Thanks everyone, it's sad to hear but also good to hear it now. These sills were sketchy to me, now for reference would anyone have a picture of what kind of sills I should expect in the 6000 range? Also, wouldn't it be possible to hide rust behind brand new sills?
Is it that bad? I own a 95 Toyota truck, and of course it's a Toyota + much more modern design so I don't expect anything near as bulletproof as that, but there are plenty of cars from the 80s that seems reasonably quiet. Rust aside (plenty of cars from the time also have rust problems), is the classic Mini especially unreliable compared to its peers of the same era?
The sills on that Mini are a mess of flat plates and oversills welded over whatever is left of the originals underneath. Such repairs are done purely to get an old Mini through its MOT and maybe get another year or so out the car before the rust breaks through again and leads to finally scrapping as an MOT failure.
You cannot compare an '80s Mini with its peers of the same era in the 1980's as the Mini was designed in the late 1950's and remained pretty much unchanged as far as bodywork and lack of rustproofing and rust traps were concerned until 2000, in fact if anything it got worse by the late MPi Minis. When it was designed people only expected cars to last about 7 years before rust started to become terminal and the Mini was sold as a cheap basic car with secondhand examples scrapped once rust repairs or temporary 'bodge' repairs were uneconomic and it was cheaper to buy another old Mini than repair.
Edited by mab01uk, 30 March 2021 - 11:32 AM.