Project Binky - Episode 37 - Austin Mini GT-Four - Turbocharged 4WD Mini

project binky in color starring nick blackhurst also starring richard brunning and rex hamilton as abraham lincoln tonight's episode clutching at straws [Music] coming up in episode 37 i finally get time to take a break nick blows a seal and binky coeurs is a minor into escaping the shed and strange things occur while it's in the wild at the end of the previous episode we'd fitted most of the rest of the running gear and despite the compromises needed because of the space constraints along with my wiring nothing being where it was ever designed to be all the best guesses and then drawing on the experiences of past failures it actually ran which was nice so the next step is to continue with the build up to the point where we can get the engine running for longer and get it up to temperature for the first time or at least that was the plan but dean from trimworks is on his way over with his pot you might be familiar with his work if you've watched our friends over at retropower and if you haven't you should they do terrific work dean came along to drop off the interior and while he was here we roped him into helping us fit the headlining he made but before that goes in we've got to stick the sound deadening to the roof some of you thought we'd forgotten it when we did the rest of the dynamat but using the heavy bitumen product on the inside of a black roof we thought might be a recipe for sagging and neither of us want any more of that in our life than we already have so we consulted the experts at dynamat and they prescribed this half inch thick diner liner it's much lighter than the other stuff so it's less likely to come away from the roof if the sun comes out forgotten about the roof if you've ever attempted to fit a headlining especially one to a mini then you'll know it's a hateful job and when you've got a bespoke one made from an expensive material that nick specified it's even worse so that's why we bribed someone else to do it with the promise of tea and biscuits once the rods are all in place and that's the easy bit the headlining needs to be stretched taut and clipped to the aperture seams it's all too easy to rip the material which would be a disaster so as dean made it he gets to pull stretch and generally finagle the headlining until all the ripples have gone and it's smooth and wrinkle free this is not an easy or quick thing to achieve when dean is happy with the fit the pot comes out and headlining is very carefully glued to the shell it's a painstaking process and you're only ever one small slip away from having to make another one so distractions were kept to a minimum to let dean concentrate yeah in other words we just sat there watching him while drinking endless cups of tea looks like i picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue but anyway dean put the pot away and declared it was time to get steamed this is basically a kettle on wheels with a long flexible hose to which various attachments can be added the idea is that the steam heats the material uniformly it adds some moisture in the process and then as the headlining cools it shrinks a little bit thereby pulling it tighter providing it was installed well before this step it makes for a really good finish with absolutely no wrinkles this job was completed over two days but it was time well spent because the result is fantastic it may look like alcantara and feel like alcantara but what it actually is is many fresh water otter skins on a carbitanium substrate or at least its sodding well should be given how much it costs don't worry we're only joking no otters were harmed in the making of the headlining as we only had enough for the seats so after that incredibly tactile interlude we're back to the headline act no there's not much room left but i've already fitted the most important parts in order to get the engine to fire so to achieve our next goal it should be fairly plain sailing because nick's fitted the radiators loads of times and there can't be that many other bits left how do you mean wiper linkage in what's fast becoming a trope there's a strict order to assembly with this car and i'm reliably informed by his nibs here but the wiper linkage must go in next [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] before we go any further common sense dictates that it's a lot easier to bleed the clutch up before the radiators go on especially as nick's bug it off and i've got to do it on my own the fluid feed from the reservoir to the brake master cylinders is on the bottom but the feed to the clutch master cylinder is halfway up the reservoir this means that if you lose hydraulic fluid from the clutch line no matter how bad you don't lose the brakes it to stop any vacuum leaks while we're running it it would be silly not to connect the boost control solenoid and the map sensors it's all color coded to make fault finding much easier the next big ticket item is the charge cooler which gets bolted down to its brackets one of the challenges with this car is going to be cooling it so to help keep underbody temperatures to a minimum we've treated the downpipe to some lava exhaust wrap it's made from volcanoes and they're very hot indeed so along with a ceramic coating this should help keep the heat from the exhaust gasses inside the downpipe must not forget to plug the wideband lambda sensor in the turbine housing gets incredibly hot so to complement the ceramic coating we're adding this turbo shield in an effort to keep the heat in the hot bits after securing it to the housing with a stainless steel tie the rest of the exhaust gets bolted on that pile of components on the floor from earlier is diminishing with every minute that passes as we keep adding stuff to the car we've slipped on the accessory drive belt here and tensioned it accordingly we found a reconditioned power steering pump on a well-known auction website