IT’S HAPPENING…..

Visited the paint shop today to answer a few detailed questions about things. Body, doors, hood, cowl, A-panels will probably be in the booth tomorrow.

Trim is DONE. And looks fantastic. Loaded up the bumpers and skirts and stuff and hauled them home.

I LOVE this color…

Perched atop a mountain of parts… waiting on the rebuild… Things are going to get serious pretty quick, maybe by this weekend…

Paint sample! Beautiful unfaded Thunder Blue. Which never looks right in pictures, including this one! But just trust me… It’s right.

Gave them the thumbs-up to make the car this color. It will be awesome.

And another box of parts from Steven at eMINIParts.com! Battery box under panel, brackets for GP underbody panels, and cowl beltline clips.

Brief update!

Shell is ready to take to the painter, scheduled to drop it off this Friday!

It’s official…

Thanks to N2MINI for setting me up with more GPR decals.

Some more parts arrived…
Passenger-side Euro parcel shelf. Since I probably can’t put the glovebox back in with the roll cage knee bar in the way.

Longacre 17″ convex roll cage mount mirror

Also got roll cage mount helmet and steering wheel hooks, and some brackets for the rear straps for the bikini top.

Greene Performance coilessovers and Whiteline end links

Springs are shipping separately

I have a couple of weeks left to work on other cars, eat, sleep, work, etc. Because when this thing gets back from paint, GAME ON.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ScottinBend  mmmmm……pretty. So, you have a design for the cover yet?

I have a concept. That will be one of the last things I do, after it’s running. So I can drive it to the top maker.

Will be a bikini top, similar to this, in black.

With a matching tonneau covering everything behind the main hoop, integrating with the OEM rear roof bow and the side trim.

First Pure Silver color coat done. That’s a lot of airbrushing….

And DONE!!!!

Looks amazing in person. Trust me 

Making the cage pretty…

Started the day nasty and rusty like this…

After first wipe-down with Super Clean, it was a bit better…

Then scrubbed with Super Clean and a red ScotchBrite… got more stuff off…

Sanded with 220 grit and wiped down with naphtha. Finally fairly clean…

Then two cans of VHT self-etching primer…

Scuff with red ScotchBrite, and two cans of high-build primer…

Much better. Done for today. Tomorrow, will do base and clear coats.

I love this junction… my head will be safer inside here…

Oh yeah… and mats for the track came…

Finally, PROGRESS!!!!!

Picked up the shell from the cage fabricator today. The cage is EVERYTHING I had hoped for. Mark Cooper at Performance Motorsports Fabrication outdid himself, as usual.

It looks rusty, because it’s been raining here for the past two weeks and this raw steel rusts just from being in the humidity, but the oxide wipes right off. Easy to prep and paint.

But here’s the cage porn, of (AFAIK) the only 6-point caged MINI cabrio in the universe.

The big picture view. Six point cage with dual diagonal bracing, harness bar, adjustable seat back brace, overhead halo, gussets, knee bar, and recessed door bars. Knee bar and halo braces are 1.5x.120, door bars are 1.5x.095, everything else is 1.75x.095.

The rear brace points are wide and all the way back, for maximum strength and rigidity.

The main hoop sweeps outward as far as possible, to maximize the width of the envelope for my noggin. Several inches wider than my old rollbar, as wide as possible to fit within the windows. Important to me, since I managed to hit my head on the pavement in the crash… The reinforcement plates tie into the reinforced seat belt B-pillars.

The A-pillars had to bisect the extra wide cabrio door sills. The sills were cut to size with a hole saw, and the pillars are welded to both the reinforcement plates and the sill cutouts to retain the structural integrity of the sills.

The knee bar connects the A-pillars, and is perfectly positioned for maximum height while allowing full tilt wheel function. Nests into the natural curvature of the HVAC system, behind where the stereo headunit normally lives.

Gussets at the halo/main hoop junctions, and tube braces at the halo/A-pillar junctions, improve overall strength and rigidity. View from the cockpit is almost totally unobstructed. Just a tiny bit of reduced field of view inside the left A-pillar.

The most challenging part of the build was the door bars. I wanted to retain the factory door trim panels (this isn’t a race car, hence why I don’t need double door bars). I wanted to recess the bars into the doors to maximize hiproom. The bars also needed to clear my pretty wide seats. Accomplished with two shallow, perfectly placed bends.

It certainly takes a bit more work to get in and out than would be appropriate in a daily driver. But it’s way easier than a race car with welded doors.

Sitting in it, it’s just RIGHT. The sight lines are all as they should be. Nothing is too close to my head for comfort. The open halo overhead maintains the “topless” feel. I intentionally omitted a halo cross brace because this open air experience is part of why I do this.

Lots of work to do, to get the cage cleaned up and painted over the next several days. And I need to strip the exterior of the car for painting. I stopped by the paint shop on the way home, so my paint guy could take a look. All good. He’s ready to paint, whenever I can get the car there.

Sad day.

Farewell, good and faithful friend Blimey Cabrio / Locutus Mk1. And F’d-up GP0769.
May your steel find another noble purpose.

A bit of hurry up and wait, for the past couple of weeks.

Cage is DONE. It’s not done in the pic… but was close. I’ll get more pics when I pick up the car, probably early next week.

Spent the last couple of days completing stripping of the wreck and the GP.

Blimey/Locutus Mk1… all stripped and ready to scrap. Sad.

Moved the wreck out into the rain and covered him up, to make way for the GP.

I’m not stripping nearly as much stuff off the GP. A lot of the suspension, subframes, etc. are super rusty and not worth the trouble. I pulled the PS pump and steering rack, to have as spares. Then pulled windows, handles and hardware out of both doors. Everything else was already done.

Well, almost everything…

Not many people have these, at least not in this form…

Supposedly the scrap hauler is coming tomorrow to take away both of these shells. Wife will be MUCH happier…

Slow progress, but progress. I’ll be glad when the stripping is done… because it sucks, compared to building.

Spent a few hours today working on the convertible top. Was attempting to get the whole top off intact. Well, that didn’t happen. But I made a valiant effort… Also removed the trailer wiring adapter and some other wiring stuff while back there.. and removed the boot door and all the trim in the back.

They don’t really design the top (or most of the rear interior trim) to be completely removed without being able to cycle the top up and down at least a bit. Some of the bolts are hard enough to access when everything is working properly… When it’s not… and when part of the car is crushed… ugh.

Here are three of the critical bolts. Which were hidden behind a crushed and stuck taillight, and a crushed and stuck hydraulic pump. After removing those, they were still arm-deep in a hole like one Indiana Jones would have to feel around inside…

Two of these three came out easy with a ratcheting box-end wrench. But the third was wedged against crushed sheet metal. I had to work it out with an open end wrench…about 35 degrees of rotation, flip wrench, another 35 degrees, flip wrench… repeat, blind, by feel, for 45 minutes. But finally got it.

Only to find that there were even MORE fasteners I couldn’t see and couldn’t access.

Eventually got things loose enough to shift around and cut out the critical parts I needed…

The “sunroof” panel, and the rear tensioner with pivots and latches. Plus some trim and stuff.

The “sunroof” panel will be used to build the front seal/latch portion of my “bikini” top. The tensioner assembly will be the rear attachment point for the tonneau cover.