Morris Minor Owners Club

Just bought this today!

It's been totally restored (last year) by the previous owner. He's done a pretty good job, though on his own admission he's not a "trimmer" so the interior needs a bit of attention - which it will get! Overall not bad though, paintwork is pretty good, and car is VERY solid - it's been completely stripped down and had loads of welding done, and it's all nicely finished in stone-chip and Waxoyle etc.









We plan to put new front seat covers and a new carpet set in it, as well as glove box liners and it needs the correct cream pin-stripe fitting down the sides of the car. Some of the door cards are a bit scrappy too, so I plan to make and fit new ones of these in time. Oh, and a good blast with the Waxoyle gun underneath - can't have too much of that!

No doubt a few other bits and pieces to do to it, but a pretty good base car to start with methinks!

No doubt you'll be hearing lots more from me as I get stuck into the ownership experience!

Paid £3700 for it - a good price or could I have done better?

Cheers!

Nice looking car, but as far as price goes, wether or not you could have done better is immaterial. You were obviously happy to pay that much, so that is all that matters! Good luck.

emmerson wrote:Nice looking car, but as far as price goes, wether or not you could have done better is immaterial. You were obviously happy to pay that much, so that is all that matters! Good luck.

Yes, I quite understand that, and I'll remain happy whatever happens. However, out of curiosity as it were - and a willingness to learn - I'd be very interested in the opinions of the experienced folk on here as to whether I've paid the going rate, or above/below it.

Cheers!

P.S. - just been spending a happy hour checking out ESM and Charles Ware's spare parts sites - good aren't they? I'll be placing orders for interior trim bits on Tuesday I think!

very nice indeed
it would have cost more than the price you paid to have a professional restoration done

well done

If the welding and paintwork are both done well then you have a good buy, in my opinion.
Looks a nice tidy car, so a seconded, well done !

Nice car -the cost is what you obviously wanted to pay - don't worry about it now! Check BullMotif and others before buying any parts!!!

Could I suggest that you purchase the carpet from Bull Motif, its by far the better quality .
The rest, I'd go Newton Commercial, but do give several specialists a call before buying. There is a good mark up on this product, but it is dependant of the size of the order,so shop around.

bmcecosse wrote:Check BullMotif and others before buying any parts!!!

Brilliant - thanks for the tip - will do!

Do shout if you're buying panels, btw - a lot of folk here know what/where to avoid. but we aren't allowed to say nasty things/be honest here. Like I said on that other site though, a very good find - I know it took some looking for

very nice.

Well, the little blue Moggie arrived home OK yesterday evening!!!

Around a 70-mile trip home, about half of it I had to do on the motorway - cruising at 60 was about as much as I could stand, but the car behaved OK. It was pretty uncomfortable though....

No problems with the trip home, but it seemed to miss a beat occasionally, and seems to run a bit lumpy at tickover - I'll have to have a play with it to sort that, as a 1098 A-series should be as sweet and smooth as a sewing machine. I hope it's something simple like points, plugs etc. and not something more sinister like burnt valve, H/Gasket etc. - I'll do a compression test and check the valve clearances and see what's what.

Hopefully a day of fiddling today!

If you want sweet and smooth, buy a 948

I'd be scared to service that - imagine getting a mucky fingerprint on that engine.
My dinner plates are dirtier!

dunketh wrote:I'd be scared to service that - imagine getting a mucky fingerprint on that engine.
My dinner plates are dirtier!

Hehe - yeah, but actually the inner reaches aren't so clean, the gearbox is quite mucky actually! It's not as clean as my Midget engine bay, last time at MoT the tester said he reckoned you'd have to clean your hands before working on it so as to avoid getting the engine dirty!

I think I've sorted out the lumpiness today - first I took the spaklers out and cleaned them - they were pretty black, so perhaps a rich mixture. While they were out I did a compression test, and the readings were (in bar):

1 - 10.9
2 - 11
3 - 11.2
4 - 11

So a pretty clean bill of health there, probably eliminating any problems with head gasket or valves.

When running again I had a look at the carb settings,a nd it was 4 or 5 "flats" of adjustment too rich, it seems to be a lot better now. We'll see how it goes.

Judge - yeah, I know the smaller engines are the sweetest, I've had an 850 before in a Mini and it was brilliant. However, my other car (Midget)has a tuned 1275 in it, which is at the other end of the "spectrum" of smoothness, and it runs smoother than our Minor engine did last night - but as above it seems better today now I've had a fiddle. Probably something and nothing - one is always more concerned over a car one has just bought!

Spent the rest of the day cleaning the interior and ordering parts - I'm £350 poorer now, but the new carpets and other bits will make the interior a lot better - when they arrive!

Cheers!

Well, an exciting day today, the carpet set and seat covers etc. arrived from Charles Ware:



First I thought I'd put the boot carpet in, here is the boot before:



And now with new carpet! They supplied it with a packet of carpet studs, I think I'll fit these at some point to keep the carpet properly located exactly where it should be.



