13
« on: 03 October 2024, 08:47:27 »
Starting with the exhaust. A cheap one can make the car really noisy on the motorway. They're not quiet on the motorway at the best of times but a cheap exhaust makes a massive difference. There are loads of cars being broken so you can probably get a half decent secondhand one for £100.
Headlight adjustment could simply be a badly fitted bulb. If not there are two easily accessible screws to adjust the headlamp.
Control arm bushes...whatever shortcut you may have seen it's far far easier to drop the front subframe. The control arm bushes are torqued to something like 186Nm and will be rusted in far tighter than this. With the subframe out it's easy to get an impact on them, or a breaker bar. Also pressing out and putting in poly bushes is a nightmare unless you have the perfect size tool. I ended up half pressing and eventually sawing out the bushes. Next time I'd simply replace the whole assembly for £35 a side.
If you do do the control arms then replace the ARB bushes whilst you're in there, extra £10 for the bushes and 2 min job. If not the subframe needs to come out again to do them later.
Dropping the subframe, whilst a big job isn't that bad. All the parts, bolts, balljoints are of decent quality and do come apart. The engine will hang there on its top mounts. The struts stay in place. You just need to pop one lower balljoint each side, which with a balljoint splitter (not a fork) isn't too bad.
Brake lines are a fiddly and messy job but low cost. A roll of cunifer and some nuts, total cost about £35 plus brake fluid.
So total cost in parts:
£35 x 2 for control arm bushes
£10 front ARB bushes
£35 brake lines
£100 secondhand exhaust
Total £215
But it is a lot of labour. Having had the subframe off a few times it would still take me a whole day (a long day) to do the control bushes properly (and carefully, torquing and cleaning as I go). If you've not done it before or hit a snag it'll be a couple of days.
Alternatively a Mini without an MoT is worth about £300 to £400 so you could just offload the car.
If you buy another Mini it'll probably have the same faults!!!
