Getting to Know My Classic Mini... and I BREAK DOWN!

hi guys i'm shmee and today i'm visiting topaz detailing to catch up with the guys and make a plan for my soon-to-arrive 675 lt spider it is nearly here it's been a very long wait lots of you asking so watch this space because that car is coming soon so most of this video is actually going to be an update about my mini now that i've had it for about six weeks driven it a fair bit but firstly some pretty cool stuff going on here at topaz it's a place obviously i've visited quite a few times before and i think my most recent trip was when i came down with the ferrari ff we took some house keys and we keyed scratched the front bumper that was definitely a video that made a lot of you cringe and quite a few of you let me know in the comments but it was a lot of fun to do it and it truly demonstrated how paint protection film saves these cars and that is why my previous two times were to put film full coverage over the whole body of my 650s spider and then my 675 lt coupe so the spider is going to be no different we will perfect the paint with some detailing before we protect it with full paint protection film which just means stone chips small scratches any sort of bags if people walk past your car on the street or at events won't do as much damage as they otherwise might and it's just film that you can then change if needs be so it's a wonderful service topaz offer and in fact they're actually expanding operations it used to just be one unit whereas now they've got a new one so this is just going to be detailing and the other unit just up is going to be protection film so there's a lot of space for some cool stuff to go through their doors um so my spider will be coming down getting everything sorted and i can't wait for that because i have to do that before i can take it out on the road and drive it it's just not worth the risk of a single stone chip especially to a custom paint work so the car will come down here get fully looked after and i can't wait then to get it out on the road now then what we're going to be talking about in this piece is the mini the schmini this of course is my 2001 classic rover mini in fact being 2001 that means it was just before the bmw minis started and in fact it's one of the last 500 kind of a special edition which is signified by the silver stripes on the bonnet silver door mirrors the silver roof and also the silver part of the steering wheel on top of in this case the pearlescent british racing green which is a color i think it's just so iconic the car is so iconic and that's why i went for it and the color configuration set up i truly love as well there goes a 599 leaving ferrari there are also some other nice cars around here just to sort of point out the speciality especially perta and the dv6 um but yes iconic car iconic color and i bought it well five or six weeks ago it had just shy of 68 000 miles i've only done 200 miles in it which i know feels like a tiny number given that in the same time i've bought the focus rs and done a thousand miles on that but mostly i'm driving it in london so it's two miles a journey three miles four miles five miles it's not significant numbers so it takes a while to get it to all add up the car though what what's sort of hard to explain or describe is how it turns a very mundane task like driving two miles through the center of london sitting in traffic into something quite entertaining i kid you not when i say i've had kids at the side of the roads of getting excited and grabbing their parents hands instead of saying minnie just as you might with a ferrari or with a supercar which is crazy because you know this is the 30th or 40th of the price of a modern nice supercar so it's crazy different perspective but they appeal i guess to all people to young people to middle-aged people because the thing was built for such a long period 60 years or something or 40 50. it's a long time a long long time from like the 50s until 2001 so it's a very cool car to own it's a an introduction for me into the sort of classic world it is a classic even though it's only 2001. um i suppose in theory that means there's a lot more room for things to go wrong but they haven't yet it does also mean it's a little bit easier to fiddle with and change things so as i mentioned before i changed the grill on my car i changed the spotlights and the headlights i put a new gear stick in it that's one of the sort of tiny things that i love the original gear stick was annoying me so i changed it for a very uh patriotic union jack flag gear stick oh also the last 500 has the silver alloy dash which is so much nicer to have in the car um than the sort of older wooden ones which just became a mess and i've got things like cigarette socket with usb ports galore so that i can have navigation plugged in up here um i quite like this storage box as well by the way it's quite nice actually quite a lot of stuff you could put in there um i just got some coins for parking meters in london um surprise surprise so getting to know it um getting to drive it i've used it for some quirky things i don't think i've ever actually had anybody in the back of the car yet there is some quirk you know you've got to make sure you shut the door one door is much harder to open than the other for whatever reason this one's forever a nightmare as i'm probably about to demonstrate myself yeah you have to push it very very firm to get it open seats are pretty worn oh well i'm thinking about it t-shirt in this in the process of making a rather cool t-shirt a special edition limited edition that we're going to launch with the lt spider so watch this space for that t-shirt if you're interested not going to be many of them um yeah so i was saying some quirks the boot's a bit of a quirk from the word go little space with a carpet at the bottom um bits and pieces and it's just started drizzling on me lovely well actually that's an interesting topic because i don't actually think to this date i have driven this car in frame um i'm not sure how it would drive i've only used it in sort of fair weather there are things i would like to change like i'd like to put a new windscreen on it and then get a tidy surround around the outside that shouldn't be too hard to do but probably not something i can necessarily do it do myself but um for the minute let's jump in actually i'm gonna jump in with the camera rolling start it up and i want to go for a little drive just talk to you a little bit about what it's like to um drive in this hilarious little thing and to do that it's quite a laborious process you've got to do the immobilizer actually that worked first time often it doesn't key kian start it up keep it some keep giving it some gas so that it doesn't conk out on us temperatures obviously need to go up fuel gauge inaccurate as you could imagine it's permanently showing empty um i probably should get that fixed because i've got no idea how far i can go tell empty and it's probably actually about to conquer so i should go straight to a fuel station and sort that the clock also is never right and what else do i want to change i want to put an ipod deck in here not very uh original or time appropriate