operation successful

It’s done and Charlie’s better than new, but let me start from the beginning ;)

I hab my appointment with Hartmut on Friday at 5pm. There were a couple of traffic jams on the Autobahn so I decided to exit at Darmstadt and drive across the Odenwald down to the Neckar valley. I really had a good time. But was cought in traffic around Heilbronn, as the A6 was blocked due to an accident.

Anyway, Hartmut was still on the road, when I arrived at his house and joined the family in a ludo battle ;)

Hartmut’s pit was blocked by an Opel Vectra, which had to be finished, and a Mitsubishi Pajero.  It was 7:30pm when I drove Charlie onto the pit.

We decided to start taking him apart to save us some time on Saturday. So we jacked the front up and placed it on stands.

First to go where the front wheels, the front bumper, strut bars and wheel housing.

Next to follow were the bumper carrier, carrier struts, intercooler cover, the heatshield from the exhaust manifold and intake.

We loosened the oilcontainer for the power steering, took out the intercooler, parted the control arms from the wheel hubs, unhooked the tie rods, took out the drive shafts and lossened the sway bar. Now we could unscrew the front axle support, lower it on a jack and pull it out under the car.

With that done, we called it a day and went to grab something to eat and a couple of beers. Actually bigagsl wanted to join us, but it seems the poor guy overslept *lol*

After a quick breakfast we rigged the engine to the crane and as the weight was off the gearbox mount, we could take out the gear box mount and therefore take out the gear box. The actual culprit was the throw-out bearing but as we had  all the parts, we decided to replace the clutch disk and the pressure plate anyway.

As this issue was resolved we put the gear box back in, which went real smooth right on the second try ;)

In the meantime bigagsl joined the party and helped taking the control arms off. The controlarm bushings were totally destroyed. The rubber dissolved once we applied a little pressure to the bushings.

Taking the metal shells of the old bushings out, was a major task, but bigagsl was very fond of the hydraulic press :D

After mounting the new powerflex bushings we attached the control arms to the front axle support and put charlie back together again. As Charlie was so brave, he got the black MINI wings and a few motoring|underground decals.

Surprisedly we didn’t have any parts left and bigagsl and I went for a spirited test drive.

Thanks to Hartmut for the good job and the bed for the night. Charlie’s as good as new!
And thanks to bigagsl for the help.