Reviving a cheap wrecked Mini Cooper S

So in true GRM fashion I am starting my build thread before I even pick up the vehicle that I am buying sight unseen. All pictures in this post are either from the classified ad or were texted to me by the seller.

The car is a 2005 Cooper S with 100k miles on it.

The guy selling the car bought it brand new for his wife and she has babied it since then. About a month ago she was rear ended but somehow the bumper was virtually untouched and the RR suspension took the brunt of the impact. The quarter panel also appears to have some winkles.

The insurance company involved authorized a shop to begin repairs. They sourced a new wheel and tire and replaced every right rear suspension component with fresh OEM parts to the tune of $2k.

After doing this they determined that a proper alignment could not be achieved and they called it without adding a pair of $1400 adjustable trailing arm to the bill.

The insurance company was not amused and decided to total the vehicle.

The owner decided to buy it back and is selling it to me for the buyback amount + the cost of a nice dinner out with his wife.

I am going to go pick it up tomorrow.

The first 2 shots are immediately after the accident. The rest are after the new wheel/tire and replacement suspension was installed

So how stupid am I? I've never owned a Mini. I've driven a few auto-x runs in one years ago and thought it was the best handling fwd car ever.

Is this car going to ruin me? I've read some horror stories about mini reliability.

What are my chances of getting the alignment somewhat straight without buying the aftermarket adjustable trailing arms?

The toe adjustment is somewhat strange in that the trailing arm mount is slotted and slides side to side. I don't think this would be readily apparent to a tech that hasn't had to do a toe adjustment on a mini. Maybe it just needs to be adjusted! Im thinking the first thing I should check is that the adjustment is already maxed to the inside. If it is, I'll see if I can slot the mount to allow more adjustment.

Ultimately, I think I'll end up flipping the car as I just can't see myself doing long term maintenance on such a needy car. I may hold onto it for a while, maybe drive it through the winter and sell in the spring.

I'll try to keep a running total of my expenses so we can see how profitable the flip turns out.

Hopefully there aren't too many surprises along the way.

Assuming the guy doesn't have any records of recent service besides what's mentioned in the ad, what basic maintenance should I plan on doing? Any advise you guys could give would be greatly appreciated.

Great project! I never had a Mini but, see this discussion board Mini adjustable rear control arms discussion

looks like some aftermarket RCA's are out there from Godspeed and others for $119.00 and up... seems that some Minis also do not meet toe-in spec once lowered. There's other Mini threads on here but having looked at Minis myself; one area of concern is if it has at AT seems like that winds up getting swapped over for a manual since the auto cannot be easily taken apart and rebuilt at a shop.

From what I understand the common practice with lowered Minis is to replace the lower control arms with adjustable pieces to adjust camber.

In order to adjust toe beyond the range of the slotted TA mounts you use the adjustable arms in the upper and lower position. Then a change in track width is needed to correct Toe. I will go this route as a last resort. In my estimation, if the TA mount can not be slotted and adjusted any more, the track width would have to be narrowed by .2-.25" in order to fix the toe.

First stop would be a shop with a chassis table. You need to know what datum points are out of place and then they should need to be pulled into place before you go spending time and money. Surprisingly inexpensive.

What concerns me is that this should have been the body-shops first stop. The root cause for the aligment issue should have been rectified before they did any work.

New trailing arms should not cost $1400. If adjustable lower control arms are required to get the alignment right, it means something else is bent. Wrinkled quarter panels is NOT a good sign and should have been a huge red flag to the body shop.

In all honesty, a MCS with a salvage title and/or accident history doesn't have a ton of value these days. I've been seeing clean title cars with slightly more mileage for sale locally in the $3K-$4K range. But there are a lot of MINIs around here, so the used market is a bit more saturated. One might bring more money in areas where they're less common.

You might be able to fix this car and sell it for a profit, but it will take some work and a bit of luck. Otherwise, it's a parts car.

NOHOME wrote: What concerns me is that this should have been the body-shops first stop. The root cause for the aligment issue should have been rectified before they did any work.

I agree. I guess the issue is that the alignment problem did not rear it's head until after the broken suspension pieces were replaced.

Ian F wrote: You might be able to fix this car and sell it for a profit, but it will take some work and a bit of luck. Otherwise, it's a parts car.

Absolutely. If I can get the car back on the road and drive it for 6 months and then break even I'll be happy. If it doesn't sell at or above the break even point I can certainly part it out and make some dough.

Clean title 05-06 R53s with similar mileage are offered between 5-7k around here. If I could get half of that I should be ok.

Depending on the end result wanted, the repair could be done differently. If it will just be a fun car for autocross and track day events. Then a simple repair could work. If the mounting point is off just a little, but still structurally sound, then some aftermarket adjustable suspension parts could be a easy fix. The body shop might not really have that option. If you do use it for motorsports events, less fear of damage...

A quick trip to a frame rack should get you on the road.

In reply to 2002maniac:

If you look at the before and after specs on the alignment printout you'll see TOE adjustment was made. So don't count on it just being a tech that didn't know what he was doing.

As mentioned multiple times, a frame rack is the proper way to figure out what's going on. Depending on those results you can decide whether just adding adjustable arms is best.

Count me as another one somewhat baffled that a frame rack wasn't basically step one for the body shop. When I totaled my 951 the rack was the first stop and it took a grand total of $550 to get it pulled straight.

