Green Stuff brake pads at MINI Peabody

Posted on by Ian C.

I visited MINI Peabody again today!
The main purpose was to try and eliminate the squealing that I get from the Green Stuff brake pads that I had fitted at the end of July. The brakes only squeal during light braking, but it is annoying (the original factory brake pads did not squeal).
Anyway, Green Stuff supply an “Anti Squeal Kit” which consists of a few sticky-back rubber pieces to apply to brake pads; we will see if they work.

I also noticed this weekend that my driving lights were not working – turns out that during the Tweeter experience, they cut the supply from the back of the radio harness to the driving light switch! No idea why, since they did not need to touch the original radio harness at all (I used a harness adaptor from New Mini Stuff).
DO NOT TAKE YOUR MINI TO TWEETER NASHUA!

Also, my passenger window motor was replaced under warranty – last week it refused to open or close for a day and Gary was concerned if would fail again.
Finally, I asked about the rear fog lights and he showed me “parts bulletin # M 63 02 03” which they just received, announcing the rear fog light retrofit:

Unfortunately the required CD35 is not yet available, otherwise I could have tried the mod (since I already have the rear fog light switch). It will be interesting to see whether both or only one rear fog light is turned on when the new CD35 becomes available; we know that the BC1 can turn on both – but maybe only one will be used in the US market:

Testing rear fog lights on GBMINI#2

UPDATE: See this later post where the rear fog lights are officially activated!

MINIsOnTop 2003 DVD from Martin Ramshaw

Posted on by Ian C.

I received and greatly enjoyed watching a DVD of MINIs On Top 2003 today. It contains two “driving up the mountain” videos (from GadgetGav and Pezboy) and slideshow sequences of everyones photos.
Martin Ramshaw (“alfnotborninusa” on MINI2) must have spent many hours putting this together, and charged an embarrassingly low $6 to send it to me.

Martin wrote: I had downloaded the MOT movies done by gadgetgav and pezboy and thought it would be neat to see them on my large screen TV. So, I made a DVD, this worked pretty well so I downloaded all the pictures I could find, from this thread, the galleries of MOTers and from www.minisontop.com. I’ve created a DVD with the two movies (10:43 and 4:42 minutes) and 497 photos. I have pictures from alfnotborniusa(30) bethandlouis(27) bakerjc&capecodmini(6) danzmini2(2) elblue(8) gadgetgav(42) gmini(21) grumpy07474(33) harmini&ice&nhref(7) jennysup(15) mgbboy(7) neminimike(21) pezboy(84) rfinprc(23) MINIvsMoose(19) snid(49) teridrag(10) Mt.Wash.Obs.(3) gbmini(90).
Oops – for better or worse I topped the photo count!
You can use this MINI2 link to contact Martin; he might still be able to supply you with a DVD.

Thanks Martin!

GBMINI stops better with Green stuff brake pads

Posted on by Ian C.

Amazingly I am ALREADY noticing more bite from the brakes than before I put the Green Stuff pads on 🙂
Not that I drive badly enough to regularly need strong brakes! But just on normal braking at lights or whatever, there is more response noticeable. The Green Stuff leaflet suggests braking improvements of “25%-40%”; they talk about “… street pads vary from 0.25 to 0.35 friction factor; EBC Greenstuff has 0.46 …” Interesting numbers but apparently a real effect on the car.

More another day …