Josh Wardell’s MINI Cooper S

I drove my MINI off the dealer lot two years ago today. Looking back, it’s amazing how much fun it’s been. More amazing is, unlike most cars, it is still just as fun to drive as the day I bought it. There have been so many good times, and I’ve met so many great MINI friends. I’m almost at 32,000 miles (and still waiting on my 2nd oil change!) and still no major issues.

No celebration for today, however tomorrow I embark on my third MINIsOnTop, the biggest MINI event of the year around here. I still remember very nervously waiting to see if my MINI would arrive in time for MOT in 2004, and it arrived just in time. The MINI will of course be getting a bath tomorrow morning before I leave, so it can have a bright birthday smile.

Aside from a “Happy Anniversary” email from MINI of Peabody, the third issue of MC2 was waiting for me in the mailbox today. Perfect reading for any down time this weekend.

Here’s to many more years of motoring fun!

The biggest MINI event in the northeast, MINIsOnTop, is this weekend! Hopefully you already heeded my warnings and registered long ago. If not, keep an eye out for large batches of MINIs all over New Hampshire and New England.

On Friday I’ll be joining in the caravan from Woburn MA then on to Area 51, where we join with others from western Mass, New York, even Illinois; and head up to Gorham for trivia and beer at the Town and Country Inn.

It seems like we’ve had weeks of rain here and only Sunday did the sun finally come out. Hopefully it will remain sunny this weekend. As you can see from the pictures from 2004 and 2005 we’ve previously harsh weather conditions.

Here are some photos on flickr to hold you over till I post some from this weekend. There are over 500 people registered this year, I hope to see you there!

After an entire winter of being dirty, my MINI is finally clean. This past weekend I spent over 10 hours detailing the exterior! Most of it was a long backbreaking day on saturday where I go through my annual spring cleaning process, cleaning the paint with dishsoap, claybar, polishing, and waxing.

I’ve updated my car care page with the details of the process, as well as my more often regular wash and wax processes. I’ve also added some new items as I continue to evaluate new cleaning products. New for me is the addition of the Porter Cable random orbit polisher, to polish down scratches and swirl marks that had built up on my MINI, which is now 3 years old!

One part of the process that really impressed me was the claybar. Though I had done it last spring as well, this year, I really had a lot of dirt embedded in my paint. I noticed the last couple of washings, my doors behind the front wheels felt like sand paper. You could feel the claybar picking up the dirt in those areas as well as the boot, and it would get dirty much more quickly. Now they’re silky smooth. Also, I’ve had some rust-colored spots on the clear bra film on my white mirrors for a long time that I was never able to remove or scrub off. To my surprise the claybar took it right off!

I’ll spend another day soon on the interior, and then I will feel fully prepared for MinisOnTop, which is only two weeks away! I also started Round Two of the Trim Test with a few more products recommended in various forums. Once we get some rain we’ll see if they’re any better.

Just when you think the worst is over, something else happens. After two nights spent freeing my wheels from rust, Saturday I finally had the time to mount the new wheels, which I expected to now be an easy half-hour job. As I mentioned, during this process I also took the opportunity to change the wheel bolts to studs and lug nuts. When tightening down the last wheel using my torque wrench, two of the lugs would never get tight enough and seem to just keep going with only a medium amount of torque. and then…BANG! and some rust shavings fell to the ground. I thought I had stripped or even shattered my wheel hub. I removed the wheel to find everything seemingly OK. I pulled on the stud to see if it had stripped, when it came apart in my hands.

Now I was in trouble: the stud had snapped off with not much more than a nub sticking out from the rotor. I tried a pipe wrench, vice grips, and a number of things, but I just didn’t have enough surface area to get a grip on it to unscrew it out. I couldn’t put the wheel back on with a missing bolt..and I had a long drive that I was already rushing to leave for. I started contemplating my poor car getting dragged out on a flat bed when I started thinking out of the box. Finally, it came to me. I took my ever-useful Dremel and grinded down two sides of the bolt flat. Then I was able to get a grip on it with the vice grips and unscrew the bolt. It was one heck of a scare and proves yet again that even the easy jobs-like the 1-hour job of changing your seasonal wheels–can turn wrong in so many ways. And you can never have too many tools!

The metal inside the break looked especially soft. Then, I noticed that the other bolt in that wheel that wouldn’t tighten didn’t look like the other bolts: it was thin in the middle. It looks like there was a defect in the forging of these two bolts, resulting in a stretch in the middle that makes them slightly longer, thinner and weaker in the middle, and the threads are stretched and wider spaced. When the nut reached this section, it tried to squeeze those threads into their proper place, and the weaker center could not handle it and snapped. These were quality Gorilla-branded wheel studs and lug nuts but it proves you need to take a second to inspect things before you put them to use. Now I’m a little nervous about the rest of the studs and I might just return them all to the stock lug bolts. Click on the photo above to see a normal stud, the second faulty stud that has a thin center, and the two halves of the snapped stud.