Bad weather, new tail lights + carb rebuild kit

So I don't know if you've heard about the horrendous string of weather that Kentucky's been putting up with for this past week... particularly today. We've been told for the past few days that it could either be nothing or absolutely horrible. Then we hear that "Storm Chasers" (the TV show) and a few other prominent figures have traveled here to follow the storm... that was a bit worrying, I assure you.

We were getting ready to go to work and I saw our room mate coming home early. Apparently her entire building was sent home early because of the weather. Even more unnerving. She says she's going to her parents' house since it has a basement.
We headed to work anyways, expecting this to all be over exaggeration (or at least, hoping it would be). Besides, our building NEVER closes. Within minutes of being work they evacuated the building and locked it down. Even scarier.
 Here are some photos of today's storm, taken from various people: http://www.whas11.com/news/slideshows/Your-photos-Second-round-of-storms-move-through-Friday-141176143.html

To sum all of this up, it was terrifying. The weather was NOT people overestimating it - it was just as dangerous (and unfortunately, deadly) as the professionals had warned. A town about 20 miles away was completely leveled. Several houses nearby were damaged. Tennis ball sized hail in surrounding areas (our house was the ONLY house I know of that actually got *no* hail). Being a coward, I hid in the bathroom while the sirens were wailing. Jimmy watched the storm from the garage. This went on for hours. Luckily we had no damage to our house, property or cars.

It was all over after about three hours... and we still had sunlight left afterwards. We decided to use this opportunity to actually work on the Mini. Yep, dangerous weather makes us want to fix cars. This morning we got in our new tail lights and carburetor rebuild kit from Mini Mania, so we set to it.

We haven't gotten a whole lot of progress on it as of right now, we're waiting for the parts to finish soaking overnight... but most of the carburetor has been cleaned and from what I understand just needs to be put back together. Hopefully then the Mini will start! I'm really hoping for it.


And, since I haven't had any photos in a while, here's a few updates!

With bonnet removed!

With the carburetor removed.

Cleaning everything.

Just a shot of the back without the tail lights. We'll be installing the new ones soon.

Just an interior shot for now. Yes, that is a bucket being used as a seat.

Bad carburetor.

It's been a white since there's been a post here. Sorry about that - our weekends have consisted of everything but working on Pippin recently.

However, last Sunday, Jimmy did some work with Pippin to see what he could manage. We have a new battery also. I went to one of our club's meets so I didn't actually get to see any of the magic - we conversed through text messages. He informed me that he found out why the car wouldn't start. He discovered that someone  working on the car previously had swapped the ignition switch and the windshield wipers switch. Once he got that figured out he actually got the Mini to fire up. Progress!

Sadly, the car did not stay on long. It apparently isn't getting any fuel, which he deemed as a bad carburetor. We already knew that it needed work, so at least there's that. Looks like that's the next thing on our list.

I'll make an effort to get some updated pictures of Pippin this weekend, providing the weather cooperates.

Bad battery. Local parts.

Sorry guys, no pictures with this update. At least not yet... I may update this tomorrow with pictures. :)

Yesterday we spent a little time with Pippin, once again trying to find out why he wouldn't start. Noticed that the battery hadn't charged at all overnight. Jimmy took the battery to a local store to get it tested - it was trickle charged for 4 hours before checked to see if it worked. The machine simply said, "Please connect battery".
Yep. That would explain a lot. We'll be buying a new battery with our next paycheck for sure.

Since we weren't really able to do any more diagnostics today, we took him outside and scrubbed out the interior. It was absolutely filthy in there, still is. It's really hard to scrub the metal. We found another rusty spot while cleaning, but this one looks like it can be repaired. The body is still in great shape, all things considered.
We ripped out almost all the fabric (having trouble with the panels in the doors, looks like they're embedded into the door's frame?) and it already smells substantially better in there. Removed the back seat's backing and the seat belts... so it looks pretty darn empty in there right now.


Also, fantastic news - looks like one of our club members actually used to own a 1960 Austin Mini 850... yep, exact same model/year as Pippin. He had a bunch of spare parts that he had been holding onto, we went there today and examined them all. There's plenty of stuff we need in the pile. I'm still shocked we found someone that actually had .... well, the same car! He showed us pictures of it. It was beautiful.

Well, looks like that's it for today. Maybe tomorrow we'll clean it out more.

Brought him outside.

Today was the day to wash and scrub him until all the children's paint was gone.

I also used this as an excuse to bring out the 'nice' camera and get a few more shots of Pippin.

You can really see the rusted door sill in this one.

Well, I didn't get a chance to get any 'good' photos of him while he was still outside after giving him a scrub down, so I had to improvise and snap one while he was back in the garage. I also have to say that bringing him into the garage was my first time sitting in the driver's seat, it was .. interesting. We almost got him to start up again after asking nicely, looks like we need some starter fluid (?) and it should be all that's left. We also learned that the brakes are shot. They're also drum brakes, which we plan on swapping for disc brakes.

Sadly, it looks like some of the paint has stained. At least he's going to get repainted. :)

 And, of course, I couldn't help but get a 'candid' shot of Jimmy. He's installing our new shop light. The camera was completely unfocused, so I'm surprised that it came out even remotely decent (but nowhere near great).

First night home.

So as soon as we got home we went straight to work. Jimmy worked with gutting the interior to see what needed to be done in there, and I proceeded to clean it as much as I could. The paint comes off pretty easy, which is something I'm relieved about.

Once the interior was gutted, we proceeded to investigate and see the condition the floor was in. Surprisingly there is very little rust. It's worse on the driver's side (it's rusted through in a very small area just above the floor on the door sill), passenger's side is in great shape. The passenger side's door hinge is in very bad shape and needs to be repaired.

 After we ran out of things to take apart in the interior, Jimmy set to trying to get the car to start (the battery was dead). We let it charge for a while before starting - we only got the lights to turn on and the windshield wipers instantly started up. It was definitely very interesting trying to figure out how to turn them off!

 

After a few hours we decided we were too tired to continue we finished it up. We've had a surprising amount of progress for having no real tools to work with (they're supposed to show up in the mail tomorrow), we're hoping to get it running and "street legal" by Summer. It'll be great.

The first photo I took of Pippin.

After vigorously scrubbing the side - discovered a large dent we hadn't seen in the pictures.

Welcome home!

Hey there! I made this blog to keep track of our new (to us) Mini. We made plans to purchase him in January and finally received him at home on February 2nd, 2012. We were overjoyed to see him, and very excited to start working with him.


His name is "Pippin", and he is a 1960 Austin Mini 850 (as far as we know - correct us if necessary please :)). He's had several owners, the last one being a good friend of Jimmy's. We knew we were getting into something that would take a lot of hard work and love, especially more so when we saw a picture of him. He was very festively decorated with paint. He hasn't been started in 2 years. He was just garage kept for that long.

We were thrilled to hear that not only was he coming with an additional motor, he was coming with most (if not all) of the panels that needed to be replaced due to rusting. Fantastic!

He was brought up to our house around noon, we were so giddy that we were running around everywhere.

He was definitely very colourful when he arrived.

I'm sure you noticed that on the right, there is a new MINI - that's my baby. He's a 2009 base Cooper (Sorry, folks, not a turbo fan). We also have a 2006 MINI Cooper S, that's Jimmy's. Our room mate has a 2005 Cooper. We are very passionate about our cars.