The next thing I ordered was a Southern Mini Centre dash and centre console with gauges, I had never seen the dash in real life so I took a trip down to Kent to have a look before I placed the order. I placed the order with them on the day and they said it would be ready with 6-8 weeks and one year later I had the dash etc and it looks good, it cost £880.66 (see the pictures) but I am still missing two gauges and the chrome hinges & handle.
With most of the parts now sourced I went back to thinking about the engine, I got talking to a lad call Phil (Turbo Phil) and he said that I should have a go at doing some of the work to the engine my self to save money. I started to look in to it and read up on what I had to do etc. I worked out that I would get about 150-180 bhp and that would cost about £3000-£4000 fully built and running. But when you take an engine and try to double the bhp of it, it become very unreliable. But I was not worrying about that as the car was going to be a show car, and not a daily run about. Things on the shell had slowed down as C&S moved workshop and they had other work on too. So this gave me time to think more about the engine.
After reading about and seeing a few mini's with Honda engines in, I had to ring up Watson's specialist car centre and have a chat to Geoff about fitting the Honda Vtec engine in a mini. I was told that the engine could be fitted and running for as little as £3500 and as standard they kick out 150-170bhp depending on which engine type you fit. So I had to ring the insurance company/s to find out if they would insure me with it and low and behold they said say YES, as long as it was my second car and it would not be doing more then 3000 miles a year - which it won't be.
The next thing was to go and have a better chat with Geoff Watsons and see what I would had to do to fit the engine. After an hour of chatting to Geoff I placed the order, the only problem I had was the wheels - they would stick out about 2.5"inc past the arches because they were so wide and the offset was different to "normal" wheels, so to speak. (They are 13x7.5), but still I had to have the Vtec engine. Two weeks from placing the order I picked up the frame from Watson's. (see the picture). In the kit from Watson's you get the frame, second hand brakes/calipers, new drive shafts etc, but I wanted new calliper/pads/disks etc. So the bill came to £2041.26. A week later I saw some new disks which I had to have they are called Rotordiscs, I rang them up too order a pair but they had to be made to order because I wanted Rover 100 GTI ones but with the PCD of 102mm, so I had to wait 2 weeks for them to be made, costing £180. (see the pictures).
