MINI OUCH! (not mine)

Saw this sad sight up at the dealer today. Don’t know any details but that’s my UJ on the top of that MC40 with JCWorks kit.

I’ll see if I can find out any details about this accident (i.e. how fast were they going, did the airbags go off etc.) ‘cause I’m always curious about how the MINI fares in an accident. Please comment if you know any details.

MINI graphics variety

Here is a sample of the recent variety of stuff I’ve been doing lately.

These are what I call stealth bonnet stripes - all black stripes on a British Racing Green Cooper S. Very subtle. no?

My first set of checkered bonnet stripes - hard to believe, I know. You can’t see from this photo but this is the same car on which I installed a checkered roof back in Feb.

I guess the checks are catching on because this makes two sets of checkered stripes in as many weeks. I also did the checkered sunroof pictured below and the checkered boot stripes pictured below that.

For those scoring at home that makes 113. The steamroller seems to have slowed to a steady pace.

MINI year three begins...

Two years ago today my MINI rolled off the line in Oxford, England. I didn’t take delivery until July 18 but today is the “official” birthday of our MINI. 22K miles later, I know - I need to get out more, and not a glitch to report, touch wood.

There’s been more talk of a second MINI but I’m still waiting for 2006 model year upgrades and those won’t begin until November of this year. The wife told me yesterday that I need to make a decision to stop upgrading my existing MINI if a new one is in the future. Like I can stop now. I still would like to add a number of performance modifications like brakes, suspension and a new ECU chip but I’m in no big hurry right now.

Thanks to Tim for the photo he took last week. It’s been raining here in KC every day for the past week and a half so the MINI will get a much needed bath and wax this evening now that sun is predicted for the next four or five days.

Black and White are still "in" for 2005

Checkerboards remain very popular in 2005 and rightly so - they look good!

Finally today, some props to my friend Jason at Highland Outdoor for the work he’s thrown my way for the last ten years and through two or three company/logo changes on his fleet of landscape vehicles. (Since he trolled for some free pub. in the comments earlier I thought I’d oblige.)

One of the two huge trailers on which I put logos. I also did a couple dozen trucks for them too but I don’t have a good enough photo to post. Beggars can’t be choosers eh?

A weekend full of graphics

First off, there’s enough stuff here for three entries and you’re lucky enough to get it all in one. That’s right - THREE-THREE-THREE entries in one!

Saturday morning I dressed up another Purple Haze MINI with bonnet, boot and side graphics. Sweet part of this deal was that for payment of this job I got a set of four new Goodyear runflat tires that were removed from the car with only five miles on them. I still owed Jeff a little cash since there’s not quite a whole set of tires worth of graphics on this MINI but we were both happy. (Those of you with MINIs know how expensive runflat tires can be to replace.) I sold what was left of my factory tires (only 10K miles on them) to another friend with a MINI so it was a wash for me and now I have a set of winter tires for my factory S-Lite rims.

Next on the big weekend of graphics was a creation for a Special Edition yellow Scion xB. That is one trick looking xB rolling the streets of KC this week. The xB graphics took about eight hours to complete. The bumpers aren’t as easy as they might look but hopefully you can see the time and care taken in the finished product.

And finally, you should see 40 or so of these rolling corporate billboards cruising the streets of KC before the end of the year.

I’ve been working on that deal since December but the wheels turn slowly in the land of big business and cable television. I finally landed the deal to upgrade the fleet on Friday.







I’ve been putting logos on the cable vehicles pretty much for the past 13 years but this is a pretty big step up from this:

Coming soon will be a Greek flag atop a MINI and a swingin’ Austin Powers style MINI next month.

Seems like the thing to do lately...

Seems like occasionally folks post their web stats as an FYI for readers. I never really started looking at my weblog stats until a couple of months ago and I’ve been astounded by how many people are out there clicking away. So here is my monthly traffic report for May, 2005.

Unique Visitors - 6,070
Number of visits - 28,786
Total pages served - 15,708

55.8% of the hits come from direct hits i.e. bookmarks so I know a majority of the hits are not coming from spambots - whew!

Other top referrers - northamericanmotoring.com, gomotoring.com, motoringfile.com and kcminiacs.org.

And best of all - at least 12% of you are Mac users!

Wow! Thank you for your support!

New stripe scheme

Here’s a new stripe pattern I just completed. This is the same MINI on which I installed the window treatment you see and previous boot stripes almost two years ago. It’s also the first MINI I ever put graphics on and got paid for. My very first MINI job was for a friend as a demo - yellow and black checks on the roof.

Anyway, the MINI pictured has won four trophies in four different car shows so I guess I can say I’ve done award winning MINI graphics. She’s going to another car show in St. Louis this weekend so we’ll see if she comes back with a fifth trophy.

Here’s a shot of how this stripe scheme goes down the boot. It’s hard to see in the pictures but there’s a red pinstripe on the outside edge of the large stripes. One interesting byproduct of the design is looking at the MINI wings logo on the bonnet, the checks fall squarely behind the badge harkening to the BMW propeller logo. Go figure eh?

I think this makes about 112 MINIs and counting.