I kinda sorta like these and I'm wanting to see the results of a proper frame exorcism for your sake......

Yesterday I stopped by a body shop on the way home from work and made an appointment to get it on the frame rack. They said to expect the charge to be between $200-300 to get it straightened out depending on what they find. Hopefully it isn't twisted up too badly.

I also ordered a some OEM trim pieces from autohausaz.com I've ordered BMW parts from them in the past and their prices and service have been great. I used Realoem.com to research the part numbers that I needed. I also ordered an aftermarket sidemarker light on ebay.

The body shop got the car on their frame rack and found that there was no measurable damage to the unibody structure! They found a tweaked subframe which they attempted to pull but could not get it to budge. They recommended a replacement subframe.

Total charge for 1 hour of labor: $50

I found a replacement subframe on eBay for $60 shipped and am halfway through replacing it.

You can definitely tell that it's a little bent up and one of the control arm mounting holes is slotted. Is this an attempted fix by the suspension shop who replaced every single other component in that corner of the car? Seems crazy to me that they wouldn't have gotten a new subframe while they were at it.

I also got some shiny new parts to replace the damaged/missing body trim. $130 from autohausaz.com

After I get the car driving and the alignment sorted I've found a paintless dent repair guy who should be able to smooth out the quarter panel dents.

I need to get this thing on the road soon since my Subaru blew a head gasket and I've been driving my 2500 suburban 80 miles a day for my commute! 

I finished up the subframe swap yesterday and was able to get the toe adjusted within 1/16". I trigged it out and it should be about .1 degrees toe out. Not bad!

I took it for a quick drive, rechecked the alignment and then got it back up in the air to give the fasteners a once over.

I finished off the day by taking the car on a 150 mile drive to go have dinner with my Dad and brothers. 

The car drove great! It tracked straight and drive pretty smoothly. It's definitely not an ideal highway car with the short wheelbase, stiff sport suspension, and a pretty bad drone from the Borla exhaust. On the plus side the HK sounds system sounds fantastic.

I'm planning on putting it to work as my daily driver starting tomorrow.

As soon as I pulled the Mini out of the garage, the Subaru got moved in for head gasket service. We'll see how that goes. 

I figured I should update this since it just rolled over 109k miles. I've been driving it daily since I got it on the road except for the 2k miles I put on the Subaru after i did the head gaskets and got it sold.

The Mini had 103k when I picked it up and has been a fantastic daily driver. It's a good balance of sporty and comfy.  It has plenty of room for me at 6' tall 220lbs.  The scream of the overdriven supercharger through the cold air intake and borla exhaust is really fun.

The only repair necessary has been the coolant reservoir which started leaking at the seam. $25 for a cheap aftermarket replacement and 20 minutes later and it's good to go.

Total expenses:

• Tweaked Mini $1800
• 1hr labor frame rack $50
• used rear subframe $60
• Body trim and clips $135
• New windshield $220
• Coolant reservoir $25

Total: $2290

I think the next time I have a minute and the weather is nice, I'll snap some pictures and list it for sale. I do like the car, but the long term maintenance requirements of this car might be too much for me to handle.

You should call it Hannibal.

Will that ended up being a good gamble.... great to hear that it was just a bent subframe. Crazy that the original repair shop did all the parts replacing but did not catch that. My guess is they checked the unit body found it was straight  and proceeded to order all the suspension pieces, but could not get it to align and then as the $$$ mounted up , the insurance company pulled the plug.  So you scored a good car with minimal damage. Enjoy it, they are a lot of fun to drive!

Parts are surprisingly cheap. I bought 2 R56 aluminum rear trailing arms for under $200 to replace the stock steel ones. 

https://www.motoringalliance.com/articles/lighten-up-r56-cast-aluminum-rear-trailing-arm-conversion-for-the-r50-53-mini.64/

Well, I guess it's time to wrap up this project. After 7000 miles of daily duty since the initial repairs I sold it on Thursday for $4,000 netting almost a $1700 profit.

The buyer flew in from an adjacent state and had me pick him up at the airport. We exchanged paperwork for cash and I made my way home via the train. Very interesting the way it worked out.

Overall I think it was a fantastic car to drive, but not much fun to work on when it came to anything under the hood (not that I had to do much other than replace a leaking coolant tank and do an oil change. The cramped packaging of the engine bay would make even a routine belt service a huge headache, let alone a water pump swap or supercharger service.

Here are the pics from the classified ad:

I'm guessing this thing is popping up as an ownership log in a mini forum right now and the guy is getting high 5's on the buy.  

well done man! 

great job on the repair of the car. 

I'm currently looking for a 2012 S hood in the dark grey of that era.  Only luck so far is $500 on ebay and get it resprayed. I did find one junkyard on car-part that wanted $250 but it's an 6 hour drive away..

Wife hit a piece of sheet metal on the highway in her clubman. 

Nice profit!

The serpentine belt isn't too bad once you've done it a couple of times.  I find it worth it to invest a few minutes into pulling off the right side inner fender shield, which makes access to the lower pulleys much easier.  Also one of those funky belt routing tools.

Yes. Supercharger and water pump (which is attached to the backside of the supercharger) service is... involved.  A task I've done a couple of times.