Posted by In part two of the build I will be focusing on some smaller jobs that are needed to allow the mounting of the ECU on one of the frame rails in the engine bay. This is possible because the Vi-Pec ECU is fully weather sealed and the location chosen has the added bonus of not needing to use an extension loom from the factory connectors.
To make sure that the front anti-roll bar can’t hit the ECU I swapped from the much larger Cooper S (my car also had the sport suspension so had the largest of the factory ARBs) bar to an item from the Cooper One. This is modification that I’ve had on my list for awhile, running a much softer front bar reduces under steer and provides much more bite from the front end.
Removing the anti-roll bar requires dropping the front sub-frame. As part of the build I’ve also decided to dispense with the power steering pump so dropping the sub-frame will also make this a simple job.
Before the sub-frame can be lowered from the car the lower suspension ball joints, track rod ends, drop links and the steering column u-joint need to be disconnected. Yet again this is a job that is so much easier with a lift and a transmission jack.
Once all the bolts have been removed and the sub-frame lowered it can be moved away from the car and worked on separately. The first job was to remove the power steering pump and all of the lines. Removing the two bolts underneath the sub-frame that attach the pump to the sub-frame while the sub-frame was still on the car would have made life much easier! With the pump and the various pipes removed the plan is to fit a condor speed shop power steering delete kit (http://www.condorspeedshop.com/products/mini-powersteering-delete), this allows the residual fluid in the rack to circulate rather than locking it solid. This particular modification might not be to every ones taste but I’d much prefer steering feel and feedback to power assistance.
After removing the power steering pump the final job before replacing the sub frame was to swap over the anti-roll bar. This is a very simple thing to do with just four bolts to be removed. The entire roll bar and mounting hardware just swap over. The Mini One ARB looks tiny in comparison to the Cooper S item; I’m really looking forward to the improvement in front end grip.
The final bit of work to be done was swapping over the water pipes between heater matrix and the engine. The pipe work is much simpler as my car already has an external oil cooler so there are no water pipes going to the oil/water heat exchanger. One of the pipes is used as the feed for water-cooling the turbo and as previously mentioned the water output from the turbo is used as the return to the expansion tank.
Even with a relatively small number of jobs this still represented another 4 hours of work and I still didn’t even have a turbo on the car!