Morris Minor Owners Club

Hi All ,putting an OHV engine in a 1953 Split screen side valve .
Gear linkage will ,of course be different with the 1098 box ,anybody been down this route already ?
Any help appreciated .
Gary

not sure they are different,could be wrong only ever had serr11 s
had a couple of splittys and they had OHV and original linkage.

kennatt wrote: ↑Tue Dec 22, 2020 7:45 am

Like kennatt, my experience is only SII, but I believe we're talking the difference between the gearboxes of Manual Section F compared to FFF, which is a big step.

As I understand it, you can swap bits of gearbox extension between FF & FFF boxes, but not F & FFF, because the 'F' box gearstick goes directly into the box without an extension.

Hopefully someone far more knowledgable will pop in shortly.. but I imaging it's doable with different floor panels.

If it’s an MM, then the gearbox, along with the engine, diff, axle and prop is totally different to any of the later cars, with no interchangeability. So you will need to change the floor section to accommodate the Austin gearbox as fitted to the later cars - presumably you’re putting a 948 or 1098 engine and gearbox with remote gear change on? And changing the prop and back axle?

Changing from SII (early Austin) gearbox to a later one is straightforward enough, as the remote housing can be removed and replaced with the SII gearbox tailpiece, so you could I suppose put a Series II gear-lever onto your later gearbox and then fit in your car if you made that modification, but it would still not be quite the same as the original MM one.

forget my post was thinking clutch linkage , if you want to keep the long gear stick you have to change the rear housing.do a search I thinks its been discussed a few times. All of Mine had the short stick and later floor covers fitted.

kennatt wrote: ↑Wed Dec 23, 2020 8:46 am forget my post was thinking clutch linkage , if you want to keep the long gear stick you have to change the rear housing.do a search I thinks its been discussed a few times. All of Mine had the short stick and later floor covers fitted.

The OP will need to remember that the gearbox tailpiece conversions detailed in other threads are for AUSTIN gearboxes though, and won’t help with the Series MM Morris one though. Without it getting complicated, changing the centre floor section is the only way to do it

I converted my sidevalve "MM" to the later OHV mechanical specification back in the 1970s. It wasn't particularly difficult but, as Liam mentions, you really need to change everything in one go. I bought a scrap Minor 1000 and more or less just unbolted all the mechanical parts off both cars and bolted all the Minor 1000 bits straight onto the MM. My car was an earlier model and I had to cut and re-weld the bulkhead crossmember to accommodate the later engine but I don't think you'll have to do that on a 1953 (very late!) MM as I believe the factory used the same pressing as they were also using on the Series 11 by then.