My Vtec Cooper

[Oz]

I treated my Cooper to a little present

From Custom-Minis (mr-cooper) in Germany a K series based frame which fits a vtec under a standard length front keeping the standard plenum and exhaust manifold although it needs small body mods to toeboard.

I can swap most of my current frame parts such as steering rack, suspension arms and hubs/brakes across to this frame.

I've got to finish my Clubman Estate project before I can start on fitting this but it'll give me some time to buy up some extra parts for job Hopefully this will be my winter project all being well

[Kaison]

Looks sturdy!
Good luck with the project.

[Oz]

http://www.custom-minis.de/custom-mi...5%22_Vtec.html

This page give some useful pics of how it should hopefully go

[ardonfast]

Looks proper job, I admit I had a twinge in my neack that wandered if this will end up in the traveler, lol,

[Oz]

Looks sturdy!
Good luck with the project.

It is, I pulled a muscle in my back moving it to my garage this morning !!!

[Oz]

Looks proper job, I admit I had a twinge in my neack that wandered if this will end up in the traveler, lol,

I do consider swapping the kit from my Cooper to the CE, putting a round nose front on and a wood kit from time to time but I keep talking myself out of it !!

[geachy87]

Looks like a cracking frame. With the extra track and standard front it surely must be the best frame to go for. Do they do a frame for the rover engines along the same lines?

[Oz]

Looks like a cracking frame. With the extra track and standard front it surely must be the best frame to go for. Do they do a frame for the rover engines along the same lines?

thats basically the same conclusion I came to. I had been toying with an Allspeed frame but every time I started looking seriously at it there'd be a post on here about how difficult they were to get set up to handle etc. The K frame is just such a nice frame handling wise, it has no torque steer and really puts the power down well, the only problem was the extended front that annoyed me. No-one seemed to notice it but I always found it looked odd when you parked it up in a row of minis as to me it stuck out like a sore thumb so to find this frame was like Xmas

http://www.16vminiclub.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=31049

here's a thread of what I believe is his first attempt at a Rover engine in his frame, it looks tight but doable, you'd have to contact him and see if he's producing them or if its a one-off. Just bear in mind the £ to € is not great so it'll be expensive, I thought long and hard about it just because of the poor exchange rate, I even briefly considered getting my frame modified locally to a similar design but in the end it did exactly waht I wanted so there was no point messing around trying to replicate it I just decided to bite the bullet and order it.

[Oz]

oh and it's actually narrowed by about an inch from the standard K frame hence the new driveshafts cable tied to it, the Watsons ones would be too long. It also helps slightly with getting wheels under standard arches

[geachy87]

I looked at the allspeed one aswell but the setting up of the handeling put me off aswell, that and the fact they don't make shafts for it. If I had seen this frame at the start of the year I'd have jumped at it but I bought a watsons frame already, just going to bang an abs clubman st front on it, not ideal but the look has grown on me.

I did wonder about the shafts in your picture, how much wider is the k series frame to start with compared to a mini? Does it use standard cones or springs?

[Oz]

I'm not actually sure how much wider a K frame is to a Mini but I think Matt cut about 4-4.5 inches out of his when he narrowed it down to a Mini track for his K series build.

This frame uses Custom-minis own inboard springs just like the Watson kit.

[Oz]

http://www.theclubman.co.uk/project_k8.htm

Have you seen this website -it's Geehawk, one of the mods on here's car. He modified the Watsons frame to get it under a standard Clubman front with just a slight bulge in the front panel which you can hardly notice. If you're going Clubby then if you got the welding skills then you may want to look closely at doing this with your frame

[geachy87]

Aye, I saw that a while back, looks like a good option. I'll have a look at it when I've got the engine in to see how much can be chopped off. I'm using the bigger pg1 gearbox so not sure if I'll be able to cut the near side leg back as far as geehawk has with the smaller box

[Oz]

You could always look to fabricate bespoke legs (a bit like the ones on my above frame), you could probably get around that

[geachy87]

Haha, I think you underestimate how lazy I am, it all sounds like hard work to me