so that gets fitted in place of the scabby old one from the breakers yard so this is the current sitrep and it's about to get even more full as it's nearly time for the radiators but first it would be easy to forget the bonnet release mechanism before the front crossmember goes on and then the radiator she's snug as a bug the bottom hose and the top hose are connected before the clamps are tightened up these are brand new jubilee clips i know no expense spared the rest of the cooling pack is added to the front end and the brackets are tightened up and finally we add some waters to the radiator for the very first time this is exciting stuff because now we can get it running again and this time for more than just a few seconds [Music] this is genuinely the first time we've run the engine with its full custom made stainless steel exhaust on and right now it's only got a very basic start tune so this is not one you've heard so if it sounds familiar it's not time to run it through the gears before switching it off [Applause] so we sorted the go now we've got to think about the woe and as we've created what's probably the world's heaviest mini we're going to have to go full never go for return now you might think it's as easy as throwing the biggest brakes we can find at it we've taken some stick recently over our use of comparators so to make the size of this brake disc totally obvious here's a drill bit for scale but as it turns out there's a lot more signs to it than that historically a car's brakes were sized depending on its weight and performance nowadays nearly all manufacturers assist and oversize their brakes and then rely on a decent abs system to stop it snatching or locking which is fine if you've got one and if the one you've got working yes when it suddenly doesn't work you end up laying a trail of parallel black lines crash through some cones and wreck a pair of tyres if you're lucky a lack of abs is definitely one of the reasons but isn't the main reason for not using a disc like this thank you this oem jaguar disc is two inches bigger than the biggest wheel ever fitted to a production mini you may think it's just about discs and calipers but their interaction with both the wheel rims and the suspension means that when choosing brakes you've got to consider all of those things as an assembly right from the start so seeing as our biggest limitation is getting brakes under mini-sized wheels it seems sensible to start trying to stop by looking at mini brakes oh dear while the cooper and cooper s's came equipped with similarly sized front discs most early minis including this one came with these seven inch drums all round they are mostly maligned but regularly serviced and properly set up they're up to shite actually that's a little unfair they were perfectly adequate for pottering around town with less than 40 horse in early 60s traffic it's just that these didn't actually get upgraded until the mid 80s that's when minis changed from a 10 to a 12 inch wheel and a much bigger disc brake similar to the newer but very closely related metro when he says much bigger he means slightly bigger like an inch bigger to 213 mil diameter but at least they were gripped by a nice two-pot ap caliper yeah the mini calipers never really changed a lot over 40 years but the metros well weirdly they all got a four-pot caliper as standard and the quicker ones even got a vented disc so the mini breaking hotness back in the day was to find a broken mg metro there were many relieve it of its complete front uprights and there you go a cheap bolt-on-ish four-pot vented disc brake conversion so why the history lesson well all those parts are still available new and with a big aftermarket scene you can even get upgrades like billet alley calipers and all of these are designed to fit underneath well-proven and fairly inexpensive 13-inch rims which makes it all the more unfortunate that none of those bits want to play nicely with our not mini hub and drive flange not to worry in the uk careering around the countryside in compact classics with tiny ties is quite a popular pastime so we're not the first to come across our current conundrum consequently several shiny solutions are already available while it's about the same size a billet caliper like this is radial mount rather than the lug which means it's much easier to put it exactly where we want it the only issue with these is they run quite a small pad so i'd want to use quite a bit bigger disc and i'm not sure we can fit one and to answer the obvious question of why don't we just bolt the seleca brakes back on it well we tried that first they don't fit under the wheels and honestly they weren't very good the later st205 selector had much better brakes four pot fronts as standard and a nice sized disc to match unfortunately you needed 17-inch rims to accommodate them there's a perfect solution for our needs out there somewhere to find it we just need to do a bit more research and a lot more mocking about i've no doubt that cardboard ceramic brake systems are indeed the future but we're not quite there yet in the meantime we're using the cardboard to aid our design that might catch on you could call it cad for short anyway nick's ruined the peugeot brake disc to act as a bell for our lovely corrugated fiberboard rotor and a bit of old aluminium angle from a shelf is shaped to use as the caliper bracket here's where we're up to i can't set the disc back any further because it wants to interfere with the hub now that could be strategically shaved but we wouldn't lose much before we have the same problem with the bottom ball joint which we can't do much about not a massive problem in itself but the disc dictates where the caliper sits and that just happens to be right in line with this strengthening rib stroke tire well is in the rim which means that while the 13 inch rim part of the wheel isn't a problem [Music] even with a tiny disc we still can't