In late 2005, I parked the mini in my garage and took the key out of the ignition. Half of the key stayed in the ignition. I took this as a sign to take PJ off the road and start on the VTEC conversion that I’d been thinking about for a while.
I bought a donor car in the form of a Honda CRX VTi, which was an MOT failure, primarily due to rust in some structural areas. I didn’t mind about that though, as I just wanted it for its B16A2 engine and gearbox.
It didn’t take me long to tear the Honda apart, selling or scrapping all the bits I didn’t need. I then set about working on making the Honda engine fit into the mini. The Allspeed subframe was designed to make the engine fit in a standard round-nose mini, with no bodywork extensions required. By doing this, the engine sat further back than in some other VTEC subframes, such as the Watsons conversion. This meant I needed to modify the bulkhead to make room for the Honda inlet manifold, as well as modifying the manifold itself. I did quite a lot of work to both the mini and engine/gearbox, including changing the final drive ratio, before it all came to a halt in late 2006, when I moved to Belgium for a few months with work.
When I came home from Belgium at the beginning of 2007, I was at a point where most of the mechanical changes to PJ were done and I needed to make a start on the bodywork, as PJ was by now showing several signs of rust. You can see in some of the images above that I welded in a new windscreen scuttle panel, but other areas were much more difficult and it quickly became apparent that I couldn’t fix the bodywork by myself to the standard that I wanted. I couldn’t afford to pay for it to be done by an expert at the time, so PJ sat in the garage, forgotten and abandoned for the next 10 years or more.
Every now & then, I’d pick it back up again and make a small start on working on PJ again, but it never lasted long, as there were always other things that took over my time. Also, a fatal mistake was that I bought another mini, a beautiful Island Blue Mini 40 (you can see it in the background of one of the pics above). This led to me spending all of my time (and money) on the Mini 40 and very little on PJ.