Dazecoop - Blog of David Cooper - Minis, Photography, SEO and more

I’m talking Mini / car stuff again so be warned, all non-car types! So anyway, last week I put Sylvester in for MOT and it failed. I was expecting it to fail anyway since I knew there was a bunch of stuff broken, but luckily I don’t think it failed on very much.

The biggest thing that it failed on was no doubt the rear subframe being excessively corroded. Luckily, however, "The Mig" (my other Mini) has a really great rear subframe which was destined to go into Sylvester, it seems. This Saturday was the day I chose to remove the subframe and depending on the weather and how the general operation went depended on how much I was hoping to get done. Amazingly, between 7.30am (yes, that early I started!) and about 1pm, I had both subframes removed from both cars, with the help of two friends! Super-fast!

I thought I’d take the opportunity when doing this task to document and talk about how to actually go about the process, so here it goes.

Sylvester was a running Mini, so everything was still attached unlike The Mig which is basicllay a rolling shell. Removing these things took some time and it really made a difference to the speed at which we managed to get the subframes off. Anyway, without going into too much detail, removing the wheels is one of the first jobs.

After that, remove the exhaust system. We managed to remove just the backbox section of Sylvester which helped a lot and speeded things up even further. Once that was done we disconnected the battery, poked the positive lead through the boot floor and pulled it out the other side to ensure its clear of anything that it might get caught on.

Next was to remove the handbrake cable and hydraulic brake lines for the rear brakes. The handbrake cable was really knackered on Sylvester so we decided just to cut through it which was easy, although we left the front section still intact. The brake lines on the back was fairly easy to remove - simply just undo the brake union on the 3-way splitter which was mounted on the rear subframe itself. Once it was undone, just bend the brake pipe very carefully out of the way just by a little bit to make sure it doesn’t get caught.

You can see in this photo the 3-way brake splitter and the handbrake cable still intact. On the
far left is the exhaust pipe and hanging down is the battery cable. The bracket at the top on the left
is my after-market exhaust mount hanger bracket.

Now we’re onto the mounts. After a lot of WD40 and some waiting around we went to tackle the front trunnion bolts. These go between the very front of the rear subframe and into the back of the heel board in the seal. The top two on both sides were loosened and removed quite easily, but unfortunately the lower two bolts on both sides sheered off. That sucks, but we can live with it.

This shot shows my lower bolt sheered off, and the top bolt loosened ready to come off.

Next up was loosening and moving the fuel tank out of the way to get to the nuts holding on the remaining subframe mounts and the shock absorber mounts. We left the shocks ’till last since I know that they would be quite easy to remove and they can easily support the weight of the subframe.

After the tank was moved out of the way it was a two-man job to remove the remaining two mounts and 4 bolts holding the subframe on. A spanner on the top with a friend holding and a socket and ratchet on the bottom. All 4 bolts and nuts were removed with ease which was great.

These are two of the 4 bolts for the rear mounts on the subframe. This is the fuel-tank side
with the fuel tank moved out of the way

Finally, then, was the shocks. We placed axle stands under the subframe itself (as well as the ones under the car already) and made sure they were tight under so it didn’t drop too much. I carefully removed the last two nuts holding the shocks on while Ben and Ian were under the subframe in a position ready to catch it depending on which way it was going to go (with the help of the axle stands already in place). Minutes later and hey-presto, it was off.

We dragged the subframe from under the car. And we’re done! Watch out for part two where I re-fit the rear subframe again, with a new handbrake cable, new rear brake shoes and wheel cylinders and new subframe bolts and mounts all round. Hopefully it’ll go as smoothly as this did!

Here we are with it completely removed. And Ian looking very
pleased with himself!
 

The first car / motorsport show of the year for me kicks off in style with the Autosport International show at the NEC in Birmingham. Its always held in the middle of January so it becomes a welcome into 2008 for the show season for me, and 2008’s show was as good as ever.

I won’t go into too much detail about the day because it was simply too big to, but its definatly a show that I would highly recommend to any petrol head. Below is a bunch of my favorite photos that I took yesterday.

The girls at the show is always a main feature and, naturally, never dissapoint. I made a point of taking a lot more photos of the girls this year than normal since I’ve noticed that photos with girls in seem to attract a lot of attension on my Flickr portfolio.

Finally, toward the end of our day saw the Live Action Arena show as part of our entry ticket. Again, this was as brilliant as ever. For the camera geeks out there, I must point out that taking photos in this show when you don’t have a photographers press pass is damn near impossible! Its always very dark and there’s always a damn fence in the way to shoot through. I think I did well considering the difficulties anyway.

To sum up then, the 2008 Autosport International show was as good as ever, absoultely brilliant in fact. A perfect show for blokes who are into cars in a big way, with a side-order of stunning girls, some live action and some beer. Spot-on.

So as I might have mentioned on my previous post, I might have slipped that I’m looking into buying an Apple Macbook. Those of you who have eagle-eyes might have noticed as well that I’ve put a Paypal donation on my site too (on the left where the comments are).

Why a mac though?

This is the question that quite a few people are asking, and although I haven’t 100% decided yet, I’ve got some good reasons, I think why I’d prefer to go with a mac than a laptop from another manufacturer running on Windows Vista.

First up, the speed and ease of use. When I popped in to my local Apple store the first thing that I noticed was the incredible speed and ease of use when first booting it up. No waiting around at all, not even any real loading screen. It just pops up pretty much straight away with the login screen. I’ve also used Amey’s (my girlfriend) iMac quite a bit lately and I’ve constantly been impressed by its speed and ease of use. The one-button mouse got me annoyed for the first few times in using it, but I got used to it quite quickly. By clicking the Ctrl button on the keyboard and clicking with the mac mouse emulates the right-click of a regular PC which was nice to know. On a macbook, things are improved further since you can just use two fingers on the touchpad to emulate a right-click. Surprisingly this works very well indeed and I got used to it quickly.

The design and style is, of course, probably the main thing that stands out with every Apple product they make. Granted, the iPhone isn’t the best phone in the world, but just look at it. Its slick, slim and sexy.

The same goes with their range of iPods. Their Macbooks, Macbook Pros, iMacs. The list goes on. In this department, the Macbook doesn’t disappoint. There’s two colours to choose from when buying a Macbook, a simple black or white. For me, I think black looks too corporate and to "normal", if I’m getting a mac then I want to let people know its a mac. This might sound stupid to some people, for example, it makes the laptop an easy object to see from a distance and a very attractive thing for thieves to steal, but I don’t intend to leave it around unattended at all.

Another thing is when you say about macs a lot of people say that you’ll have problems getting the software for them. Really? Well everything I use is available for macs with ease and the software is only marginally more expensive than the same software for Windows. What’s more, 80% of the software I use is now made by Adobe who work closely with Apple anyway so its quids-in for me.

But what happens if you can’t find a particular piece of software for the mac? No problem at all. I introduce you to Boot Camp. Since Apple are just, well, plain awesome, they’ve developed something called Boot Camp which is included for free in the new Mac OS X Leopard. Boot Camp allows you to run any version of any other operating system at the same time as running Mac OS. This means that I could, if I needed, to have XP or Vista running at the same time as Mac OS. I can then install software as I wish on the Windows OS. How sweet is that

Anyway, I think that pretty much concludes my thoughts on the Macbook at the moment. I haven’t completely decided about "going Apple" yet, but the more and more I read about their operating system and products, then the more I am getting swayed into buying one. Their fast, easy to use, look stunning and, as they say, "Just work".