GloverMini

More mini stuff

2011-01-26T13:54:00.000-08:00

Well, a lot has happened since the last post, Lynn has been in hospital for an operation, which even with insurance cost us $10,000+! As I have now been out of work for 20 months, this was a big impact! The computer repair business, and lately the sign making business have been keeping me busy, but not making huge amounts of money, as we have very little money to do any real marketing. The mini was made into the company car, and was signwritten, and has done stirling service picking up and dropping of PCs as required.
The good news is I probably have a new job! I am just waiting for the contracts to arrive, but I should be starting next Monday. Even better news is that the job is both computer related and is also in the motor industry, so a job in both my areas of interest. Eventually it will be based in Porirua, just 10 mins away, and 2 mins from where Lynn works, and not bad pay for what I will be doing. More details when I am sure its on.

I am hoping that this will be the spur I need to get on with building minimal. The shed and landscaping are almost finished, just another few hundred dollrs worth of materials and a couple of weekends work, should see me with some time and money to spare!

Mini back on the road

2010-05-14T22:02:00.000-07:00

Finally, I got my a into g and did some work on the mini. A year or so ago, I put a spare steering rack onto the car which I had acquired from a scrapyard (along with both subframes and some other stuff). It felt really good around the trackrod inner joints, which was the problem I was trying to fix. However, when it was on the car it was obviously very faulty, as there was very little steering ability at all. A bit dispirited, I took the car off the road and abandoned it in the garage, where it has been getting in the way ever since! As we sold the Honda Odyssey at Christmas, and I may be getting a new job soon, I need some transport.

So last week I dropped the front subframe and removed the rack, and stripped it down to find the fault. The track rod joints were excellent, and everything else looked good, the rack and the pinion and all bearing surfaces looking very good. A bit stuck, I stripped down the old rack for comparison, and the new one still looked better! Looking a bit closer, I saw that whoever had rebuilt the new rack had missed out a small spacer washer that goes on the pinion gear. It doesn't look important until you realise that 3 mil of end float is not going to make a steering rack very accurate, translating to probably 15-25mm of movement in the rack, completely removing the ability to steer! I quickly transferred the washer from the old rack, and reset all the end float and damper shims, and put the rack back in the car.
Next job was to put in a new battery (11 volts after 16 hours of charging is not healthy!), and start the car up. Some adjustments to the carburettor, and it was ready for the WOF. It failed on the brake balance on the front brakes which is par for the course, and sailed through its retest!

So the mini is now road legal and insured again, and on Monday it will be licenced! It will get used for to from polytechnic for a while, and if I get the local job I have applied for, for travelling the 10km a day for that. Any Signs of Success house calls will also be done in it. Next job is some sign writing possibly!

If I do get the new job, I am feeling a little more inspired to get on with Minimal!

The shed is finished

2010-01-20T23:14:00.000-08:00

Finished and partially filled. The outside and roof are complete, and a bench has been installed. I have some shelves planned, which will be built at the same time as the shelves in the garage.

More progress on shed

2010-01-09T16:29:00.000-08:00

The shed is going quite well. The paper (well QCAD) designs translated into the wood very well, and the new Ryobi saw cut the various pieces very accurately, including the roof trusses etc which were quite a worry.

Here are a few photos of progress to date. As yet I still have to put the roof on, and build a door and a shutter for the window space, hopefully I will post more when they are done. The shed was dismantled between the naked and topless phases, as it was easier to square up the frames and nail on the cladding with each piece laying on the concrete slab. The first assembly was to get all the holes pre-drilled to attach the four sides to each other, and to the concrete slab. This paid huge dividends, as when it cam time to assemble the shed, the pieces slotted together in seconds, and being perfectly square, all uprights are upright, amd horizontals are flat! With the roof trusses and purlins firmly attached, the shed is completely rigid, no movement in any direction. It's held to the concrete with 14 10mm dynabolts, so is not going anywhere in a hurry!

