So, spent the better part of the weekend cleaning out and rearranging the garage. Whee. Fun. The point is to make space to do rust repair and repaint the roof of the Mini. So, having now made 90% of the space to actually put the car in the garage, I figured I should take it out for a spin.

Put air in the tires (one of ’em has a leak), washed all the pollen and spiderwebs off (yeah, poor thing’s been sitting there for way too long), and took it out for a quick drive. Damn, that’s a fun car to drive. It really is like a little go-kart.

Problem is there’s something funky with the clutch, and I’ve gotta get it looked at – after the car warms up, the clutch starts to slip when going uphill (maybe downhill, too, but I can’t tell). Supposedly, it’s a degrading tube between the master and slave cylinders, but for the life of me, I can’t get to it to replace it. I’m just not small enough. Maybe I’ll get Ei-Nyung’s little brother to do it while he’s here! Ha!

Seriously, though – I’ll just take it to the British car repair place in Oakland, and see if they can figure out what’s wrong. While it’s there, I’ll probably also see if they can replace the plate that holds the shift linkage down, as that thing’s screwed together after having been broken in two.