Last Thursday was my local area’s Mini Meeting known as Mini’s On The Hill. We meet on top of the hill every first Thursday at about 7.30pm for a chat and a cuppa, then usually head off to a warmer location for food. Last Thursday was especially cold and we headed off to the local pub for drinks and food. After the meal and drinks we all decided to head off home and I took an old friend of mine in Sylvester, my Mini, back home.

10 minutes down the road, however, I pulled away from a set of traffic lights fairly casually and something broke. It was bad - a huge bang and clunking of metal-on-metal. I stopped as soon as I could on a side road to see what was wrong. I couldn’t tell exactly what was wrong but the symptoms were that in neutral the car made a very loud clunking noise, and then when the clutch was down there was no noise. Releasing the clutch slowly while in 1st gear, however, the noise was back again and the car refused to move forward without a massively violent judder. Something had broke, gearbox-style.

After a swift phone call the AA arrived and towed me back home. Speculation and disappointment came to me the next day, still not knowing what was wrong.

On Sunday the work began on removing Sylvester’s engine and with the help of Scott and Adam it was out in a little over 4 hours.

Not much to report on getting the engine out, it all went pretty smoothly and better than I thought it would. Removing the brake servo (something I’ve never done before) was also quite easy and was out in a few minutes.

We ended the day then, and of course still not knowing what was wrong. Monday came with a few more updates…

I removed the head since I believed the head gasket to have gone and after 5-or-so minutes the head was off to find the gasket had actually not gone. Weird, but I’ll replace it anyway. I think the head may have needed re-torquing but its best in this sort of situation to replace the head gasket anyway (a while-your-there job).

With the head removed its easy to see where all the power comes from. The size of the inlet and exhaust ports, and the size of the valves are a dead give-away. The head also is equipped with double valve springs for a stronger, quicker movement of the valves. (Must have missed taking this photo, I’ll post it up soon!!)

Next job on the list was to remove the flywheel - a job I hate doing. For those of you who don’t know, the flywheel is removed with a special tool know as (you guessed it) a flywheel removal tool, and is a right pain in the backside to remove. The flywheel is attached to the crank and spins around at the same speed as the engine is running, therefore it must be tightened and well-attached to the crank otherwise bad things would happen (like it falling off!).

So, as you probably could have guessed, removing the flywheel is a task. Even with the flywheel retaining bolt removed, the flywheel and clutch assembly is usually always well and truly stuck on there. The remaining daylight hours of Monday saw me and two of my friends beating the hell out of the flywheel remover trying to get the thing released with no luck.

Here’s a photo of the flywheel stuck on. The flywheel remover tool attached to the three equally spaced threads which are drilled into the flywheel itself for that reason.

And here’s the flywheel retaining bolt and locking washer.

Tuesday, the next day, saw a lot of updates. Someone on my local Mini Club forum reminded me of a good way to remove the flywheel. Where the starter motor attaches to, if that is removed it exposes a small amount of the flywheel from the opposite side, meaning you can get in there with a large hammer and beat two-bells out of it from the other side. This worked a treat and in 10 minutes it was completely off.

I was hoping that the drop gears (sometimes referred to as transfer gears) would be the cause of the problem since they are easy to replace and are quite cheap. A few minutes later off came the transfer gears casing to find them all intact and in good condition. Damn - its gearbox then!

Then I removed the gearbox from the block. The ‘box is held on with a handful of bolts around the base of the block and on the gearbox itself, these are not usually that tight but are quite difficult to get to! Thankfully with the selection of new (working) tools in my new toolbox the job was easy.

Me and a friend carefully lifted the block from the ‘box and…

Vola, can ya see the problem yet!?

… Can ya? Kinda bad. Still not entirely sure what was the cause of this, but its certainly impressive how many teeth are missing and how quickly they must have broken off! Just hoping the block is all OK, so I will be taking a good look at that and cleaning it out as much as I can, without stripping it too much.

My plan now, then, is to fit my Straight Cut Close Ratio gearbox which was suppose to be used for my red Mini. However, since this still has a long-long way to go until its done, and since this lovely gearbox has been sat in my bedroom for the past 3 months, I thought I should put it to good use and use it on Sylvester.

That’s it above, looks just a bit nicer than the old one!

I’ll post another article very soon when the rebuild begins again.