IDRIVEACLASSIC: Series MM Morris Minor road trip

hi guys it's steph from my drama classic and i'm back with the first video of 2022 with a little adventure that we went on back in november and when i say we i'm talking about myself my friend richard and his incredibly outrageous purchase of a 1951 morris miner yeah and a little bit outrageous it was a bit outrageous when you didn't tell your mum and dad that you bring it home but that's besides the point now this video we decided to film because it was a little bit different and we have long had conversations about people buying morris miners and then saying oh i'm too frightened to go more than 20 miles i can't do it i'm so scared and so we said we're going to take this car that's over 70 years old and we're going to drive it over 200 miles from huddersfield down to somerset and show people how we do it and the video is quite mouth cap isn't it because the mic broke the weather was crazy at one point yeah it was just like a fly on the wall sort of start mockumentary at times but it was yeah it was good fun though yeah it was good that's what we've done in the video and as richard was telling me before there were magazines back in the day what's magazine called oh you because it's all like nuffield organization and they had i think it was like teamwork and like in-house magazines and you know when these cars were new gotta remember that it was export export export export and they all went to far-flung places australia canada all these sorts of places and they covered vast miles you think about these open wildernesses um people were driving around they do all sorts of crazy mileage really in all honesty but that was their car yeah and now people are going crazy over doing 20 miles to a local show so what we wanted to do was show you that it's completely possible to buy one of the oldest morris miners out there do over 200 miles haven't it only done some crazy mileage how many what's it done the mileage is a bit weird it's done about 70 000 miles but it had done 65 no 60 000 by 1960 so since 1960 it's only done 10 000 miles and we had we were a bit silly really we had no breakdown did we we just decided to crack on and do this trip and we had a brilliant time so without further delay we'll show you our madcap video of life on the a roads from huddersfield down to somerset and we'll start the video off with richard buying the car from a man who is also called richard and if you're watching this previous richard really sorry that we didn't get the car towed i am not we told you we were going to and actually secretly we drove it so let's crack on good we've done a lot of morris miners on our driver classic so in today's video i handed the reins over to richard and said tell me everything you think people need to know about this particular car so first of all if you didn't already know this the morris miner was launched at the earl's court motor show in 1948 and initially you could only get a two-door saloon or an open tourer which in other words is a convertible the four-door saloon you see here today was launched pretty much two years later and it was meant to be a slightly more up-market better-equipped and consequently more expensive version of the car and it took advantage of a slight reworking of the side valve engine not long after the four-doors models launch which was around engine number seventy-seven 000 and it had some really good upgrades things like a water pump thermostat and an interior heater which by the way you were going to have to pay extra for the previous versions you could have only got a thermo siphon engine car which meant that the heater had to be fitted using a smith's auxiliary water pump kit and it went onto the dynamo body and essentially it was just a massive faff this made it a lot more modern now engine wise this car doesn't have an a series in it has a morris four-cylinder side valve engine the ush m3 engine is 27.5 brake horsepower and it's a 918 cc engine the reason it's not an a series is because of course the austin morris merger only came about in 1952 and in fact the engine in this was originally used in the morris aids this particular car is a really early example of the four-door miners and is very lesser spotted now it doesn't move on much from the low light because you do see a lot of low-light bits like the cowling on the front of the inner wings where the low-light headlamps would have been either side of the grill and therefore this is often referred to as a short bonnet it was replaced with the far more common full-length bonnet by the end of the year it also has some very unique features only seen on early 4-doors such as the chrome trim around the rear window rubber swivel type ash trays inserted into the front door cards and things like the painted grille and hubcaps now you might think this might have been for austerity but it was actually because the korean wall caused a nickel shortage it meant that people just couldn't do the amount of chroming that needed to be done so morris just decided to paint a couple of the normally chromed bits in the body color as a short-term solution but what happened was was later on down the line a lot of people once chrome was available would just swap it over so a lot of finer details like this have been lost in the passing of time however that's not the only interesting thing about this car because this car shouldn't be in the uk at all when it was made in 1951 it was made as an export left-hand drive four-door series mm morris miner and finished in the paint shade thames blue the thames blue was only used very briefly by morris from late 1950 to mid 1952. other colors you could have got at the time were miss green gascoigne gray and of course good old black which continued throughout the four doors were the first miners to have the trim colors entirely coordinated with the exterior color the previous policy had been the trim supplied in the same shade with different color piping but all using the same beige material color initially the four door was only available as an export only model so the fact this car did end up being sold on the home market makes it a little bit of a red herring an export of course was absolutely the name of the game for initial post war british motor industry because steel supplies rationed and companies were only receiving their rations if they promised to export high amounts of product so that basically meant that if you lived abroad it was quite easy to get a morris miner but if you lived in this country you could have been waiting a long time and the year that this car was produced 1951 95 of maurice cars produced were going abroad so it was a massive number however in 1951 there was an economic squeeze in canada and this meant that new car sales briefly collapsed and as a result morris or rather nuffield organisation said well we're not going to