Dedicated readers,
For your perusal, I submit the above picture of the damaged right hand of myself after the Amazing Door Handle Repair of the Mini. Shamed into dealing with this age old problem (I don't know how long, Mahtin - a month of frickin' Sundays, ok?) I resolved to take it to one of our local dealers this past week. The problem with the Mini dealers is that they are both nearly 40 miles away (that's like a zillion kilometers, alrighty? - yonder non Stateside readership!) so armed with the official manual I set into repairing it myself. At first it was but an exploratory surgery, but then upon discovery of not needing any parts it turned into a repair. The cable had come off when the mechanism had frozen. All I had to do was replace it and modify the attach point so it would be less than likely to come off again. Mini is made by BMW and this usually means no nonsense type Teutonic design schemes, but apparently the wacko British design concept of the original Minis had rubbed off on these Bavarian engineers and it has all the quirkiness of the '62 MG in my garage! A love/hate relationship has since developed, like with so many British cars. I had to remove the entire mechanism from within the bowels of the door (of course the manual doesn't go there!) in order to see what I was up against. Working on a car that is used on a daily basis puts a whole new light on a repair such as this and anything going wrong means that the car is disabled. Especially a door... a door is unique in that it has interior and exterior componentry as well as being a major moving part. Never simple. I had to give up as the light of day went away on day 1, but I was able to replace the latch well enough to have the car closed for the night. The weather's unusual cooperation was waning on day 2 but with sailor-blushing commentary it was reprimanded into place and the repair was made 100%. The dealer would have cost anywhere from 120 (minimum) to 400 for this particular task so I feel I got my money's worth aside from the satisfaction AND the battle scars.
5 comments:
Um, two things:
1) We know kilometres / kilometers. We just don't use'em.
2) Minis are made up the road from me in Cowley (a suburb of Oxford). But where the actual design was done is a matter of debate. At least these Minis.
(And darn blogger to heck for not allowing me to exercise my encyclopeadic knowledge of HTML tags - nor my Firefox code to insert them.)
Hey Varmintlips...welcome oh Great one to the bloggersphere
Oh yes & congratulations on the door handle fix. Did you know my passenger side window doesn't work?????????
As it turns out, one Frank Stephenson, a Moroccan born engineer, currently works for Fiat, Maserati, Ferrari group and worked for BMW for 11 years. He went to school in California (almost ALL cars are cosmetically designed in California, BTW) but the fact that they are made in UK accounts for the craziness I recognize from working on English cars for 30 years! Live on Lucas, the Prince of Darkness. Quality control was so bad at Lucas because the lights kept dimming in the factory!
And darn my spling - for once. :-)
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