Morris Minor Owners Club

Can anyone please confirm the correct handbrake cable length dimensions. I have a 'rolling resto' 67' 4-door saloon. All the cable adjustment has been taken up at the lever and the handbrake is hardly effective even when the lever is pulled up to its last notch. The rear shoes and cylinders have bee...

I have a LN063 calcium-calcium battery about 4 years old. When doing a few checks at the week-end I had a peek inside and found it very dry with no electrolite above the plates. I thought these things were supposed to be fit and forget with no maintenance required. Do I top up with distilled water a...

I’ve just rebuilt my 1098 gearbox and decided it would be a good idea to fit a new tailshaft bearing and a new seal. I made a tool for drawing the old one out and the new one pressed was pressed in. ‘The bearing may need reaming to suit the prop shaft’ it says. Reaming usually means taking out no mo...

Dental Hygene... Missing teeth? Tis nought but a dab of Moly grease but it does remind me of a tale from many moons ago when my brother bought a ‘65’ 850 Mini, a lovely Morris badged version in Victoria Plum maroon. It started no problem on the test drive and so too when he picked it up a week later...

Part 8…Back in the fold My prayers for a sunny Saturday were verily answered. I needed a good day to re-install the motor and that included a keen morning’s work to clean up the engine bay and remove over four decades of accumulated gunge from inside the bell housing. In the end there was even time ...

Since you asked…… Part 7. The Daily Grind It’s been like Vladivostok in my work-shop. I’ve had to don my thermal long-johns under so many layers of knitted woollies so I can have a session refurbishing the cylinder head. First off, knocking out the old guides and banging new ones in. The surface of ...

Part 6 Sticking it back An A-Series block stripped down, cleaned and painted is an object of great beauty, the crankshaft is wonderful sculpture and a camshaft is pure art in its highest form. They should bury a Mog engine in Westminster Abbey or mount one on a pedestal outside the National theatre;...

Part 5. Off my Head I’m getting to the point now where I could really do with finding a problem to my smoking habit otherwise it’s all down to a leaky tappet cover. Time to dismantle the head. How do you like my valve spring compressor? I made it! I got the ‘C’ plasma cut in 12mm thk MS plate, made ...

Here's some dirty pix; [frame] http://mmoc.org.uk/mbimage.php?src=1421703345_20019 [/frame] Timing end main bearing[frame] http://mmoc.org.uk/mbimage.php?src=1421703491_20019 [/frame] Centre main[frame] http://mmoc.org.uk/mbimage.php?src=1421703574_20019 [/frame] Drive end main[frame] http://mmoc.or...

Part 4. Deeper and Down I hadn’t done an awful lot this week other than clean up and bag everything that had been stripped so far. I flipped the lump over and took the sump off half expecting to find the gurgling bowels of the Moo knee-deep in sludge but nope, not a smidgeon, clean as the proverbial...

Part 3. The Good, the Bad and the Stuck. I’ve placed the cylinder head to one side even though I think this might be the culprit. I then set to work on the main lump to have it stripped, cleaned, inspected and re-build first. In taking out all the peripherals I hit a couple of snags. Firstly, the oi...

Ta muchly, the advice is sound. I was thinking about doing a bit of diagnostics whilst the motor was running, but it was coming out for a winter once-over anyway. Here's an update; Part 2. Horrible History Back in the days of long hair and loon pants I had a ’65 Austin Mini Countryman (the all stee...

Part One. Up in smoke A cloak of whitish-blue fog hangs over the once lovely town of Llangollen, Denbighshire. It was left there by my Morris last August on the homeward leg of our annual, ‘No kids, no dogs, no technology’ holiday touring Gods own. The Moo didn’t let us down throughout the 600 mile ...

According to my local Microsoft garage they can no longer carry out a service on my Minor XP model. Apparently, every time it came up for a service they had to make a new set of service tools. Now they’re refusing to make them anymore. I can carry on driving the old girl but she might conk out sudde...

I have 67' 4-door in Sandy-Beige. That'll baffle the experts no doubt but that's its colour and that's how it's staying. Maybe it has had a re-spray during it's life but who cares. I have Auto paint supplier not far from where I work in Loughborough. I let them have the glove box cover to enable a m...

One of my sealed beam headlamps has blown (on dip). Is it possible to get a replaceable H4 bulb type instead? Any advice on this subject very welcome.

Today’s tailgater was a rather fetching sports-saloon Audi resplendent in a luscious jet black with silver fleck. I could almost count how many coats of paint they’d lavished upon this aspiring example of £30K worth of turbo-charged menacing presence clinging to my tail. It came swooping up from now...

What a lovely car (with a Leicester registration). I got a beige 4-door for my 6oth birthday. The best pressy I've ever been given.

OW

Thanks for the help guys, problem sorted. I filed about 1/32" off the end of the shoes end opposite adjuster) and that did the trick. The cylinders were fully retracted and the drum measured just over the nominal 8" diameter. Right then, I'm off to find a good body-repair-welder, the sills...

I've just fitted new brake shoes all round on my '67 saloon. No problems apart from the front O/S drum is a very tight fit. I've checked everything out, adjusters are backed right off, nothing wrong with the cylinders. Is it normal that new shoes have to be linished down to fit?

OWmoo