As junior Audrey Osborne walked into her garage, she wiped her paint stained hands on her work overalls and picked up a paint sprayer filled with Tamco’s “pepper white”. Then, she got to work on touching up the passenger door of her pride and joy – a totaled 2015 Mini Cooper Sport.
Osborne began the restoration process of her Mini Cooper with her dad in October of 2023. Osborne’s main focus during the restoration was to make sure that her car went from junkyard scrap to a working, functional vehicle. This meant months of replacing broken parts and tweaking fine details. The father-daughter pair worked on the Mini Cooper for six months, only finishing its restoration in June. They faced a lot of challenges along the way, including welding new doors, painting the exterior, and installing new airbags.
“It was completely totaled. The airbag modules needed to be replaced, the passenger door and passenger side panel both needed to be ripped out, and the doors needed to be leveled. It was a really complicated process,” Osborne said.
Another obstacle that Osborne and her dad encountered was the fact that the vehicle they were restoring was a German car. German automobiles are well known for their precision engineering and high quality materials, which makes it expensive and tedious to work on them.
”My dad knows how to work on American cars, and I sort of know how to work on American cars, but German cars are very different. All of the engine components are stacked on top of each other in German cars as opposed to being laid out flat like American cars, and so you have to dig to take certain parts out. It’s kind of like dissecting a frog,” Osborne said.
Despite the fact that the project was difficult, Osborne maintains that she learned a valuable lesson from spending so much time working with her hands.
”I learned a lot of problem solving skills because when the manual gave instructions that we couldn’t complete because we didn’t have the right tools or when we did something wrong, we had to find our own way to fix the problem,” Osborne said.
The entire process of restoring a car was special to Osborne, but perhaps the most special part of the project was being able to bond with her dad.
“I had the privilege of working alongside my dad that not many other kids have, and that motivated me to work harder,” Osborne said.
Now every morning as she pulls into the parking lot, Osborne feels a sense of pride wash over her. Her time spent with her dad is paid off with every nod of approval she receives towards her car.
Audrey Osborne • Oct 7, 2024 at 5:08 pm
Wow Emma, this is great work. Very well-written, and focused on getting every detail about the story right. Great job Emma, I love it!