The naked shed

View from the window

Topless shed

Topless shed and labourer

A nicely framed view

Progress on the shed

2009-12-27T22:46:00.000-08:00

When we finally got round to fully pricing the shed and all the other stuff we wanted, we realised that it would be too much of what we got for the car. So we have decided to build the shed from scratch ourselves, saving $500-$800. So today we went out and ordered the timber for the shed, as well as some landscaping timber and some shelving materials for the garage.
With the money I saved, I have bought a Ryobi Compound bench top saw, which was a really good deal at $289. I used it to make a bench for itself today, and when the timber comes it will certainly make building the shed much more straight forward.

It's been awhile

2009-12-22T15:37:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted here for a while, as all money taking projects are on hold. After our trip to the UK in May 2009, I came home to life without a job, which is still the case. So the mini is still off the road, no shed has been built, and my garage is crammed full of cars.

However, we have just made the decision to sell the Honda Odyssey, because even though it is reliable and comfortable, we don't need and can't afford two regular cars. So the Honda is going, and with the proceeds I am going to finally buy the shed and put it on the base we put down a year ago, and also put some extra shelving in the garage where the gardening stuff is at the moment.
This will give me room to get the mini out from where it is hiding, finally build a good steering rack from the two I have (maybe even get some repair kits from the UK) and get it back on the road. Hopefully with the very low mileage I am doing at the moment, it will be cheaper to run than the Honda.
In February I will become a full time student again, just 6 months doing a Certificate in Web and Print design, and having a small run about will be good, even though I can use the bus when I really need to.

2009-02-12T16:43:00.000-08:00

Last weekend (Waitangi weekend) we spent three days digging out the foundations for the shed, making the shuttering or forms for the concrete, buying the builders mix and cement, hiring the concrete mixer, and finally on Sunday, mixing what was supposed to be a cubic metre of concrete and laying it. Mixing took place in the front of the house, and it was delivered to the rear of the section, 20 metres and 2 vertical metres away, by wheel barrow, where it was tamped and screeded into a very solid base. Ran out of mix just before then end, so had to go out and get another half scoop in the trailer and another bag of cement, but it was all done by 2:30. After a quick trip out for lunch, the rest of the day was spent cleaning up.

It's been curing all week under a layer of polythene, and this weekend is the grand unveiling of 'the slab'. Next step is to order the shed and erect it on the slab, which should be in the next month or so when we have a bit more cash! So - one more step closer to getting the garage clear for work on the car! Shame I can't afford it any more! May reduce the welding down to a cheap arc welder to start off with, and see what sort of results I can get with that. Probably save about $600 that way. Steel is also cheaper at the moment.

Went to the 'skite' night at the Constructors Car Club in Petone on Tuesday, to look at the various club members projects. I had seen most of the completed cars before, but some of the partially completed cars were interesting.

The mini is off the road at the moment, I have two less than perfect steering racks, and I need to make at least one good one before the car will pass a WOF, and frankly I can't be bothered at the moment. When I have something new and shiny to put them in, maybe I'll get around to it.

2009-01-19T15:42:00.000-08:00

Part of the 'deal' for building the car is that I put a shed in the garden, so that all the gardening type stuff is out of my workshop. This means that it is accessible without wandering through an area of sharp/hot bits, and also that I have more room in the garage for car bits etc. Before the shed can be built, quite a lot of changes have been necessary to make room for it in the section, effectively removing a large raised vegetable garden, replacing it with two others in different places, extending some decking up to the new garden, terracing a sloping part of the section into other gardens, and generally shifting a lot of soil and clay around. The good news is I am within a few hours work of starting on the shed! Hopefully, the shed will be up by March, then I will take a month or two to reconfigure the garage and shelving so that it becomes a 2.5 car garage again. We are considering a trip to the UK in May, so maybe after that I can get a welder and some steel and start translating the ideas into hardware!

In the meantime, I have bought a full version of QCAD, and used it to generate better build diagrams and measurements. Looking good for a running chassis by this time next year!

2008-10-29T19:55:00.000-07:00

Since my last post, I have upgraded my Ubuntu machine to 8.04 - hardy heron which is a long term support version (lts). I also loaded the community version of QCAD, which is a rather nice 2D Computer Aided Drafting program.

I got a book on Autocad 2004 from the library, which gave me a kick start on how to use QCAD, and I have started translating the spreadsheets and Google Sketchup pictures into real dimensions and drawings.

