Well everybody, here it is. My Rover Mini Mayfair.
It's a wine color that will have to do for now. Probably has somewhere between a whopping 40h.p. and a road gobbling 50 h.p.
It has 40800 original miles as the car was located in a coastal town in Jolly Old England with superb public transportation. So it got very little use. That can be good and bad as we all know.Not using a car can be almost as bad as overusing one.
I'll get into my plans later on. I just wanted to do a better docuementation on this project car then I did on my Z.
Here we have "Bertie" in the garage. I named him after the Hugh Laurie caracter from the BBC series "Jeeves and Wooster". This was long before Hugh became "House", and if you like a good laugh, you should see some of the old "Fry & Laurie" shows, also from the BBC.
Bertie had been in the driveway overnight after arriving from his first American home in South Carolina. Still wearing his old registration, and covered in the rain residue from a long trip on the back of an 18 wheel car hauler. I took delivery on the evening of September 20th, 2007. It was dark and raining, so straight home I had to go. I did not want to drive around in an unregistered car, tempting as it was, in the dark rain.
This is where the fun starts. A tiny car such as this in its homeland will go un-noticed. But here in the GIGANTIC USA, where it seems everyone needs lots of space for there large behinds, this litle bugger turns some heads. Then when the eyes readjust and tell you "No, he is on the wrong side of the car" you realise, Hey that car is right hand drive. This is just too cool.
A close up of the flat black grille. This tells a little bit about the cars history as well. Black grilles and chrome grilles seperate models as well as production dates from my understanding. I'll be changing this one to chrome, simply becuase I like chrome more... who dosen't? Besides, Mr. Beans Mini had a chrome grille and I'm also thinking along those lines for paint work as well.
Berties English Badge of Identification a.k.a.as a license plate. Pretty good finish on this Mini already. Almost makes me want to leave it alone for a while.
WestRidge Garage decal in the rear window. I'm told that is where this Mini was regularly serviced.
Well, as you can see, this is the very first of many car washes to come. I even got a coat of wax on the entire car in just over an hour. Not a sloppy job either, that's not my style.
I stand 5'7" and I tower over this little bugger. I still don't know how this car can acommodate a 6 footer and still seat adults in the rear as well. You can barely do that in my 05s back seat, and it's considerably larger on the outside.
Bertie dosen't require much driveway space either. I'm sure that if I owned two of these, and nothing else, I could get them both into a one car garage!
More to come......