clear a small caliper bug well they would have worked and they were a nice idea these wheels are nfg we scoured the internet for wheels that would suit but nothing came of it and then a chance conversation with a friend of ours led us to a bloke called carl at force racing he didn't have anything suitable either but he did have various machines and a will to use them so that led us to break out the pencils and draw what we needed a few weeks and some pounds later we ended up with these strictly speaking this three-piece wheel is put together wrong with the center on the outside but that meant maximum width on the inside and minimum width on the outside as we didn't want to make the car any wider than it already is there's a great big boss for the offset but more importantly it's a straight line from the mounting face to the edge giving us a whole bunch of room inside the wheel which allowed us to make some decisions decisions like this 280 mil rotor like this custom-made aluminium bell that carl whipped up while he machined the wheels and like these ap racing cp four part gallopers yeah i'm aroused too that bit of old shelf ain't gonna cut it nope we need a proper bracket that befits the radial mount aps so while nick gets on with that i'm gonna get the funk out [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] after a coating of black epoxy the brackets look great and this little lot is ready to go on the car but only after assembling the bell on the rotor bell having no abs and no servo assistance combined with a competition pedal box and racing calipers you might think is a recipe for disaster on the road and you might be right but if you've ever driven a car with this type of setup you'll know that it gives unrivaled feel you might have to push the pedal a bit harder than normal but the feedback you get through the ball of your foot is second to none that is until you panic lock the wheels up and send it through a hedge backwards on fire with the brake lines attached there's only one thing left to do on the front brake setup and that's to fit the pads being a competition caliper it's designed to make changing pads as easy as possible and it doesn't get any simpler than slide them in and do one bolt up even i can manage that with supervision that looks pretty cool i have to say anyway will our expensive new 13-inch wheels fit over those 11-inch discs and 4-pot calipers bloody hope so [Music] yeah of course they do a hell of a lot of time and effort went into making sure they did but there's always that niggling doubt until it all goes together for the first time peeking out through the slots the yellow writing gives just a hint of what hides behind the titanium hued three-piece rims i suppose we better check it's not binding excellent now how tight is it in there very tight very tight indeed tighter in fact than the hinges on nick's wallet to give you a better idea we stuck some milliput to the tightest points and then whacked the wheel on the squished putty gives you an idea of how little room there is between the caliper and the rim that's two stanley blades for scale we calculated we'd have about a mil and a half clearance and that's precisely what we've got i just hope the wheels don't need balancing the consequence of having a very straight barrelled 13-inch rim especially made is that we realized we could use the stock seleka brake set up on the rear it was old and manky so we set about reconditioning the major components and buying new bits only where necessary overhaul kits for the calipers and the handbrake mechanism are readily available as are shoes discs and pads it's amazing what a quick turn in the blast cabinet and a coat of silver vht will do once we've checked that the rear wheel fits nicely and doesn't bind anywhere i think we can call the brakes sorted we'll take the rears as a win but being forced into having these spectacular lightweight billet racing split rims custom made just so we could fit bigger high-end discs and calipers is not quite the inexpensive bolt-on solution i was after but i guess them is the brakes don't be like that you knew that was coming at some point deep down you knew and anywho we're not quite done here yet there's yet another piece of this setup puzzle to check you know because binky yes we need to ascertain whether the expertly 3d printed thanks ivan and beautifully painted thanks tony arches cover the new wheels wait there is a third thing of course there is with all this talk about brakes it's probably worth mentioning that hang on it's a little different on a permanent 4x4 like this but for most cars dynamically three quarters to all of your retardation is managed by your front axle so you can fit the biggest most expensive brakes you can find the limit of their performance is grip because they only ever get to work through two small contact patches which means that a lot of times the best performing most cost-effective brake upgrade is tires anyway get on with the story yes thanks anyway despite always being thought of as a buck for a mold we were so happy with the arches that we decided to throw caution to the wind and just try them on the car as they are a chance meeting with tom at darwin composites who's an expert in composites led us to hand them over to him for some reinforcement he's lined them with dialing and carbon fiber to make for a very impact resistant inside the mounting bosses and edges have also been strengthened so hopefully they'll last at least until it gets crashed the arches don't mate directly with the wings there's a rubber interface betwixt the two it's a self-adhesive gasket type thing that stops the rattling and the vibration from rubbing all the paint off it's also a pain in the ass to fit perfectly on the back the arches bolt through from inside the boot and inside the cabin whereas on the front the bolt holes are all in the wing which in our mini is on the flip front frame once nick's bolted