Hi everyone,
New to this forum, just picked up a 2006 JCW Cooper S. Paid $3500 and got the car with 140k on it. Its definitely a project car and needs a good amount of attention, but I really love the drive and I think its going to be a great daily once its cleaned up. The car runs and drives but hasn't been registered for a few years, needs some attention for sure.

Right now I'm looking at two significant issues:

1. axles, it has a thump in it that is felt under moderate to hard acceleration, from what I've read this is indicative of an inner CV joint failure as it doesn't get worse with the wheel at full lock. This is unfortunate as the rebuild kits I see are all for the outer joints, I've found links to the inner tripod bearings but if I find that the inner buckets themselves are damaged am I out of luck? I know people say to avoid aftermarket axles, but I have a cautious amount of trust in napa parts. They have both axles for $250 all together.
2. OBD port doesn't work, saw some stuff about this being potentially a broken k-bus wire. What confuses me is that according to this diagram from the Bentley manual, K-bus doesn't even touch the OBD connector at all. The diag connector only has d-bus and DS2-bus. Is this a common failure?
   

The car needs lots of other work, I have parts on the way for:

• supercharger service
• PS reservoir and fluid
• valvecover gasket
• pads and rotors all around
• brake fluid
• coolant
• fan ballast resistor
• new hood struts
• new rear wiper
• new upstream 02 sensor
• new serpentine belt, tensioner and idlers

The car also has a sizeable exhaust leak at the flex pipe, I'm either going to have that welded or put on a low cost "sport" manifold. The car has Koni adjustable shocks and lowering springs, and a set of rear adjustable control arms that appear to have seized and look like they were salvaged from the titanic, those will be replaced eventually either with stock parts or something with a sealed spherical bearing.

Looking forward to hanging around here and learning about this car, I really enjoy how it drives Thanks!

 

Update on this actually, the K-line wire (which i learned BMW calls d-bus here) is broken between the ecu and the OBD connector. That's my issue there, now i just need to actually find where its broken lol

 

Congrats on the new MINI! I would suggest a build thread or documenting your fun. It will be easier to show people what you have done if you have pictures.

 

i replaced my passenger side axle with one of these units I have an 05 R53 with the lsd transmission. i havent had any issues with it, im probably around 20k miles on it, and there is definitely some dragon time on there.

 

I love build threads, here was my focus ST that I sold a few years ago: The Engineer's ST I'll definitely get one going for this

 

Your ST was a nice ride, and welcome! There are plenty of veterans AND folks fresh off their own builds (myself included) that you can learn from. Between threads, a Bentley Manual, and YouTube (modmini was my go-to), you can learn a lot and save plenty of headaches. This is a really easy and fun car to work on, and yours as a JCW sweetens the pot. I look forward to seeing where things go.