Boosted and a crazy idea

Our Daughter Noa moved back home this week. She will stay for a while before starting her studies abroad next year. Because she likes driving Maggie – we took the MG to get the vaccination booster shot close to Cologne. The car started easily, and the engine ran well – but after 30km I noticed that the oil pressure sometimes drops from 40 to 25psi on idle. This wasn’t the case before since the engine was rebuilt about 19000km ago. While driving the oil pressure gauge showed 60psi as always. At the next traffic light stop it had 40psi on idle again. Very strange. As I need to do an oil change shortly anyway, I will do some further checks.

On the way back with took the Autobahn A555 which was quite empty. With the Ford T9 gearbox it easily runs 175km/h (GPS speed – 190 on the Smith) at 3500rpm and I didn’t even give it full-throttle. It is really a joy to drive, and this sparked a crazy idea. I think I will do a road trip in the MG and visit all our three children who will study abroad next year. Approx. 1600km to Spain – then taking a ferry to Plymouth where our oldest daughter will do her Master – onwards for 350km to our son in London and 700km back home. Fuel costs would be approx. 500€ the ferry and channel tunnel another 600€. I have a few weeks to do some prep work on Maggie and improve my onboard tools and spares set. More to come…

At work some changes might come up next year. Right now, this means I have less time to get to the garage and I just used about an hour or so every day to clean up and paint brackets and other things on the Mini 40 project. The engine block is painted black again and looks quite good. Only the valve and timing covers need to be addressed now.

Today I cleaned up the engine bay. It will get a bit of paint in some areas and the new steering rack and freshly painted front subframe hopefully should be installed next week. I also removed the dashboard as the piece around the gauges needs attention. The Mini 40 edition has an “alloy”/silver dashboard. The dashboard fastings of an MPI classic Mini are different from e.g. the Mk V version I have (aka Miffi). Actually, it is a lot easier – but it took me a few minutes to figure it out. The paint shop needs to deal with this part now. One of the things I will try to find out is how to “defog” the glass of the fog lights 🙂