With so much time and money invested into the project coupled with the fact that I am supercharging a Yamaha R1 bike engine, I thought it would be a good idea to have some fire protection.

I decided to buy and install a "plumbed in system" that would be permanently hooked up ready to deploy should the worse occur.  I will also carry a hand held extinguisher for smaller fires if they occur.

For quite some time I toyed with the idea of adding a dummy right hand filler cap for that 60's look but it didn't sit well with me to have a fake item just for show. Whilst weighing up my options, it occurred to me that I could re-purpose it as a location to house a battery isolator. Something I wanted to fit anyway to disable the power during long periods of inactivity.

What a place!

I visited a few weeks ago to attend a wedding. The plan was to see as much of the country as we could within the limited time frame of 10 days or so. My wife and I had 3 days booked in Tokyo so I thought it would be rude not to attend the legendary Mini Maruyama.

I will let the pictures do the talking.

I've always been a big fan of MK1 minis and I particularly liked the early Morris mini bonnet badge shape. My custom badge started out as a Morris badge I purchased over 10 years ago from eBay. I was originally going to fit it as is but the condition wasn't perfect and the addition of a 3D printer to my tools has opened up lots of opportunities to customise. 

The majority of the running gear was brand new when it was fitted to the car. I had already painted it in black hammerite before fitting it and it hadn't covered any miles under it's own steam. The wear visible is from storage, jacking up and two house move on a car transporter. 

Well look at that. One Yamaha R1 5PW fuel-injected 1000cc bike engine sitting under it's own support in the front of my Mini Cooper!!

Oh and whats that I see. An offset brake servo :-)

Well I'm fully committed to the fitting the R1 engine now. I've sold the old A series engine and its off to it's new owner.

A set of used Group 2 arches arrived yesterday that I picked up The Mini Forum for a decent price. They need a repaint but overall the condition is good and I can't wait to see what they look like fitted.

Whilst I am going to the hassle of transplanting a Yamaha R1 engine into the Cooper I thought I would take the opportunity to carry out a few exterior mods. I have always liked the look of MK1's so I thought why not add a few MK1 touches to this mini.

I quick google for inspiration found this picture.

My Mini won't look exactly like this but this is the overall look I am going for.

It has been quite a few years since I carried out any major updates on the old Retromini website so a change was in order. The old site was focussed on my old Mini project which sadly is no more and never saw the roads again.

These past 4-5 years I have been quietly working away carrying out a ground-up restoration of my 1997 Rover Mini Cooper. It was never intended to be a full restoration following an MOT failure but as these things often go, one thing lead to another.....

This new look website will soon display all the hard work I have put into restoring the aforementioned Cooper. I will try and post stuff that I found useful along the way to hopefully make it a little easier for anyone undertaking a similar project.