have cars sitting abroad ship them back convert them over to right-hand drive and sell them in this country which is exactly what happened to this car and it was then sold at mourds of norwich because the main nuffield dealer for cars in the area and it provided the first owner with good service and it was well maintained until it was laid up in the mid-1960s it was then found by a chap in the 1980s who then restored it pretty much to running spec and then started using it again he then passed away and the car ended up being purchased by a man called richard seems like quite a few people though this car called richard and it is now being purchased by current richard who is intending to use it for light duties richard tells me to own in 2022 this car is a fascinating piece of history and with the right type of driving patience road choice as you'll see in this video and using gears correctly it will trend along all day without any fuss or worry a little bit like cars that you would have seen in the 1950s it could do fantastic mileage it just needs to be maintained now if you're thinking after watching this video that you'd rather go for an earlier car than the usual later cars please approach it with caution because parts availability on a minor that isn't a later car they just aren't very great and although you can still get all your core mechanicals and service parts all your other bits and pieces are far harder to get so let's crack on with this road trip we're going to show you what we've been up to now there's nothing quite like listening to an engine running when it's at full pelt so i'm going to have a little listen to the car before we stop off at our first stop the great british car journey the first stop on our a-road adventure was to the great british car journey and of course i've been a few times before you'll have seen me borrow the hillman imp from them the chrysler i came down when it first opened but richard hadn't been so i wanted to show them the museum so one of our first stops was really to go for a walk through the museum have a look at all the fantastic cars on display and of course if you haven't been before i do recommend it it is a great day out wheelchair friendly you can bring kids around and they've got voiceovers telling you all about the cars it's good value for today good value for money day out and also don't forget if you don't know this already you can borrow one of the cars from drive dad's car and you can actually drive some of these cars as well so we headed off from here and carried on down to coventry at this point we've done well best part 100 miles and it was going really well it looks quite light from the outside but as you can see on the inside it's completely dark you only get a couple of dials lit up so we took about an hour or so to get down to coventry and again the car performed faultlessly it did really well but richard's done all the driving so far so i thought i'd ask him how it's all going [Music] so we've just driven from west yorkshire fire brooks celebrating our arrival we've just driven from west yorkshire um down to where we are now which is just outside coventry we stopped off in derby at the great british car journey to do filming and what have you um but literally we've gone from yeah west yorkshire down to coventry about a hundred and something miles uh we've done today um it's it's a longer journey than normal we've not taken any motorways but honestly you can sit in this thing 50 just under 48 50 you know on the flat and it seems absolutely fine long continuous hills it does begin to sort of your third and if you are if you time it badly second um you're sort of crawling on up them but if it's sort of up down up down up down it's not too bad generally um you know and as i say it's been absolutely fine mechanically you know um so you picked up this morning no real faults at all with the car nothing um it's just taken everything in its stride so far which is which is brilliant and it's a testament to it really it's it's a minor that a lot of people to be pretty honest would would not probably want to do the journey in because it is technically technically the slowest morris minor it's a side valve it's a four-door highlight it's not stream streamlined as a low light and it's heavier than a low light um not by much but um it is so it is suddenly the slowest minor and it's no it's no speed demon but it it's done absolutely fine and it's got us here and you know it's been touch wood absolutely spot on fantastic [Music] now we're not miked up today because whilst the car made it unscathed the microphone setup hasn't and he got loads of water into it and now it's broken so unfortunately the sound of this video is going to be probably a little bit hit and miss but it's all about the adventure for us so how many miles we've done now we've done about 100 miles but it's been touch wood i've touched metal dashboard it's been it's been very good so far so onwards and upwards as it were we've got any wood in this car that we can't hatch uh there will be behind oh no they won't on this one actually um we should have got a traveler then we would have a bunch of touch as we drive along oh there's one gear knob oh yes touchwiz touchwood non-standard item but never mind right should we set off the summit set off okay we'll show you some of it as we go along to be fair i definitely thought we would have broken down by now so i was very impressed with the car and how she was performing so we carried on through and we drove through little villages and little areas and before you know it we were in gloucestershire now richard said to me i've got to show you campbell airfield we weren't able to get in but there's plenty of scrap planes and if you're going through the area i would advise doing a little detour so you can see all the bits and pieces from the road as you go i think we're doing pretty well with a broken microphone a car that won't go above 50 miles an hour and when was she last taken on a big drive richard about eight years ago eight years ago we're doing well with rescuing these cars this year they never get driven anyway i'm sitting in the back and the most thing about morris spiders let me show you if i can see you can see there's plenty of room between my hair and the roof of the car i mean what ball can i ask for i've also got quite a lot of room at the back as well so you can see my suitcase here and we've got a sainsbury's bag here and i'll cut away and show you that i've got plenty of legroom as well so i think a lot of people think that cars like this just are very usable when in fact really it's only people's beliefs that are limiting them yeah we're trucking on quite well we've got about an hour and a half to go and hopefully we're going to be able to show you some nice villages soon because i feel like we've been waiting ages to see some of these nice