Carb Rebuild

Update by Tim Suddard to the Austin Mini Cooper S project car
Nov 22, 2013

We rebuilt the carbs on our Mini Cooper s.

We picked up a new SU rebuild kit from Mini Mania. We have the parts all cleaned and laid out for the rebuild.

SU carbs are quite straightforward. The Eastwood paint looks pretty original, though we haven’t added any tint.

The finished product: our assembled carbs and an original air cleaner we found at Dj’s Mini on our now assembled engine and front subframe.

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While waiting to get a block of time to dive back into the metalwork, we did some light bench work and rebuilt the original 1.25-inch SU carbs.

Overall, the carbs were in good shape, and we had a few extras that we’d collected. The main thing to look out for in a carb rebuild is worn throttle shafts. These can be rebushed. Fortunately, ours were in decent shape.

We even got carried away and polished our float bowl covers. From there, we dug through and figured out all the throttle linkage, picked up a new heat shield, and painted all the black pieces with Eastwood Chassis Black. The throttle linkage we painted with Eastwood’s new three part, recreation, cadmium plating look paint. We love this stuff. It comes in a silver base; you can then add green, red or gold cadmium highlights. It sprays on easily and dries in just a few minutes.

You can tint your pieces to match what they looked like originally and add either the slightest bit of highlights (an uneven pattern looks most original) or go hog wild, and make the piece turn nearly red, gold or green. This cadmium look paint is another exceptional product from Eastwood.

It was an itsy bitsy, teeny-weeny rally-winning project Mini. Subscribe to Classic Motorsports and get them in your mailbox.