost) had split the hose which causes the boost to push against the diaphram to open the wastegate. this means i was running way more boost than i should (don't know exactly how much, i don't tend to stare at the boost gauge). this is the most probable cause of the pinking and the reason why my headgasket went. a new re-inforced pipe has been used to supply the air to the actuator. a new headgasket, and manifold gasket has been used also. she fired up first time, bit of a misfire but that soon went when it was warm. took her out earlier to get her to temperature, and make sure everything was fine.

my speedo problem of under-reading has hopefully been fixed. i have swapped the pinion from a 17 one to a 15, and accoring to mini website this should give me the correct speedo reading. i check this with a gps soon. i just have to re-torque the cylinder head down tomorrow when its cool, and check the valve clerances and give it a good wash! no pictures unfortunately, was too busy concerntrating on the job in hand.

glad it sorted for you and wasnt to costly.

thats the great thing about building your own car, you get to know what goes wrong, and can fix it yourself! tbh i missed not driving it the past 2 days

fook me, you work fast!

glad to hear its sorted

guess what blew again