but i think it would be quite fun so let's go for a cruise so then we don't have any air conditioning in here which is always frustrating in winter though it does have a heater you can just sort of get some cold air blown at you when you actually drive but obviously in london you can't ever get enough speed that you get that happening clutch is kind of okay no power steering but it's kind of a driving style you just get up and go you don't stop and worry about things you just sort of make a move and get on with it four gears four speed gearbox h pattern so that's pretty easy to deal with i've literally got stuff going everywhere at the moment very harsh on speed bumps so i'm going around some speed bumps here and it's really really low um so going down ramps and garages and things you notice that you can hit the bottom either the front or the exhaust on the back they're fairly inexpensive parts so if something happens you can change it but it's best avoided and because the track's so narrow it's quite hard sometimes to get either side of a speed bump as well so basically you can't do that much of that um you just go around everything but then it's so small and pointy that it's easy to do you just round we go well off we go again then and you probably can't see it but i've just pulled out with an f12 tdf the tdf just went that way um yeah that was cool um so i filled up the car um and the gauge is actually showing full but i only put 12 liters in and i think there's about 20 liters in total um it's pretty hot with the window up um always is even though it's wet i mean it is summertime it's low 20s maybe here but for pootling along and just driving around apart from probably a lack of much by way of safety because there's not much around you this is just the normal car it's just fun though you know give it some gas it's not going to go anywhere quickly north of 62 it's like 12 seconds 12 and a half seconds but the way it goes about it it jars you when it bumps but there's something about it it's just a lot more characterful than you know to me it's it's exciting to drive in a way that you know a normal general dare i set diesel hatchback or something just wouldn't be so if i'm going to sit poodling around on roads that i'm not going to enjoy myself on in the normal car why not do it in something a little bit sillier it's hard to explain i just love this thing a lot and i intend to take it on a quite significantly bigger adventure in the not too distant future probably across the channel tunnel um i'm not entirely sure if that's a sensible idea but sometimes you've just got to go out and try and if you don't try you will never know but certainly around here where the roads are bumpy this is rough but uh you know it's awesome i've had time to get to know it i'm absolutely loving driving in it's a nice it's so bumpy isn't it it's a lovely thing to have as part of my my garage my sort of lineup of cars one that's older and a little bit silly and a little bit smaller fun um oh and there's a hurricane spider it's clearly my day a tdf and a hurricane spider out on the roads in one clip a few minutes apart that will do matt perfect car spotting car yeah we're just bumbling around i could bumble in here forever it's uh entertaining so it's uh it will stick around i think it will stick around for a while and it wears the 87 tv plates proudly but i'm going to head back to topaz i've enjoyed my little run around got some lunch and filled the car up oh that was a bump oh bummer this is what happened so that bump was really really hard and basically conked out the engine now it sounds like it wants to start but it's not getting enough fuels i don't know too much about these things phoning some friends getting some help let's see where we get to i guess basically this is the other side to classic car ownership so i was just raving about how wonderful everything was um and i've now got the aaa on the way uh so it's a little bit in shock and not really sure what was going on at first um i'm hoping this isn't going to be too dramatic because it's so new i haven't actually yet got around to sorting out membership i do have that now it costs a little bit more but i need it anyway so i'm signed up now for a year um for unlimited call outs because you never know might need another one and hopefully somebody's going to come along and work out what's going on in here and get it running again if they can't get it running again it will have to be taken away on a truck what's now a really windy afternoon sorry about that um and we shall say farewell and i'll get a taxi back to topaz to see the guys again um that's not what i want to happen oh that's so annoying and unplanned it's just started to rain but the man from the aaa has solved this there's a thing just in here that thing called the inertia switch and basically if the car takes a bump like it did and this is pretty obvious when you know there's a button you click it back down and the car will start again so if i shut that for the moment and walk around just to demonstrate this to you put it in and it's just started raining oh it would help if i uh do the immobilizer start it up and straight to life so as always that turns out to be pretty simple no idea what it was at first and it's a button to press it could have been the fuel pump could have been the fuel lines could have been goodness knows what the world of classic cars hey the world of classic cars well i'm gonna get out of the rain and get back to wrap this one up we are running and i'm on my way back and this all feels so stupid but hey that is basically what it's all about it's a learning game a learning process i will discover things that i didn't know before um oh well it's half the fun you have to know that every time you take a car like this out you're living a bit dangerously i think that's just the way it is i might rethink my uh long trip i'm intending to do in the car though um just in case anything does go wrong although i do now have coverage um oh boy oh boy do you know what even things like that don't seem to turn you away from owning something as cool and fun as the mini but it is kind of ironic that in my video talking about the car and how well it's going i would go and effectively break down it's just absolutely typical um i still love the thing and i'm very happy with it and we'll drive it lots more um and now i have a better idea of what to do in case anything does go well in case the same thing goes wrong with it again it's just a little bit of a silly way to spend an afternoon anyway i'm back here we will continue our plans for the lt spider watch this space it is coming very very soon the schmidt is awesome there's going to be a lot more with it hopefully if i take it on this adventure i might even drive it round a track not sure if that's a good idea but you only live once let's see thanks for watching guys i will catch up with you again very soon cheers you

Channel: Shmee150

Views: 229,073

Keywords: Shmee150, Shmee, Shmini, Classic, Mini, Rover, Break down, Broken down, Bump, Update, Review, The AA, AA, Rover Mini, Cooper Sport, Cooper, Mini Cooper

Id: C2Fc5KRhbWc

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2016