How to make car panel clips

[UPbuild]

Hi everyone

Hope you’re all enjoying your weekend.

I’m in the process of restoring a classic Mini with my dad and I’ve made some panel clips to help with some of the restoration work. Here is a short video of us making the panel clips and showing them in use.

Thanks

Mark

[DIYer]

Thanks UPbuild! We've added your Panel Clip Tool to our Autobody category,
as well as to your builder page: UPbuild's Homemade Tools. Your receipt:

Panel Clip Tool by UPbuild

tags: autobody, clip

[metric_taper]

Nice design for a very thin panel spacing 'kerf'.
So that panel has to be cut down in length, must be for a different model Mini.

[UPbuild]

Morning,

Thanks for your comment,

Your right, it’s the panel from a Mk1 mini which has a slightly longer rear quarter panel. It was just a way of quickly showing how the panel clips work. My plan is to convert the Mk4 shell that I’m using in the video to be a Mk1, so I will need to replace the whole rear quarter panel for a longer Mk1 panel. Hope that’s makes sense.

Mark.

[UPbuild]

Good morning everyone,

If anyone is interested in seeing me and my dad restoring and converting our classic mini to a Mk1, here is the first video of the series. It should make for quite an interesting project because we’re going to be fitting the older Mk1 doors with the external hinges, it will require quite a bit of fabrication work to do this. I show the extent of this in this video.

Thanks for your support
Mark and Dad.

[metric_taper]

Nice FAB on the rotisserie.
I'm confused, did you start with a Mk1, and found after many hours of sheetmetal replacement, to give up, and then found a Mk4 as a solid body frame to use, and convert to the Mk1?
I remember my neighbors having a 1963 Morris mini (bright yellow), and some ridiculous fuel economy (even in the early 70s when they rebuilt it and did body repair).
Wikipedia has articles on this auto. It talks of design drive for fuel efficient because of "response to the 1956 Suez Canal crisis".
I'll keep an eye on your videos.

[UPbuild]

Hi metri_taper

Thanks for your comments, the rotisserie is great for making everything so much more assessable when working on the shell.

This is the car I started with, it’s just taken us a while to get round to working on it. It’s a 1989 Mk4 Mini so there’s a lot of work required to convert it to resemble a 1960’s Mk1 Mini but I’m upto the challenge.

[metric_taper]

Hi metri_taper

Thanks for your comments, the rotisserie is great for making everything so much more assessable when working on the shell.

This is the car I started with, it’s just taken us a while to get round to working on it. It’s a 1989 Mk4 Mini so there’s a lot of work required to convert it to resemble a 1960’s Mk1 Mini but I’m upto the challenge.

I guess my confusion is the car that was buried in the weeds did not look like it had that amount of body cancer where serious structural integrity was lost. That and the videos don't seem to convey a time table I can follow. That's why I thought you had an old Mk1, and it was rusted so bad that you looked for a newer auto to use as a main parts car. With the amount of corrosion seen in the videos, I assume that car came from part of the country where snow falls, and the highway department uses salt to 'plow' the snow away. They do that here where I live, too far south of where snow persists all winter long, here it melts after each snow fall, so salt is used as road ice is a problem.

[UPbuild]

You’re right, if I’d thought on earlier when we bought the car I should have documented a bit more to build up a better time table of restoring the car. I’m on it now though so hopefully from now on it will be much easier to follow the build. When I bought the mini I knew it needed quite a bit of repair work but I have to say it turn out a little worse than expected. The good thing is with these classic mini’s, almost all of the panels are available. We live in the north of England where winters can be quite long and a lot of road salting is done.

[metric_taper]

You’re right, if I’d thought on earlier when we bought the car I should have documented a bit more to build up a better time table of restoring the car. I’m on it now though so hopefully from now on it will be much easier to follow the build. When I bought the mini I knew it needed quite a bit of repair work but I have to say it turn out a little worse than expected. The good thing is with these classic mini’s, almost all of the panels are available. We live in the north of England where winters can be quite long and a lot of road salting is done.

It's interesting that these Mk1 autos used uni-body construction much earlier then I've seen with any US manufactured car. It was well into the 70s before this was the common manufacturing method. I recall seeing steel frames on a 1972 Pontiac station wagon. The OPEC fuel crisis is what drove our auto industry into manufacturing light weight autos.
I have a 1965 Datsun Fairlady SPL310 to restore, it is a copy of a Austin Healey Sprite 2dr Convertible right down to the SU carburetors. It has a full frame under the body.

I would recommend you get a wireless microphone to improve your videos audio quality. That seems to be the evolution path of folks that post on youtube. I know that editing is a major bit of effort, and I appreciate the effort to document the restoration of these antiquities. You are fortunate to be able to do this with your Dad.