http://www.faber.co..../9780571248094/
This quote below from the book explains why even my new genuine replacement doors and bootlids never seem to fit like the rusty originals I have replaced over the years on numerous Minis!
Paul Chantry (retired deputy managing director - BL/Rover & BMW at Cowley Oxford plant:-
The thing that absolutely shook me about the Minis was that when they put them together they didn't fit.
The first time I saw Mini production was in 1970 at Castle Bromwich, who were making the trim body shells for the very high production at Longbridge. Castle Bromwich is now Jaguar.
I had several jobs here in quality control. One was planning for the dimensional accuracy of the body for new models. I began on the Allegro, then the Princess, and then later Metro.
On the Mini, if you recall the original boot - it was just a hole in a single pressing, which in my eyes would be a simple thing to control. Once you got the tooling right, it would all fit and the trunk lids would look perfect. But they used to put these trunk lids on with what they called a stretcher bar. This was a mechanism, a parallelogram of wood and metal and a bar, and you'd put it in and stretch it. The same would apply to the doors. They put the doors in and they didn't fit, so they'd get these bars on them and bend everything.
I went in to see the guy who was responsible for dimensional control in the plant, and he said, "This car has been in production here for ten years, and there's not a single thing that's right to drawing. And I'm now going to put it all right." But of course he never did. He put a lot of effort in to overcome some of the basic problems.
Part of it was bad technology, and part of it was, "It's good enough - the customer won't notice it at sixty miles per hour."
It was that sort of approach to car manufacture - a bit of bodging.
http://theswitchback...-of-a-motor-car
