Classic Mini Clubman Estate
1) The car
The car is a 1979 Classic Mini Clubman Estate in orange. It looks like it has been resprayed in its time to a different colour of orange, with the original left underneath.
My plan is to do a complete nut and bolt restoration to the car and respray in Champagne Biege. I won't be trying to make the car "original" (.... boring!), but I will be doing it in a very tasteful way and as a tribute so that it's theoretically something that could have been built in the 70s. The overall feel will be something fairly sophisticated so I can get in it in a tweed suit and feel right at home :) More on the tweed later.
The car was bought running and driving, but without an MOT. It came fitted with a 90's 1275 engine in it.
3) Stripping it
I started stripping it with my friend Tom not long after buying it, by removing the engine. Not having removed an engine before I couldn't believe how easily we did it. It took us about 3 hours, and half of that was building the ebay engine crane.
However, not long after I got distracted when I bought my 1st gen Toyota Hilux Surf, so the mini went on hold for a couple of years.
Eventually in 2019 I got back on it and with help from my friend Matt we got the rest of the car stripped back to the body so we could get it sandblasted. All in all stripping it took about 2 evenings and a couple of saturdays.
4) Sandblasting
I wanted to make sure the paint job lasted for as long as possible, and to make sure we simply weren't bodging it back together. So optted to have it sandblasted before we did anything else.
Why sandblasting and not acid dipping?
The latter was fucking expensive.
How much did it cost?
£500
The result
Lots of holes.
It's worse than it looks in the pictures. But I have also seen pictures of way worse. So it is what it is :)
8) Interior - upholstery
After seeing the interior of an absolutely beautiful Classic Mini at a random car show in Paris which we stumbled upon after visiting Versaille, I really wanted to create something beautiful. Something you would just sit in and think "wow, this is beautiful", without even having to drive anywhere.
The theme was tweed, brown leather, and (real) wood where possible.
Tweed
It was a bucket list item of mine to visit the Isle of Harris and buy some tweed from the maker, and have something cool made in it. In 2019 my wife and I went, and bought enough to get the Mini done, plus a few other bits.
Leather
The leather is called "Derby" and is real leather rather than a leatherette.
The front seats
I really wanted head rests for the front seats, just to make the car more comfortable on long journeys. The original seats didn't have any headrests, so I managed to pick up some quite cheap from an 80's mini.
Getting it upholstered
After looking around, I decided to go with Optimise Automotive, near Stoke, who specialise in Classic Mini interiors.
They did everything for me including the front seats, back seats, door cards, speaker pods, dash rails, and all the interior window trimmings.
I'm kind of glad I bought an estate, as there doesn't appear to be any off the shelf interiors available, so this forced my hand to really get something nice done.
9) Interior - dashboard
I had in my mind a nice wooden dashboard which would go the whole width, of the car, unlike the original one.
I wanted one which was made out of proper wood, rather than MDF or some other cheap fake looking material. After quite a lot of looking around I found out this was easier said than done. By chance I managed to find a chap who was making custom made dashboards to order, but was closing his business down to concentrate on other things, and had one left. So I snapped it up. It's made from a solid piece of walnut and is beautiful!