villages but let's go for those of you watching at home we are traveling on foss way which for the uninitiated is an old roman road so whilst it isn't going to take us directly into somerset it is one of the roads that we're going down we're also going to see richard now tackle a hill this one seems quite treacherous third gear there we go hang on sun guys down i can't see a bloody thing i think i might have been a bit late changing into third but it's not stopped and that was quite a hill so what speed are we on now night sets just under 30. but i reckon we're doing around 20. there is no way we're doing 30. we're about to be overtaken by someone on a mobility scooter so i think this is a really good example actually for all the people that think we should have taken a motorway is we could say well look what happens if you get a slight incline i mean look at what happened you know that motorway near sheffield is pretty you know it's pretty ropey so right on we go by this point in the journey we've done nearly 200 miles away from our starting point because of course we did a detour and we've done all the a roads so it would have been a lot quicker if we'd taken the main roads but we wouldn't have seen half the exciting stuff that we'd seen and stopped off and had just as much of a laugh and we felt quite relaxed because the oil levels were fine the water levels the car wasn't running hot there were no problems so richard said you've got two choices now to get back to where we need to get to in somerset so we can either go through bath and see all the architecture and see some interesting bits and pieces or we can go through a few older villages and see some of the thatch cottages and bits and pieces we didn't have time for both because of course it's november and time was really against us because it gets dark quite quickly so being selfish i decided that we'd go through bath because i've only ever been here to stop off for store openings when i went to go outdoors and i've never actually seen the city itself so i said to richard let's stop off and there were two places i wanted to see that i've only ever seen in photographs the first stop would be the royal circus and the second stop was going to be present we've never seen these places in the flesh but they're really interesting examples of georgian architecture and i absolutely love architecture and i thought if you're watching this at home and you've only ever seen photographs you might appreciate seeing it in the flesh so our first stop as you see here is the circus it's a historic ring of large townhouses built by john wood the elder well designed by john wood the elder built between 1754 and 1768. now the second stop is the royal crescent it's a row of 30 terraced houses laid out in a sweeping present and designed by john wood the younger built between 1767 and 1774. these are all grade one listed buildings which means that any changes you make even the very smallest of changes have to be signed off now these houses go for over one million pounds each and they are some of the best examples of georgian architecture now it's time for our final leg um for interested security purposes we won't be showing you exactly where richard lives but before we go home it's time for me to grab the keys and see what i think of this little car richard has trusted me with his pride and joy and i'd be lying if i said i wasn't terrified that something was gonna happen it's not a gear change that's getting me i mean that's up into fourth because when you're driving cars like this should get up to forth quite quickly um it's not the gear change that's killing me actually it's the the where the gear stickers weren't going to reach in i must say i'm really proud of richard for driving this back because it's been over 220 miles from huddersfield to here and richard's done it he's not complained once he's worked his way through this box he hasn't driven a morris minor in a few months you know he's just been in his modern stuff i think he's done a stellar job and we've had really good fun as well and i think that's part of the fun of classic cars is that you get to have fun it's not just boring driving from a to b and i said all along that i was um that i was really annoyed that we were doing all the aim roads i said oh richard it's going to take forever and it's taken us about eight hours seven eight hours a ridiculous amount of time anyway but we have had so much fun to the point where actually maybe next time i'll skip the motorway a little bit and take a few of the a-roads because we've seen that playing graveyard we got to see bath we got to see the great british car journey we got to see so much on this trip that we just wouldn't have seen if we were just bombing down the motorway going as fast as we could from a to b now driving this car it's like it's lovely but these brakes are absolutely dire and they are not the ones for me get me back in my 1968 1098 engine with that lovely gearbox and i will crack on i mean i'm not gonna complain because this lovely lady that we've been driving for over 200 miles in in november is 70 years old i think she's done a cracking job i am bloated to say a single bad word about her because she's done you know she's done the whole journey flawlessly no oil used no water used no problems she has just been an absolute diamond and if you were to get if you people ask me all the time what classic cars should i get and i always say look at a morris miner because they are good fun easy to drive and you make lots of friends and in fact without morris miners i wouldn't have met my lovely friend richard so all in all it's been an entirely pleasing couple of days driving down i was absolutely dreading it and we've had so much fun and it's been great this perhaps is a little bit too antiquated for me i'm not a side valve kind of girl i'm more of a 1098 but it has been good fun nonetheless so that's kind of it for me today really it's been a pleasure taking you on this road trip with us it's been a very different sort of video we've had mic issues all sorts going on but i hope despite sound troubles and filming woes that you have enjoyed this video just as me much as we enjoyed making it so that leads me to say until next sunday take care and drive safely [Music]

Channel: idriveaclassic

Views: 20,978

Keywords: series mm, series mm Morris minor, Morris Minor video, 50s car, 1950s car, lowlight Morris minor, Morris Minor road trip, Morris Minor driving, Morris Minor buying guide, Morris Minor history, Nuffield, British Motor corporation, Morris Minor review, Morris Minor repairs, Morris Minor a series, classic car road trip, classic car adventure, retro car road trip, vintage car road trip, road trip video, English road trip, bath tourist guide, royal crescent, the circus bath

Id: 2NvSd5MWrck

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 03 2022