This acted as a sanity check on some of the numbers I was getting out of the spreadsheet, and while it all basically worked, drawing it accurately picked up some serious errors, of between 5 and 25mm, which would have really messed up the cutting and welding process.

So I have gone back to first principles using the original base measurements, and it is amazing what a useful tool a good CAD package is. One quickly becomes adept at using it, and can trust it totally, so long as you get the input right! It's great to finally get down on paper/computer those tricky areas such as the pedal box mounts and the detail of the sub frame mounts, with accurate cutting dimensions and welding positions. Obviously my cutting and welding abilities will not be up to the accuracy of the drawings, but as each section is added adjustments can be made.

So another few weeks and I should have accurate drawings of all the key components, and if I renew my current contract, I may buy myself a welder for Christmas!

We are off to the South Island next week to pick up the youngest son from polytechnic, so I am having an enforced break from the computer!

A long gap

2008-09-16T00:03:00.000-07:00

Since my last post, we have had a fairly wet New Zealand winter, and other than finishing the welding course, no further progress has been made on the car. In fact the mini is now off the road for a couple of months, because I was a bit fed up paying warrant dees and licence fees for a car I was only doing 1000km in every six months. I haven't competed in any events since then, but Lynn and I did go to see the Rally of New Zealand in Hamilton, so not totally motorsport free.

The main reason for this inactivity is the need to spend time and money on other things. Since getting broadband at last a few months ago, I have been building up a home network. Downstairs in the lounge we have a 'Media Centre' PC, an Acer L3600 3l format, with 2 gig of ram, 500gig hard drive, a TV tuner, and a wireless network card built in. This is connected to a Samsung LCD TV, and an Onkyo 8522 stereo receiver, with two sets of speakers, a pair of Wharfdale Diamond 9s flanking the TV, and a pair of Kef C20s as the main room speakers. It's all connected so that I can record TV, VHS tapes and audio from any source (including LPs and cassettes) onto the computer, and the computer can play back through the stereo and the TV. Our main passion on that at the moment is listening to BBC 7 over the internet.

In the office I have an XP machine with MS Office etc on it for office type work, and an Ubuntu machine running Ubuntu 6.6 as it came off the disk at the moment, but with an upgrade to 8.4 or 8.10 planned in the near future. The mother in law has an XP machine which I have just rebuilt with new memory, new hard drive and new DVD drive, as well as a wireless mouse and keyboard and HP printer I had spare. All these machines are networked through a Dynalink DSL-604T Wireless ADSL2 router, either wirelessly, or in case of the machines in the office, via ethernet.

Also connected to the router is a Venus Network Attached Storage device with a 320gig hard drive in it. All machines have access to this 24*7, as it is the only part of the system never turned off, other than the router. Next step is to make the NAS drive available via FTP for when I am travelling etc. Nice piece of hardware, cheap ($90 plus $90 for the HDD) and a doddle to set up and use.

Downstairs in the lounge thee is an HP 8183 wireless printer/scanner with built in negative and slide scanning, as well as a light scribe DVD writer! Another nice piece of hardware, and it can also act as a network shared drive too if I leave a big memory card in one of the slots!

So setting that lot up has been taking cash, and an incedible amount of my spare time.

Plans for the next few weeks include building the shed I promised myself last summer. When that's done, I may start work on the car again. In the meantime I may build an A frame to tow the mini with, so that I can get to some of the more 'fun' events. I have to have some justification to buy a welder eventually!

Finally getting it!

2008-05-07T17:45:00.000-07:00

Another week of the welding course, and as I said in the last entry, revisiting the other forms of welding was a revelation.

Within minutes I was laying down perfect welds using the mig welder, everything I ave practiced just came together, balance, speed, the whole caboodle.

I took another set of the tubes for the smaller frame in with me to practice on, and to ask Greg's advice. He reckoned it was a perfect exercise for the tig welder.

So we set the TIG up to run with the hand control rather than the foot pedal, and off I went. 2-3 cm of practice bead, then into the framework. External corners are so easy, no filler rod required. Butt joints are really easy, the trick is the amount of filler rod that is needed, and the gap between the parts. Inside corners are a bit more difficult, and I need more practice on them. Perhaps I should stick to arc for those.

