About My Mini

This is the new one! A British Open, all black, full leather, lots of wood, sports pack, - but still standard. More to come...

ABOUT MY MINI
A ROVER COOPER 1.3i

Shit happens!
So this is what happened to my Mini on our way back from the IMM 1997 in Ireland! What a mess! Starting with a strange noise from the engine bay it was all over after another 30 kilometers near by Cardiff (in Wales). First diagnosis: broken gearbox!

With the help of the local AA-Service the car was brought to a 24h Service Station in Cardiff. They said there was no way to get the Mini back on the road again within three days. So we decided to leave the Mini in Cardiff and drive home to Cologne in a rented car. I can tell you: It's good to have an european car travelling insurance (from the german ADAC)! They organized everything including the cartransport back to Cologne.
Ten days later the Mini was back and I got a call from my local garage: "We've got the engine out, you'd better have a look at it yourself!" - sounded like bad, bad news. And it really was a mess: Almost the complete engine bearing was gone! Some of the gears even had lost all of their teeth! And imagine all the metal splinters in the oil! So we decided to build in a new engine bay which had only 14.000 km on the clock.
Now I'm back on the road again. I hope this will never happen again. Although I've heard of a lot of injection Mini owners having similar problems when their cars had about 80.000km on the clock.

My Mini! It's a 1.3i Mini Cooper in storm-grey metallic with a black roof. You don't see this combination very often in Germany. I've seen only four or five of them in the last three years. Originally this color variation was selled only in the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg) countries.

I bought my Mini new as a reimport from a local Rover dealer in 1993, and now it has around 75.000 km on the clock. I use it not only as an everyday car to get to work but also for long distance holidays (Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Ireland, etc.), too.
I can't say that I never had problems with my car! The list of unexpected difficulties would be too long to write it down here. Now almost everything is O.K., except the common rust problems. But I would be interested to know what experiences all the other injection Mini owners have (rust, oil lost, engine stabilizators, water temperature sensor, etc.). I think everyone with similar problems know what I'm talking about!

Of course my Mini also has a "few" extras:

complete wood interior including dashboard, dooropeners, windowwinders and switchboard.
Clarion-RCS with CD-changer and four speakers
(I've placed two speakers in the dashboard instead of the airvents).
Janspeed tailpipe and itg-airfilter.
full size sunroof
(a manual one, without that awful roofspoiler!).
chrome locking fuel cap
165/60 R12 A510-Yokohama tyres.

And don't forget:
Mini Driving Seriously Damages Your Bank Account!

My decision to buy a Mini (this is my first one) was made very spontaneously after a test drive at the local Rover dealer. My first impressions were: no comfort, no safety, too loud, too bumpy, etc. But the next day I bought it! At first I planned to drive the Mini only for about a year, just to see how it is. It's been four years now with no end in sight. It's really amazing how fast you get fascinated by this little car!

Now I'm a subscriber of the german Mini club magazine "Mini Zeitung" and the "Mini World". And of course I'm a member of a Mini club, the Mini Drivers Cologne. We have a regular meeting every 14 days, we make weekend trips, drive to national Mini meetings and help each other with the cars. At the moment we are looking for a new meeting place (pub or restaurant) in Cologne, so if You want to join us please write me a Mail.

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Comments welcome, please mail to:
mareng@netcologne.de