1959 Mini floor pans and how i came about making them..

I guess I need to preface this with admitting, I'm not a mini guy. Never have been, I have driven a few back in the day, even crashed one once when in my early 20's and a few friends had them but I was never into them or owned one.

Fast forward to 2022 I think it was and I run a very small restoration shop which I also make a few panels for various very old VWs. A paint sprayer next door has a long term customer who was into early minis and one day he's telling me about his 2nd week of production classic Mini 1959 that he has just found that needs some welding.

Me being me and enjoying very early versions of cars for the variations they have in those early production days eventually buckles and I say I will weld it up for him.

The car arrives and to be fair its not bad at all given the age, he talks me through a million differences on a 1959 car which I make sure all the detail is kept in the restoration.

The floors are there but both need work and there is enough left for me to make some accurate drawings from with all the detail and I decide to actually keep a fair amount of his original floors and then do the tooling to stamp some complete floors which I will join in to his originals.

He gets the best floors I can give him and I can sell a few to get my money back on all the tooling and my time developing it....This is where a little research would have been a good idea because after I did it all, I realise they are 3 month only floors. The production run of these floors is apparently August 1959 (start of production and presumably prototypes) to mid October 1959.  Had I realised how rare and how unusual these floors were then I think I would have just hand made the parts and been done...but there we are and here we are.

I obviously don't sell many sets at all but have had great feed back from some proper early mini specialists on how good the floors are when they have fitted them and as I have fitted them across the ribs of original floors myself I can confirm they fitted very well.

So I guess the moral of the story is to do a bit of research before you jump in but in this case if I'm honest, I'm glad I didn't because I'm pretty proud of the result :-)

The 1959 mini register for anyone wanting to know more about body and interior variations, production etc is here 1959 Mini Register

Thanks for reading