The look of the work is amazing, I'll post a photograph later, but it looks really good. I did some more mig practice afterwards using similar sized tubing, and its just as easy, but nothing like as good looking. Talking with Greg the tutor, he reckons some of these cheaper TIG machines ($500+) are really worthwhile, and as they do arc too, are really good value. I'll have to rethink my ideas again!

A few more weeks!

2008-05-05T19:36:00.000-07:00

Another few weeks have passed with some progress. The welding course is now 8 weeks old, with 4 weeks to go. After MIG welding, we did three weeks of TIG, including some Aluminium welding. Its all very nice, but all a bit finicky and expensive and slow. Then we did a week of arc welding, using the big machines at the poly, and some high quality welding rods. Wow, arc is so simple, cheap and easy! Given that I have lots of practicing to do before I start on the real thing, arc is so much cheaper and easier to practice on!

Some of the arc welding you see on some tubular steel chassis is frankly quite awful, blobby with no real structure to it. With minimal practice, an antique machine and chinese welding rods, I have produced welds that look really quite good in comparison, and I have a long way to go with improving my welding! Here is a couple of examples of my welding done in my garage.

The larger frame is a mock up of the upper layer of my chassis, but a third scale. The smaller frame will sit on one of the two similar shapes on the larger frame. They will together make the top front subframe mounts. Those bits are actually life size.

This is an inside corner weld on the main frame. Arc welding is great for these welds, especially with 'contact' rods. Just ram the rod into the corner, and drag across the join!

The smaller frame in detail, showing the butt welds. I still have some work to do on these so they look good, and a new welding machine with variable ampage would help a lot.

Last week we did gas welding. maybe its a confidence thing, but I really got on well with gas welding too! Maybe I should revisit MIG to see how good I am now. Hopefully in our last 4 weeks we will.

So, I am going towards arc welding for the whole chassis, possibly buying a new hobby machine, with variable amps between say 40 and 140, which should cover most things I need to do, or possibly a 10-80 amp inverter, and use the old machine for bigger stuff. Depends what I finally get round to welding!

The Cube

2008-03-28T14:38:00.000-07:00

Had to share this. I had a strip of 3mm plate, about 33mm wide at one end, 350mm long, about 45mm wide at the other, and I wanted to maximise the welding practice I got out of it.
So, I trimmed it up0 into a 33mm wide strip along its length, using my scorpion electric saw, and my Ryobi bench grinder to clean it up.
I then cut it into 3 67mm lengths, and the remainder into three practice pieces. Each of the three 67mm pieces I cut half through at exactly half way, marking two exact 33mm squares with a 'score' line between them. I then folded each one to a right angle bracket. Thanks to Greg at Weltec for showing me this technique. What this gives you is an L shaped bracket with a very neat bend at the half cut, with no bending on the rest of the metal.
I then tacked the three L shaped pieces together into a cube, where each L shape makes up two of the sides. This took a bit of doing, as there is nothing to clamp together when putting the last piece in, and my cutting and folding was not perfect, so making it look good was quite hard. I had to file out a couple of tacks and try again to get it right.
When it was all tacked up with the arc welder (2.5mm rods on 90 amp), I 'corner' welded each of the 12 outside corner edges, including the ones which were cut and folded. I drilled a small hole in one of the sides before I started welding, to make sure it didn't explode with the heat, or implode when it cooled!
I then used a disc sander in my angle grinder to clean off the excess weld and splatter! The result, one cube, very shiny, with some very good welds and some less than very good welds! I am still proud of it though!

I also bought a copy of the Haynes Welding manual (#4176) which was excellent value and a really good read, at $35 from Super Cheap Autos!

2008-03-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

Three weeks into the welding course, and I am starting to feel good about it! I bought myself a self darkening helmet last weekend, it was on special for $100 and I couldn't resist it. I also bought an antique arcwelder (from the lady who thought she had a mig welder!), which I paid $90 for, a bit over the top, but she was quite attached to it sentimentally. It has no knobs or dials, just two terminals marked 10g and 12g. The 12g is a 90 amp output, and the 10g 140 amp output. The big one will be good for heavy plate that MIG and TIG won't do, and the light one will be good for tacking up 2ml tubing before I weld it some other way. I had a good play with it at the weekend, I found a 4ml plate used as a timing chain back plate on an 1100, and burned about 20 rods away practicing! I might try welding some 2ml tubing to see how good it is at that thickness.

