Pedro Makes Nice Racks.

Last year Lori and my folks attended our first ever Concours d'Elegance in Forest Grove. If you've never gone I highly recommend it. I was absolutely staggered at the quantity, variety, and quality of automobiles on display. It instantly became a "must attend" event for our family.

This, however, is not what I wanted to talk about... well maybe just a bit more.

What caught my eye was a classic blue Saab that I'd seen before at the All British Field Meet at PIR. While I really liked the car he had a roof rack installed that really stood out. When asking about it the owner told me that Pedro of Pedro's Accessories – known for his high quality racks sold to the aircooled VW crowd – made it for him.

Nice Rack!

It wasn't until March of this year that I finally acted on the information and contacted Pedro. Pedro was pretty excited to take the project on although he did let me know that it would be his first time making a rack for this application. With him down in San Diego, CA and me up here in Oregon I was a little nervous about the process. Still, having looked at the available options for Mini racks I really, really wanted this style.

It should be noted that Pedro is an extremely patient man. He guided me through the process I'd need to take in order to provide the measurements. His guidance and encouragement here was helpful, but I was still worried. After all, the success of this endeavor hinged on my ability to make measurements and in that capacity I had little confidence. So with Lori's help we measured about 20 times for each position before averaging those together and sending them down to Pedro. These are the results.

Reference at Your Own Risk.

From there Pedro went to work and would email me progress pictures along the way. All of this led up to last week on Wednesday when a large package, addressed to me, arrived at the Greyhound Station in Salem (yeah, I didn't know they did shipments either).

What arrived was honestly everything I hoped for. A great, classic looking rack that is very sturdy and really well made. So enough words, lets see some finished pictures.

Closing Out the Year

As we close out this most eventful year I must reflect on the progress made on the Mini with a touch of disappointment. I really didn't attack anything else of much substance although I did learn how to adjust the valves and also replaced the fuel filter, again.

Again because the new fuel filter that I installed earlier this year, a K&N model, ended up nearly melting. This as you can imagine was rather alarming. I really have never had a problem with their products before so this was unexpected. I did contact K&N about the issue and they offered to send out a replacement, but I simply opted to use a filter made by Wix which hasn't exhibited the same issues.

Other than that there has been two new additions to my Family, but neither of them will fit in the Mini yet.

L to R: Alex and Will

I bring you Alexander and Will. My boys.

They're still working on how to activate the Wonder Twin powers.

2010 Woodburn Dragstrip (definitely NOT racing)

One last shot of the Mini taken this year while visiting some friends at Woodburn Dragstrip late in the summer. The fellow at the ticket booth actually suggested that I should take the Mini on a few runs which was good for a laugh and probably would have ticked off more than a few serious competitors who could have put in at least two runs in the time it took for my little Mini to fling itself down the quarter mile.

Next year the plan is to start restoring the various subsystems in the car. Fuel capacity and delivery and subframe and suspension being two I'm thinking of. With the instant family in full effect I expect I'll have to manage my expectations, but I do expect a few things will get done at very least.

Counting the Revolutions

In February I finally received my new, reproduction Smiths Tachometer. It's styled after the classic gauges with new electronic internals. The Gauge Guys (APT Instruments) supplied the unit straight from the fine folks over at Caerbont in the UK. I had a chance to correspond with with one of the employees over there when we were having some communication issues and I was really impressed, thanks Neil! Thanks also to Chuck over at Gauge Guys for getting this arranged from this side of the globe.

I think mine is a fairly standard 8,000 RPM unit, although I requested the rounded chrome bezel to match my existing gauges.

In the picture above you can see the boxed Tach and my gauge pod that I ordered up. The pod itself fits any 80mm instrument and comes in a semi-gloss black finish. However, you can see from the picture above that I opted to repaint it in a wrinkle-finish black. I really dig the wrinkle finish. I'll be painting more with this later.

Retina Burn In? Check.

I mentioned before that the Wipac Quadoptics that I had so carefully installed, wired, and relayed were unceremoniously dumped (and still for sale) in favor of some shiny new Cibié H4 7" headlamps. This was actually pretty easy to accomplish since all I had to do was rewire the pilot lamp. The only serious modification was to the headlamp bucket. The Cibié lamp has the pilot light located near the lower edge of the lamp versus the Wipac which had it relatively close to the main bulb. Thus it was necessary that I cut a small section out of the bucket in order to accommodate for this. I took no photos of this work to make sure any explanation here was utterly worthless. Mission accomplished I'd say.

So are these better than the Wipacs? Well, that's not necessarily a slam dunk unless the sex appeal of the Cibiés does something for you in which case you probably wouldn't even think twice. Truthfully though as far as the dipped beam goes I have to say the performance is about equal. They both have a nice, sharp beam cutoff, very little scatter, and do a really great job of lighting up the road especially in foggy conditions. Both of these perform so much better than my "modern" Subaru headlights that it's almost depressing.

First Post.

A towel in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is described as being "massively useful" and since my car is British and the author of Hitchhikers Guide is British, and I like that book, and I like my Mini, and massively mini is such a nice oxymoron, and... well... Hey, I can't say Massively Mini is terribly clever, but it will work.

My goal here is to capture my thoughts and actions around the restoration of my 1971 Austin Mini 1000. Maybe show it some folks, maybe not. I may even follow through with this for more than a few posts, who knows?

I figured I could either track the progress on the various message boards or as a blog, for whatever reason the blog option won. Mostly because I tend to be rather verbose when I write so I figured I would feel a little less guilty writing so much when I can be certain few will read it. Versus trying to reach the viewers in the short attention span theater that is a message board. Oooh, shiny!

So let's get started shall we?