Carolynn and Dave’s Mini Challenges.

Mini Cabriolet - Part 2

    I was lucky enough to be offered a 1380 engine from an American guy in town who was building a Mini Vtec, long before they became popular and wanted to be rid of the 1380 engine. It did run reasonably well but the head looked like it had been toasted. This unfortunately was the case and the engine was in a very poor state, the head went in the bin, beyond repair and the engine itself was a 1340 not a 1380, not a lot of difference really. I fitted a new Mini Sport camshaft and duplex timing chain along with stage 2 MG metro head.

    The performance was dissapointing to be honest and I could never tune it properly which was when I came up with the idea of converting it to fuel injection.

    The fuel injection took the form of an SPI manifold and an obsolete self repaired Formula Ford Ecu I got from work. It took a while to wire it all up and convert the petrol tank to run an electric pump. Then there was the fitting of crank and camshaft sensors to do, these were all home made efforts.

   The system worked and I managed to make it run but was dissapointed with performance once again. This time however the ecu fuel injection showed a problem with the fueling of a couple of cylinders with two cylinders running at 8%+ CO and two running at <0.3% CO (I have a twin exit exhaust with two cylinders on each). Once again the engine came out and the valve lift was very carefully measured with a dial gauge. I was horrified to find that the Mini Sport Camshaft lobes were wildly different between cylinders with a difference of almost 2mm lift on one lobe!! (Cam timing was accurately checked and found to be correct).

     I then splashed out on a kent 276 camshaft and chucked the mini sport one, engine was rebuilt and re-fitted and ecu remapped and ... WOW!! ... what a transformation !!, the engine must have doubled in power output and now revs cleanly to the redline with much better driveability.

     Having barely started the running in/mapping process the Mini was taken to Guernsey for a holiday and managed to last the week along with the trek to Weymouth and back (360 miles) without incident.

    The Ecu still needs more mapping doing to it but has taken a back seat whilst the Vtec Mini project has got going along with the finishing off of the trailer project.