The extra practice and the new mask meant that the last night of MIG welding at the poly went quite well. We were joining pieces of metal together, which I find quite hard having no sense of balance and poor eyesight. Following a line is quite difficult. But we did spend 3 hours on our own instead of in pairs, so I spent an hour or so just practicing butting a bead of weld down, at the right speed, with the correct angles etc and managed a couple of perfect runs!

Next time we do TIG welding, which I am really looking forward to. In the meantime, I think I will buy some steel and start making up some practice versions of the main joins on the car. After doing TIG, some stick welding and some cutting practice, we can revist some of the areas we have covered and try some of our own projects.

New Welding Course

2008-03-06T15:30:00.000-08:00

I started the new welding course at WELTEC on Tuesday, and so far it is looking quite good. Doing 3weeks on MIG, 3 weeks on TIG, and then the rest of the time on other techniques such as cutting (plasma, gas) and using other equipement. Hopefully then we will get time to work on our own projects too. I acquired a nice seat with lost of support and adjustment, which I fancy putting in the mini, but it will need a nice subframe building, to fit it to the original mounts. That will probably be my first project.

The mini failed its warrant of fitness last saturday, funnilly enough on non standard seat brackets for the existing seats. This is because I moved the seat back a few inches using standard mini seat extension brackets, but then went one step further, and added extra brackets gto hold the seat still while cornering hard in street sprints etc. I think it was the extra brackets it failed on. All I have to do is revert to the original seat mounts, and it will be OK. It also failed because the sump guard sits ontop of the brake measuring machine, stopping the test from working. Not sure how that works, as he managed to drive it on and off the machine and the wheels got plenty of grip. The stainless steel exhaust is also leaking at a joint, so I am going to have to smear it with jointing compound, which I amnot keen on using on such a nice exhaust!

One of my wifes friends has a MIG welder once owned by her deceased husband, which I hoping to get for a fair price. He died some 10 years or so ago, so I am not sure how good it will be, but it's worth alook!

I think the garage needs a damn good claenout this weekend, so thats my freetime done.

Back from holiday

2008-02-18T17:27:00.000-08:00

I have just had 9 days in the south island, and looking forward to doing some work on the car soon. Link to holiday blog.

2008-02-02T22:42:00.000-08:00

OK, I know I am not taking this blogging thing seriously, everyone should be hanging on my everyword in my daily entries, but I really have other things to do, and as I have not progressed much on the car, or spent much leisure time on the computer, the blog has suffered!

First things, those links below are rubbish, if you want to see the spreadsheet or the Googl Sketchup diagrams of the car, here are the links

http://www.glover.gen.nz/minimal/chassis.xls

http://www.glover.gen.nz/minimal/chassis.skp (save on your had disk and then open it in sketchup.

Here is the latest jpg version of the chassis if you don't have Google Sketchup. This now shows the complete chassis, and the planned superstructure over the chassis, including front wings, bonnet, scuttle and nosecone. Only in line drawing mode, but it is easier to see if you download the drawing into sketchup!

Secondly, I have just comeback from a wonderful days motorsport at the Port Road sprints, at Port Road in SeaView, Petone, Wellington. I came deadlast out of 43 entries, but I improved on my times at the Labour weekend run last year (down from 118.6 to 117.77 - whoo-hoo). A cracking hot day, got slightly sunburned as usual, and had a great day nattering to Dick, Shane and Brian and many others! Geoff took some pictures http://s69.photobucket.com/albums/i66/geoffwnz/2008/Port%20Rd%20Feb/ including this one of me http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i66/geoffwnz/2008/Port%20Rd%20Feb/IMG_6192.jpg

Last weekend I had a very similar day at the Wallaceville Hillclimb, in Upper Hutt. Got the mini into 3 digit speeds for the first time in competition (125kph at one point!) and came about 5th from last. It was a classic car event, so there were some interesting but not necessarily competitive cars. Here is a photo from the day. Despite coming last in my class, I won a prize at the prize giving (so did everyone else!). See other photos from Jody Seabright here http://www.seabrightmotorsport.co.nz/Photos/Wallaceville%20Hill%2008/index.html

