Original 1964 Austin Mini Cooper S Mark 1 1275 Engine Rebuild
Hey everybody, call your class for many DIY and on today's episode we're picking up a new project. Welcome to the next episode of Classic Mini DIY and in today's episode we are somewhere different. Obviously, we're in my car, we're in my Toyota Tacoma and we are on the way up to town a little bit north of Charlotte called Canapolis where we are picking up a very cool Cooper S engine project.
I was contacted by a gentleman up in Canapolis who said, hey I have this Mark I Cooper S that I want to do a restoration on. And he said, is there any chance that you could help me out with the engine? To which I replied, absolutely, I would love to work on a Cooper S engine.
So we've been talking the last couple months, get everything ironed out and pick up and make sure we're getting all of the right parts because he has a ton of different mini parts, engines and all sorts of stuff. And what's really cool is the pedigree behind this engine and behind this car. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to head up there right now, pick up the engine.
But while I'm there I'm going to take a few videos, few shots in this car. It is absolutely incredible, it's super super cool and it's going to be a real treat to work on this. So I will catch up with you guys here in just a minute and I'll show you guys the car that this engine is coming out of. Okay, now it's time to take a look at this car, which is a 1964 Austin Mini Cooper S Mark 1 1275.
And this car is the real deal. It is an actual numbers matching Austin Mini Cooper S. It has the engine matching number, chassis number, everything is parts matching, which is really, really cool.
The color on this car is the original paint that is the almond green and old English white. It needs a little bit of TLC, but nothing that is unrepairable. But what's cool is the pedigree behind this engine and behind this car. This car was used by this gentleman's mother to race in all sorts of drag division, drag class, all of these different races.
This car was raced in one of those races.
This car got all sorts of trophies and that are proudly displayed on the back windows of the car, which had a ton of really cool pedigree to me.
I mean, look at this. There was so many that she had to put some on the other window.
Now the car has the original suspension and original disc brakes on the front and it has a hydro-lastic suspension. The suspension is a little rough. Need some work still, but nothing that is not repairable. And you know, these kinds of things are just little bits when you have a number is matching car. Now what's cool is I wanted to call this out. There seems to be an anti-roll bar on the rear of the car. I've never seen anything like this before. I'm not sure if that was a factory option or what.
The interior is also just as original and just as a immaculate. It needs a little bit of cleanup, but original steering wheel, original seats. So I am just so excited to be sharing this with you guys and I'm really excited to be part of this engine build.
So let's hop over to the shop and we'll get started on the actual engine. All right. So how cool is that story? This engine or that engine over there has been through a ton. And the car that goes with these engines is just man, it one of the best things about big projects like this are the stories and the, you know, pedigree behind the project. You know, rebuilding an engine by itself is always a lot of fun, but rebuilding one that you have a history with or that you know the story about how it got here.
That's what makes minis really cool, I think. And so now that you guys know the backstory, let's talk about the parts that we have so far.
And now for those of you with a keen eye, you probably noticed that the bottom half of this engine, the gearbox here is not actually a Cooper S gearbox. This is from an MG or an Austin America, something like that.
But the block and the head are from the original Cooper S engine. Off to the side here, I've also got a Cooper S block, another one of the Cooper S blocks, the 1275 block. That is the AEG 312 casting. And then I have a three-sync row gearbox. And then what we both think is the original gearbox, a three-sync row with the correct output and the correct remote shift housing, those are probably going to be the gearbox that we're going to build up and put back on this car.
What we're going to be doing is trying to make this as period correct as possible. These kinds of things, it's important to take your time and to really really get all of the details, right? Because when you do, you really end up with an incredible end project and an end product.
And we are probably going to be getting more parts kind of off and on throughout the next couple months to get this all built up. And depending on how hard it is to find some of these original parts, we may have to, you know, it might take a little while.
But to start off, it's pretty straightforward. We want to take this gearbox off and we want to take this apart so we can really inspect this cylinder head. Although we do have a second cylinder head, we want to inspect this one. We want to check everything up here as you can see, it's super grimy, super dirty, so we're going to want to clean that up. And hopefully, there's no damage to the block and, you know, even more hopeful, neither of the blocks and neither of the heads have any damage. And then maybe we can even build up two of these engines, which would be pretty cool. O
kay. Before we go any farther, first off, the smell that was released when I lifted that up might honestly be one of the worst things I've ever smelled, but the piston has dirt in it.
It's literally just dirt. I thought it was rust, but it's not. How strange. Very, very peculiar. Anyway, head gasket actually looks good. Should have just run it.
All right, so this is one of the parts that you can see is not quite a mini part. This timing cover backplate right here should look like this. So you have your timing cover plate that's on the other side. This is a mini sized one, and then this one down here is for a car that had a different mounting system. I think this actually was a supplementary engine mount for the original configuration of this engine, or rather this gearbox because the block itself is, as I said, a Cooper S block. But let's get this timing cover off.
We'll get this incorrect plate off, and then we should be able to rotate it the rest of the way around and get the whole heavy-ass gear box off. Let's get bumpy.
Okay, so that is going to wrap up the tear down of this Cooper S engine. Now if you guys have any questions or maybe you saw something, maybe there's some fine detail that you wanted to share with me, please do. There's some really interesting stuff on this engine and I think it's going to be a lot of fun to put this back together and get it all just absolutely period correct.
The next step unfortunately is the one where I don't get to film very much and that's going to the machine shop, bringing the crank, the block, all the things that we have here, bringing them up there and getting them done, cleaned up and worked over properly. But the end result is we've got beautiful clean engine parts as well as gears to go back together and in this Mark 1 1275 Cooper S. So very exciting stuff. You're not going to want to miss it. There are some really cool parts of this build that I am really looking forward to.
So if you haven't already, subscribe to the channel, like this video if you like it and yeah, I think that's going to basically wrap this up. But anyways, you guys know the drill. Until I see you guys in the next episode, enjoy those minis and motor on. Take care guys!
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