The original Mini had to have its rear wheels set to toe in by about 1/16" to 1/8" (as I remember) by using a shim between each radius arm and the sub-frame.

I found this out when I bought a new Mini at discount from a dealer in London and when I joined a motorway on one of those looping tight-bend slip roads, I had to pull hard on the steering wheel to get it to go around! It really wanted to go in a straight line. My local BMC dealer had no idea, of course. Don't know why I bothered going to them.

After pondering the problem overnight, I got out the old Paddy Hopkirk tracking gauge and found that the back wheels were set parallel. And there were no shims in the radius arms as there should have been. Typical of the build quality of British cars in those days, the factory had omitted to fit them. I seem to remember that I found the answer in David Vizard's book on Mini tuning. The book gave the required shim thicknesses to give different amounts of toe-in, but I wanted to go for the recommended toe-in. Noting the shim thickness for the recommended setting, out came the micrometer and I check out all the bits of steel which I had, and separators from a filing cabinet measured at the correct thickness. I cut and drilled two shims from the sheet, fitted them and the problem was solved.

Now, I had a noticable fault. What are you feeling in the handling that you don't like? Is it a similar problem to mine?

Don't like the sound of that.

I had a similar problem with my Dispatch van. Two places tried setting the front alignment to try and stop uneven wear on front tyres. It wasn't until I landed at TW Tyres in Rugby where they have a 4 wheel jig, that I found out the rear axle had an alignment problem that couldn't be corrected as it was fixed. They were able to adjust the fronts to compensate and a year later tyre wear is now even.