After having a recent drive in Ben’s mini with Dad, it quickly became apparent that the first port of call in restoring Ben’s mini is to sort out the suspension and to tune up the engine, as the drive was rough to say the least! The slightest hole or dip in the road felt like you ran over a land mine! One pot hole was so bad that Dad pulled over so that we could check that the bang from underneath the car wasn’t due to something falling off!

As Ben had recently had new suspension put on his mini over the Christmas holidays 2011, it should just be a case of changing the setting to one of the 20 odd available so should be fairly simple.

We will be honouring any plans that Ben had for his mini, I have discussed some of his ideas that we currently know about below.

In terms of asthetics Ben wanted to get it resprayed and was interested in getting a white roof and white racing stripes on the bonnet. The original paintwork is shown to the left.

There are also quite a few scrapes (that I haven’t shown) that will benefit from a new lick of paint.

As the paintwork is quite old, the whole mini needs to be resprayed, not just the bonnet and roof; although when it was polished up to be included in Ben’s funeral procession it already looked much brighter!

Ben was also interested in changing the wheels to alloy wheels. He had 4 rather old looking ones in his room that he was going to get cleaned up to be put on, but it has been suggested that it probably won’t be much different in cost to buy new alloy wheels, so we will be looking in to which option is best. There are close ups of two different wheels below, the one on the left looking slightly rusty so they certainly could do with a bit of TLC!

Ben was also interested in refurbishing the mini interior, with new seats, dash board etc. Here are some pictures of what it looks like currently…

We have begun to think about ideas for refurbishing the interior and have been looking at www.minisport.com/ and www.minispares-online.co.uk/ for inspiration.

We are thinking that it would be nice to keep the seat colour quite similar with a cream colour, as Ben seemed to quite like this colour, as he re-did parts of the interior in this colour with leather from a second hand sofa.

However none of the interior furnishings or exterior paintwork will be touched until the mechanical side of the mini has been adjusted, tuned and repaired (where necessary) to make sure that it is able to complete the London to Brighton Run successully with no breakdowns!