I work on a lot of Minis. Your description of the fork bolt is
accurate. They are 7/16" hex. You can get to them without removing the
engine from the gearbox. You have to remove the drivetrain from the
car and take off the diff housing. Then you need at least two 7/16"
box end wrenches that are clocked slightly differently since you can
only move the wrench about 1/24th of a turn.

The good news is that when torqued properly the fork bolts don't back
off. The one I had to fix was just a poor rebuild that a friend
bought. He pulled the drivetrain, I owned the wrenches. This also
proves that you can never have too many tools.

Cheers,

Kelley


On Mon, 6 Feb 2006 23:02:33 -0500, "Bob Chilcoat"
wrote:

No safety wire on the one I was in. Headed (can't now remember if square or
hex) machine bolts that just screwed in against the shaft. The one I needed
to get to was aimed toward the bottom wall of the casing, and completely
inaccessible. As far as I could tell, the only thing keeping it tight was
the proper amount of torque. The MGA you refer to probably used gear oil as
a lube. The 1100 gearbox (like the Mini's) ran in engine oil since it
doubled as the sump for the engine. I don't know if that would make a
difference to screw retention.