Morris Minor Owners Club

Hi just wondering the safe load weight limit of a morris minor 1000 ute for carrying purposes?
Cheers,.
Tom

The originals were rated at 5 cwt. Later ones with heavier steering arms and wider wheels were rated at 8 cwt I think.

I think you mean 6cwt?

Both right!
The early ones were 5cwt, then became 6cwt and then an option of 8cwt from mid sixties onwards with the wider rims (that everyone wants) and beefed up steering arms.
Exactly when 5cwt vans became 6cwt i'm not sure, prob late 50s and it was probably only a marketing change as there were no physical changes. Even the 8wct upgrade is only marginal changes.
I guess they couldn't go to 10cwt as that would have been the same as the larger Austin A60 based vans.
If you want to convert the cwt to metric just google an online conversion chart. From memory the Marina vans that replaced the Minors, were classed as 7cwt or 10cwt (springs, back axle and road wheel difference) which was later rebadged as 440 and 575 being the load weight in Kg....

Spring differences!
Did the 7cwt Marina van share the same spec as the saloon/estate? On Dads Marina Estate the rear suspension collapsed on it! Admittedly it did have a pallet of bricks in it, but still .

I thought they did 6 and 8 cwt , I'm sure i remember when I bought mine the guy said it had 8cwt springs on the rear ,
they've got 8 leaf's . I've put my Kawaski Z650 in the back with no complaints ,and today i threw 8 x 25 kilo bags of sand and 2 x 25 kilo bags of cement in the back and it hardly made a differance ,which is 550 lbs + the spare wheel and a few tools .
I never was sure what a 100 weight was but i just ckecked it out its a tad over 50Kg , but apparently there ar two definitions of a hundred weight a long and a short .
So if its 6 cwt =305Kg or672lbs
or if Its 8cwt = 407Kg or 896lbs

I don't think the rear springs ever changed........ just the steering arms for some odd reason.......... and the wider rims but still with the same old tyres I believe.

803/948 = 5cwt, 1098 = 6cwt. 1098 option = 8cwt
1 cwt = 112lbs

chesney wrote:Spring differences!
Did the 7cwt Marina van share the same spec as the saloon/estate? On Dads Marina Estate the rear suspension collapsed on it! Admittedly it did have a pallet of bricks in it, but still .

Er, yes! It was the same floor pan. My pickup even has a rear seat base and foot well and captive nuts for rear belts in the floorpan! The Marina commercials always seemed a bit light duty in relation to the load space so it was very easy to overload them. That and the not very good corrosion resistance is why they're so rare these days....
The 10cwt (575kg) models had a rear axle based on the MGB axle with 4.5" stud spacing and sturdy wheels as opposed to the car type Triumph based axle. Same metalwork onthe bodyshell though...

bmcecosse wrote:I don't think the rear springs ever changed........ just the steering arms for some odd reason.......... and the wider rims but still with the same old tyres I believe.

True, I think all vans had 8 leaf springs. Odd that they decided the steering arms needed beefing up. Why? How would that help the load capacity... The 8cwt rims had 5.60/14 tyres instead of the 5.20/14s on the car type rims. Little practical differance though, in real terms you could regard all Minors as being 8cwt really. Rule of thumb I used was to stop loading when the suspension was on the bumpstops The silly things one used to do! Cornered nice and flat though....

Shamelessly pinched from another web site ;

"What is the weight of a full pallet of 452 facing bricks?
Facing bricks weigh 2.8kg each, so a pallet of 452 would weigh about 2,790 lbs, not including the weight of the pallet. Pallets sometimes have 500 bricks"

Although not a definitive answer I doubt that any pallet of bricks will weigh less than a ton!

I've heard the larger steering arms were one of the requirement of the gpo, I would have thought that the extra strength attained was negated by the larger 'hole' required in the uprights!

Box ticking exercise probably, they don't have to make any sense as long as the box gets ticked.