these on we'll be able to see how far the tyre stick out is my bet is somewhere between cheeky and taking the piss what do you think core i'll take that i reckon nice the car is still on the axle stands and the suspension is in full droop so with a bit of static negative camber to come when it's on the deck i'm calling that a win excellent now if you're thinking those wheels look familiar then you're right because they're modelled on the 1100 special wheels the car came in on way back when many moons ago we were invited to bring the mini along to the inaugural historic rally festival being held just down the road near telford we jumped at the chance obviously knowing full well we'd have plenty of time to finish the car global events led to the show being postponed twice leaving us even more time to get it completely finished so here we are a day before the event throwing parts we've had kicking around the workshop at it and a mad dash to get it to western park looking like we've just thrown a load of parts at it we were honored to be asked to be the spectator safety car at the historic rally festival back in august the event brought together dozens of rally cars from all over the country on the famous western park stages our experience of the event is coming up in a subsequent video unfortunately what you won't see is binky out on those stages a couple of days before the event we were fully prepared to engage smug mode because in what felt like the first time in ages we'd actually made some progress that is until this happened a catastrophic failure of the alternator drive brought us crashing down to earth and that wasn't even the most immediate issue remember this we never gave it a second thought because it's not unusual for a new clutch and a rebuilt transmission to drag initially but just a few hours before the show we found out that that's not what that was it turns out that with bare hubs there was very little rolling resistance in the transmission and that allowed the synchros to line up and sneak into gear as we added rotating mass with the brakes and the wheels it became apparent that the clutch wasn't dragging it wasn't actually disengaging at all so what was occurring well actually it's a fairly simple problem the pedal ratio we've got does not allow enough travel at the master cylinder to fully disengage the clutch in any other car you just push it further but in our case some bell end put a bulkhead in the way the obvious solution is just start the pedal further back here to give you more travel and we can't do that because it gets too close to the seat and you can't get your foot on it meaning that that to get more movement at our master cylinder within our allowable travel our only option is to change the pedal ratio so that's exactly what we did bollocks you could call that sub-optimal but only because the master cylinders we're using do not allow this degree of misalignment without binding up but that's not to say doing our alteration didn't get us what we wanted far from it it just means we've moved on to a whole brand new shiny problem don't look at it like that i was young i needed the money and it was four in the morning the day of the show works perfectly as you saw that did actually work we ended up with enough travel at the master cylinder to actually fully disengage the clutch yay what it also did was made the clutch pedal so damn heavy that the car was pretty much undrivable [Music] actually thinking about it that's an entirely different problem so i'm still calling this a win we've been cognizant that if we match the original toyota setup with regard to cylinder size and pedal ratio we should have absolutely no problem because to all intents and purposes the setup was identical we chose the 5 8 tilt and master cylinder to match the original one a bigger one would disengage the clutch nicely but would make the pedal even harder so no bueno we made the pedal to match the stock ratio of seven to one so there's nothing we can do there either we could fit a lighter clutch but we expect ours to handle all of the safeties and we don't want to compromise that so there's no easy bolt-on solutions which leaves us with five options we can either chop up and extend the lower bulkhead but to do that we'd have to relocate the steering rack we could lengthen the steering column remove the front seats and drive the car from the back or we could lower the driver's side floor load so we can have a longer pedal not massively keen on any of those to be honest with you so you're gonna have to leave this one with me a bit i know it looks more elaborate than it needs to be but actually the geometry in here is fairly simple and it was quite easy to arrive at the tricky bit is getting that geometry to fit in the space available and then actually being able to assemble it so if this setup works as well in the car as it does on the bench we are golden not bad for a first attempt the box of shame well not really none of these is a failure they're just another way that it wouldn't work because of the forces involved all of these had to be fabbed like it was staying on the car we couldn't just mock them up out of thin tin and given that we couldn't change any of the bits that would have made a difference then this is the only way we could have achieved a clutch pedal that disengages and is light enough to use [Applause] so [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] i mean the squeak's gonna drive him nuts but the contraption is in i suppose the only thing left to do now is to try it [Music] sorted the clutch fully disengages and it's light enough to use more than once a day but just how light is it well to find that out we're going to have to turn to science in a bog standard french shopping trolley the clutch pedal needs just eight kilos of force to depress it but that's hardly a fair comparison so here's a subaru imprezza wrx sti this oem clutch needs a much more