The Ultimate Mini Restoration Manual (Paperback)

Condensing several decades of hands-on Mini experience into a restoration manual that works with and enhances existing repair manuals, Iain Ayre encourages the reader to evaluate realistically their own potential, equip a garage as a restoration shop, and buy exactly the right sort of nasty old Mini.
Showing two major semi-professional body restorations, on older and newer classic Minis, this manual explains how a full-scale rust rescue job can be successfully tackled, before looking at the aspects of restoration not usually covered in repair manuals, such as rewiring, and rebuilding and retrimming seats.
Once your Mini is on its way to full restoration, you’ll be shown the art of improving Minis, an art learned during the writing of hundreds of articles on modified Minis … and in racing and crashing them.
Iain Ayre is a long-time Mini enthusiast, who has built and modified his own Mini-derived cars, and who has written many articles for MiniWorld and Mini Magazine.

Born in Glasgow and now resident in Canada, Iain Ayre is both opinionated and unfocused, and was warmly encouraged by his school to leave. After several random gap year jobs he decided to take an English and art teaching degree, but as teaching is hard work, he became a model portfolio photographer, cartoonist, advertising copywriter, copy chief and creative director, ending up as a writer at J. Walter Thompson in Mayfair. Unwisely, he launched an ad agency, and when that ended in tears, ambled into motoring journalism, freelancing for Triumph World, Classic Cars, MG Enthusiast, Kitcar, Japanese Performance, Redline, Jaguar World and Australian and US titles. He launch-edited Classic Ford, and wrote fourteen books about cars and one about gourmet dog food.
In his spare time, he creates the occasional car: a Mini based three-wheeler, spaceframed XK120 replicas, a propane turbo V8 Cobra, and currently an Art-Deco-inspired Rolls-Royce boat-tailed two-seat speedster in aluminium.