Project Leyland Mini Clubman

At long last the Clubman is all one colour after a total respray, though we are not entirely sure what that colour is!

As previously reported, we had initially hoped to carry out just a few localised repairs on our Mini, but there were just too many areas that needed work to make this viable. A lot of those problem areas were where the paint had been breached, allowing minor corrosion to start forming. Very few of these rust blemishes had pitted the metal, which actually presented a bit of a problem. If they had been pitted below the level of the surrounding steel, then so long as we removed any loose or flaking specks, we could have treated them with rust converter and then paint. But rust converter can’t be sanded back before painting, so it can’t be used on surface traces, which our bodywork maestro Alan Denne refers to as snailing because they look like snail trails.

Ultimately we could have sanded away until all traces were removed, but that would have removed a lot of sound metal too, particularly on places like the OSR wing where sanding back revealed a speckled trace of discolouration under the factory primer. This primer had not lifted at all, so it looked as though the problem had been there from new. This was not unusual at the time because bodyshells were stored bare, and so if they got the slightest trace of damp or contamination on them, this could simply have been painted over – especially if you got a Friday afternoon car!

In the end, you have to assess each project individually when deciding on the best way forwards. Alan sanded this OSR wing area back with 80 grit in the DA sander, followed by a fine 400 grit paper so we could see the finish clearly without any reflections messing up the view. This showed that the speckled traces were almost gone, to the point where there was nothing to be felt by hand, just some faint colour that could be seen by eye. So we decided to sand back everything, then spray it with Zinc 182 rust inhibiting primer, followed by three coats of regular high-build primer.

After this high-build primer had been flatted back, it was time for the glory coats. We had some fun and games deciding on this, though. You may recall that we had taken the offside door to the paint shop and had this colour matched for the paint to cover the new A-panel adjacent to it, but that I also decided to respray the microblistered NSF wing. The match of our new paint with the OS door was close, not perfect but we would just about have got away with it. However, on the NS wing is was way too orange to match the passenger door.

So in the end I took the nearside door to the paint shop and had that matched for three litres of top coat. This is probably closer to what the original paint would have been, though we have no way of knowing for sure. The main thing is though that the Clubman is all one colour now, and I have to say it looks superb.

3 There were also a couple of places where the paint had been chipped and tiny rust spots had taken hold. Sanding them back cleaned up the edges, and after the pits had been cleaned out, rust converter could be used in them.

2 Also evident in places was this very light surface rust that had worked its way under the paint to form what looks for all the world like snail trails. Again, they sanded off almost completely.

1 Sanding back through the paint layers on the offside rear wing got us back to bare metal eventually, but also uncovered this very light speckling of rust, most of which came off with further sanding.