2007-12-02T22:15:00.000-08:00

Wow, I now have broadband. Still a bit new to it, but expect to see more photos of the cars soon! It's taken nearly a week to get everything sorted, including the wireless network, 3 email accounts in Outlook for 4 family members etc, but its looking good now. Links to the sketchup diagram (you'll need Google Sketchup to view it) .

http://nz.briefcase.yahoo.com/dave.glover@xtra.co.nz/car/chassis.skp
and the excell spreadsheet of the dimensions
http://nz.briefcase.yahoo.com/dave.glover@xtra.co.nz/car/chassis dimensions v2.xls

Royal Spoonbills

2007-12-02T22:14:00.001-08:00

P1030303
Originally uploaded by Dave Glover

Just experimenting with my new broadband connection, Flickr etc, and loading up this picture of Royal SpoonBills (Kotuku-ngutu papa) in Porirua Harbour, 3 kms from my home in Whitby

First scale plans

2007-11-13T19:28:00.001-08:00

2007-11-12T19:30:00.000-08:00

I had a bit of a disappointment last week, I was bidding on a metal band saw which was well within my price range, and because of my inexperience in the ways of online auctions, I missed out on getting it. I suppose i will just have to learn how to cut accurately by hand! I have also been researching welders. I was interested in a MIG welder, but have been reading things about how difficult they are to use when you use gasless wire and how hard it is to be accurate. A friend recommended just tack welding the chassis together and get a professional to weld it. This seemed like a good idea, so I started looking at cheap 'stick' welders (arc welding only) and got side tracked into 'inverter' welders, which are really light, and can have facilities such as high frequency starting and 'anti-stick'. A good Inverter arc welder can also be converted to a TIG welder, and TIG gives a realy good weld if you can master it! So I am no closer to buying a welder! I am booking myself onto a wleding course at 'WELTEC' in Petone next year, as the course at Wellington High School which I started this year was particularly useless.

I have started to translate my sketches and spreadsheets into some accurate scale drawings, which I will post when our A3 scanner at work is up and running. Its amazing how good the calculations in the spreadsheet are, but I am also picking up errors as I draw them to scale.

I also finalised the body styling for the whole vehicle (sort of short and dumpy Lotus 7, with curved aluminium body panels and possible a fibreglass nosecone). When I get a decent drawing done of it, it will be posted here!

First pictures

2007-11-06T15:46:00.000-08:00

First pictures - firstly a picture of what the subframes look like, and secondly a wire frame diagram of the chassis. They are oriented roughly the same so you can see where the subframes fit into the chassis.

Minimal

2007-11-05T22:04:00.001-08:00

This blog is about me and my cars. I am Dave Glover, and I own a Leyland Mini Clubman, which I have recently rebuilt, and in which I compete at low level motor sport events in New Zealand. I have recently started on another project, to build myself a sports car using a tubular steel chassis and components from a Mini. I have built and run such a car before (over 30 years ago now) but that was a car made from a kit (known as the Mk 1 Mini Scamp), so was somewhat simpler. When I told a few people what I was doing they suggested I make a blog of my progress, so that others who were interested could see what I was doing. It sounded like a good idea, so here it is.

The project has been on the go for a few weeks now, but while the progress is good, the results to date are not very visible. I will fill in previous progress as I go along, along with current stuff, and post a few photographs as bandwidth permits.

I suppose I have had the itch to do something for a few years now. Rebuilding the mini over the last few years has rekindled my love of cars, and competing in it reminded me of how much fun a small fast car can be. I have considered all sorts of things, including three wheeler minis, electric minis, and more recently I have become interested in creating a fuel injection system to use instead of my fish carburettor. I was up at the local breakers yard looking for suitable parts to scavenge, when I happened upon a mini with two excellent sub frames with some other bits and pieces. I bought the two for about $100 NZ, and the idea was born.

Since then I have drafted out a design, cleaned up the design, made some calculations, cleaned up the design some more and started building a prototype in wood to check my calculations.

I have also started to collect the appropriate tools, having bought myself a pedestal drill, and am looking for a metal band saw and a welder from 'Trade Me'.

More soon, when I find out how this blogging things works.