Genuine Progress

Douglas & I spent a little while over the last two days working on the mini.

The video below is the result. (Note, the horrible squeak is the alternator fan just rubbing slightly. It'll sort itself out when it's run a little while)

There was a bit of a process getting to this point. ;)

We managed to sort out the main wiring (excluding things like lights, wipers) - this had been a concern as the car has (and always had) and alternator, and the wiring loom Douglas had bought was for one with a dynamo and separate control box. This turned out to be simpler and tidier than we'd imagined. The distributor is now an electronic one. There are no points of course, so setting the static timing is pure guess work. We set it as best we could to a few degree's BTDC. We bought some 95RON fuel, and additive to replace the lead that used to be in fuel, and poured nearly all the 5l into the tank, reserving a little to prime the fuel bowl on the carb.

We robbed a battery from the Range Rover (which hasn't gone for a while, so the battery was a little low), connected it up with the battery boost attached too.
Cranked the engine briefly to ensure we had spark. We did. Good spark.

We filled the float bowl, sanity checked everything and gave it a go.

There was a cough, but it didn't go. Maybe the timing wasn't close enough. Adjusting the distributor, I noticed the housing was loose.
We slackened the clamp for the distributor and moved it a bit, and tried again. Still nothing. 

Next try, there was no ignition light & the engine wouldn't turn over - confusion reigned. It worked before.

We spent the rest of the day trying to work out what had happened. The multi-meter showed 13V at the ignition switch, and at the right places when the ignition was on, but as soon as there was a load on the system, even just a bulb, nothing worked. 

Initially we thought we had blown the electronics in the distributor (this can happen if the earth of the distributor's body isn't good, and we had the clamp loose). Took the distributor off and started hunting for parts to build up the original one with points. We don't have all the parts.

After much more hunting for electrical problems, I decided to work out why the ignition light didn't work. Simple circuit - 12V to one contact and earth the other. Nothing. The bulb tested OK on a spare battery.

The rest of the afternoon was spent trying to track down this issue. Eventually, I started from the very basics, and tried connecting the test light to the battery (in the boot of the mini) -success. Connect it to the other end of the battery cable and earth - nothing! Somehow the battery cable is not conducting.

And, it turned out that the starter solenoid was also blown. But it had all been working at the start of the day.

So we got some more battery cables (short ones though) and attached the battery to the front with mole-grips, and put on the spare starter solenoid. Re fitted everything else.

Success - ignition light and it cranks again. And there's spark. 

It wouldn't start though, not even cough.

Next day, we thought we should check everything; after all, these engines are simple - if it's got air, and fuel and spark, it'll go. Checking the fuel supply revealed that the fuel pump wasn't working. So we rigged up a bottle to gravity feed fuel until we can get a pump rebuild kit from UK. 

Still wouldn't go. We still had really good spark, so it had to be fuel. Inspecting the carb showed the jet wasn't working on choke as expected.

I stripped the carb, put in a new jet. Set the tune to a basic start point, and refit it.

After a few more attempts, the video below is the result. (We did have to delete about 20 video's off our phones which just showed it not starting.)

Douglas didn't run the engine for long, but it idled and had 70psi oil pressure (which, for everyone but Alex, is about perfect for a newly built mini engine).

Oh, I forgot one of the bits of excitement - Douglas at one point broke the copper oil-pressure gauge feed pipe, so we had to remove that and solder it up.

For context, the engine was the first bit of the car that Douglas rebuilt, about 10 years ago. It hasn't run between then and now. Douglas built it entirely by himself, including honing the bores, grinding in the valves etc..