significant 18 kilos that's around 40 pounds so what of the mini well with nick's contrivance we need just under 17 kilos to disengage the clutch excellent i suppose it is all subjective but we've only got nick's word that was ever really a problem in the first place i just assumed he was being a massive wench i knew you'd give me don't move here it's the clutch pedal equivalent of trying to lift kate beckinsale or to put in a slightly less stalkery way that's like leg pressing a tremec t56 magnum with one leg every time you want to change gear so i'll concede it probably was worth spending all that time to get where we are now so we've sorted our most pressing issue but if you remember that wasn't our only problem after working perfectly for weeks the flexi shaft broke just a couple of days before the show after some detective work we think what happened was that the inertia contained within the alternator the belt the tensioner and the ac pump pulley was too much to allow the flexi drive to decelerate at the same rate as the engine this meant that the spiral driveshaft unwound a bit when the engine revs dropped it grew as it did so and bulged into the reinforced outer grabbed it and unwound the whole assembly off the threaded end this resulted in some nasty noises from within the engine bay and a significant amount of swearing and gnashing of teeth a brand new flexi drive was going to be nearly 500 pounds and a three-month wait so we thought we'd have a go at making one this was not 500 pounds and definitely isn't a secondhand husqvarna brush cutter drive but it looks identical to the expensive custom one so we'll give it a stab we wrapped our brains researched like mad and tried various different ways of driving the alternator but we kept coming back to the fact that this was the best if not the only feasible way to make a decent job of this we're going to have to cut this cable to length and crimp our own ends on and to do that we're going to need a tool not just the one using the tick [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so this is the moment of truth really for our homemade flexi shaft to work as we need to this crimp needs to be strong secure and concentric this is a step into the unknown so we've not tried making one of these before i mean it looks alright but only time will tell if it's been as successful as we hope the flexi shaft is going inside some ptfe tube removed from a piece of dash 6 stainless fuel line we figured that the self-lubricating properties of the ptfe will be an advantage the tube is slid on and then the flexi drive part of the new system is finished by crimping the other end on lovely for the outer part of the drive shaft we're using more hose bits this time some dash 10 which is 4 bigger we need to get rid of the female swivel end and cut an m18 by 1.5 male thread onto the remaining spigot bought a cheap imperial and metric tap and die set a while back for those just in case occasions this happens to be one of the many that have cropped up the corresponding female thread is then cut into the original flexi shaft drive ends this thread was m15 by 1.25 that's a stupid size so we needed to go bigger inside the big dash 10 reinforced rubber hose we're wrestling a length of dash 8 ptfe lined stainless steel braided hose trial and error led us to realize that the hoses with some persuasion would go inside each other and once we realized that we figured we could adapt the fittings to make our own skookum outer cable then through the whole lot the flexi shaft is slid through the dash 6 ptfe tube fits perfectly inside the dash 8 ptfe lined hose the final part of the assembly is to screw on the drive ends these are the only parts of the original expensive cable we've retained so there you have it one reimagined flexi drive cable made extensively from bits we already had in the shed so what's to stop the same thing happening again i hear you ask well it's simple where the old shaft went into the alternator pulley with the keyway that's been machined out and made bigger and we press fit a one-way needle roller bearing when the shaft is turning the alternator pulley in the direction of the engine it locks up so it drives the alternator if there's any overrun at all from the alternator it just freewheels over the roller bearings and we can't get any backlash even though this car's been put together with a heady mix of sheer bloody mindedness luck and hot beverages there were always going to be some teething troubles and honestly i think we're probably better off getting him out of the way now instead of having the disappointment of finally getting the thing on the road and then breaking it still it's fixed for now and yes that is an awful lot of work to put us back to where we were before we went to the show but in reality i think we're only probably 18 months behind where we wanted to be three years ago [Music] [Applause] [Music] tune in next time for another exciting episode from the files of project binky [Music] foreign you

Channel: Bad Obsession Motorsport

Views: 323,271

Keywords:

Id: qk8t__6k1D4

Length: 45min 47sec (2747 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Exuberentfool]

That clutch pedal linkage is pretty fantastic. Gotta love when you design yourself into a corner like that...

[u/Stolenink]

These chaps are GODS, plain and simple. The best channel on EweChoob. Can’t wait for the next instalment of L’Escargot! The Cardboard Aided Design comment from waaaay back has worked into my daily lexicon.

[u/really_another]

I don't mind that this project is 18 months behind schedule three years ago.

[u/malkouri]

That needle roller won't last much longer with the shock loads - they'll need a soft coupling to dampen that out!

[u/dv73272020]

Yes! I just watched Episode 36, for the second time, last night.

[u/Sythe64]

I hope they got a sweet deal om those wheels. I love how they don't cut corners. They just build around them.