Now the bad news, the door cards and seat covers are a MUCH darker blue than the existing upholstery in the car. I phoned around to CW, ESM etc. and the story is that the original shade is no longer available. I'm not sure what to do - TBH I rather prefer the darker shade, I might well get some of that vinyl dying stuff and re-colour the rest of teh interior to match the new stuff - a lot of work, and just how good is that stuff? Woolies are experts in this field, and they do a service where they will supply the vinyl dye aerosols to match a specific shade, so I might give them a ring and see if they can help. It will be a lot of hassle and a lot of work though....

Here's the new seat cover against the old seats:



Well, they also supplied a fine-line masking tape set, and an aerosol of the correct "Old English White" that the wheels are painted in. The reason I wanted this was that the car currently has no pinstripe down the side, like it should have:



So I set to and started to do the pinstripe - here's the O/S rear door with no pinstripe, and the rear strip just masked up:



Now the O/S rear door is done:



Here I am doing the N/S door, this is what it looks like just before you take the tape off. I didn't want to use the aerosol spray, so I sprayed it into the cap and painted it on with a fine artist's brush - it still comes out pretty smooth.



And now the whole of the O/S of the car - looks great IMHO!!



Have to get cracking on stripping out the interior and fitting that carpet set soon - if it stops raining for long enough!

At least a productive day.....

As expected an excellent result. Didn't expect anything less with the standard of work seen before.
Personaly the old and new look not far off, may be the photo or the computer but nice new stuff always looks odd in a classic until I get use to it.

John.

Hehe - thanks Tickman - thought I recognised you here!

Yeah, the computer colours can play tricks - they definately look totally wrong. I think I'm going to try vinyl dye trickery from Woolies - I'll give 'em a call tomorrow, though there's a 3 week turnround for colour-matched dye.

Carpet fitting day tomorrow (if the rain holds off long enough....)

nice job with the pin stripe!!!!

OK, yesterday was carpet fitting day.

First off was to strip out the interior, only 4 easy bolts for each seat, easy removal of seat belts, the rear seat cushion just pulls out, and then remove the parcel shelf and kick panels - this was a bit fiddly but got there in the end. Here it is all stripped out:





Then offer up the sill carpet piece - this needed a tiny amount of trimming to sit nicely, and I also undid the outer sill covers to lift the lip on the inside so the carpet will slip underneath it.Then a squirt of spray adhesive to the inner sill, and the same to the back of the carpet piece, and in it goes - here is the passenger side done:



The driver's side was done in the same way, and both looked fine to me.

Then on with the front wheelarch carpet covers - no trimming required, these mould by hand to the double curvature of the wheelarch, and ended up looking very pro!



Next up was the rear valence under the rear seat - this has a thin strip of vinyl that folds over the top - tricky to get no wrinkles in this, but I managed it. This too was secured using spray adhesive:



Then I stuck the supplied pieces of underfelt to the gearbox and propshaft tunnels, and then glued the carpet on top - leaving parts of it un-glued so that I can lift it to adjust the handbrake and get at the gearbox filler plug.



Then the rear floor carpet followed by the front floor capet go in - at this stage my hands were covered in sticky glue and carpet fluff, and as I've now finished using the glue, I took my chance to clean my hands. White spirit cleans this stuff off nicely, which is also what I used to remove glue over-spray from the top side of the carpet and other bits of trim where you don't want to see the glue - works very well this.

I fixed the floor carpets in using the supplied pop-studs, which means they are easily removable. Here are the passenger's side carpets in and fitted.



Driver's side going in:



A bit of under-felt goes in under the floor carpets, here is the driver's footwell under-felt cut roughly to size:



And finally with a quick vacuum out of all the fluff, here is the carpet set fitted. This stage took all day - quite time-consuming but very satisfying:





Today I fitted the seat-belts and the seats back into the car, I used a sharply pointed bradawl to "find" the holes under the carpet for the bolts to go back in, and then a pointed scalpel to cut out holes in the carpets for the bolts to go through. The most tricky part was poking around with the bradawl to "find" the holes for the self-tappers to put the gearbox lever surround and the ash-tray back on - managed it in the end though! Here it is all fitted back up and ready to go:





You will see that I've left off the parcel shelf and the footwell kick-panels, as these were pretty manky when I took them out, and are very cheap to replace so as the parcel shelf is fiddly to re-fit, I'm going to leave it until the new parts arrive. You don't notice them missing when you drive the car.

I have to say that the quality of the carpet kit supplied by Charles Ware MM centre (Newton Commercial products) was superb, both in the cutting/preparing and in the actual quality of the material used. The gearbox and transmission tunnel items are fully moulded too, so they look really good.

More updates to follow!

Looking very nice there! Fair play for taking the trouble to take the pics and write the captions.

Good one!