We'll have another, eventually .. but we're waiting until our older cat (who definitely does not like dogs.. or cats.. or people
) is no longer with us. Then we'll see. We do occasionally dog-sit for a friends
mongrel cockerpoo, though - Diesel was such a joy in the house in comparison, he never chewed anything, never destroyed anything (ok, that
one time) where she eats everything in sight - she even tried eating the fake coal in the gas fire ffs! Then again, she's a joy to walk where Diesel wanted a fight with
everything..
Took a while to get back to the car after losing Diesel, but I eventually turned the rats-nest of wiring behind the dash into a … slightly tidier rats-nest:
Oh and we finally got her Mini back - nearly two months after the accident:
And that takes us up to the end of
April already.
May(!) arrived and my wheels arrived from Bob @ Vintage! Unfortunately one was damaged in shipping by Fedex and had to be replaced; which was all taken care of by Bob, so top points for service and customer care, there, I’d highly recommend him:
First job in May was to fit the door latches - I wanted a nice ‘easy win’ on my to-do list, and thought .. how hard can that be? Follow instructions, job done.
So I did! First, a tip:
Don’t do everything to one door and then just think “I’ll just mirror the same measurements over” because you’ll find it won’t work. Ah, symmetry.
Dax supply the door latches with a backing plate that goes inside the door - you can tap that plate to accept the bolts or you can use nuts behind it; given access is damn near impossible unless you have hands like a five year old but arms like Michael Jordan, I went with the tapping option! Then, you can use the back half of the lock mechanism as a template to drill the four mounting holes, the large clearance hole for the pivot and the notch for the lock itself:
Here, you can see that I clearly fell for the “This door will be the same as the other one” and had to move the lock further away from the edge of the door.. This also lead to an interesting difference side-to-side - here’s the passenger side striker:
And here is the drivers’ side striker:
Note that one has a stack of washers - this was the door I did first, following the instructions in the build manual for lock position with respect to the door edge. Then I mirrored that to the other side and found that I couldn’t move the striker far enough away from the lock to clear.. Which implies the door gaps on the outside (which are roughly equivalent) do not follow through to the size of the inner skin of the door. Surprise!
Anyway, if you are in need of a rough guide, you are looking to put the striker about 65mm up from the corner return shown here:
With the back edge of the striker about 10mm in:
Also the “notch” will need to be much bigger than you think!
I got all this stuff close to aligned by measuring as above, but still needed to enlarge the striker post hole a little. No problem, because you’ll need to bond a steel spreader plate in behind the glass anyway - so what I did was drill the hole in that the ‘exact’ size I needed, then bond it in with Wurth and, while that was still pliable, set the position of the striker and tightened the bolt up:
Once the Würth had set I unbolted everything, rust-proofed the area and then covered it in a few layers of 350gsm glass mat to encapsulate everything. Finally, once that was dry, I drilled back through using the hole in the steel as my guide.
Now another tip - I did all of this with the car sitting on the lift, off the ground. Turns out, once you put it back on the ground the doors are harder to shut (hmm.. Chassis stiffness, anyone?? I’ll be honest - that was a little disappointing!) so you probably want to do a final adjustment on the wheels.
I also fitted the door hinge escutcheons, which was really just so that all the holes will be there. They’ll come off again for paint, like all the other brightwork:
Looking at the pictures, that was actually all done in one day - May 11th.