#12: Don’t drive your mini through a ford!

Amongst other things, Steve tells the story of how driving a mini through a ford resulted in a new engine.

Andy: It’s Friday 29th January, I’m at 1st Class Garage with Steven. Steven’s just been playing – not dominos – that game where you have to move things around to make space with cars.

Steve: Well, it’s almost like musical chairs with the cars, just shunting the cars around so that people can get in and out. And, yes, I mean, it’s the same sort of problem wherever you go in the town. I don’t know; I don’t know what the answer to it is really.

Well, I do know the answer is not to fleece the motorists. That’s basically all that’s happening; it’s all about money. I mean, if you go not too far from here there’s, like, it’s 11-hour meters. And if you go up and down those roads you’ll find that most of those are standing empty because, of course, the cost of parking now. So we’ve got roads around here that has got not a lot of vehicles parked on them because they’re now metered.
Whereas before the meters, obviously people used to park there, so all the cars that used to park there, where have they gone? You know, they’ve only moved them to another area. And this is the common practice: when they started zoning this town people used to park on the outskirts of the zones, so they moved the zones out. People park on the outskirts of those zones, so it is a little bit of a knock-on effect.
And the parking issues in this town, I mean, I could spend hours talking about it and I don’t really want to go down that – because it does make the blood boil.

Andy: Have you had any nice, juicy run-ins with traffic wardens recently, Steve?

Steve: Just lately, no. I’ve got to say, in fairness, the guys we’ve had around here have been very understanding, because obviously we work with cars; we’re in the town; parking is a problem. When people drop their cars off, you know, we then have to move vehicles around to accommodate them or we have to find somewhere that we can park them, you know, safely and legally.

So yes, parking is a little bit of an issue and we’ve had run-ins in the past with various wardens – I don’t know what their, sort of, their actual job title is now, but…

Andy: Traffic enforcement officers, I think, something like that.

Steve: Oh, traffic enforcement…

Andy: Or parking enforcement officers. Something like that, I think.

Steve: Yes. That’s a lovely term, isn’t it? I mean, just directly outside the garage here we’ve got double yellow lines. We did ask if we could actually have, like, the white bar that they used to put across sunken pavements. Because this is a sunken pavement, or a crossover as they call it, which means that you – you know, that really other people – or people shouldn’t really park there because we need access to it.

So we asked if we could have the white bar there because of cars being dropped off; it’ll allow customers just to pull their cars up outside there without getting hassled. And one or two of the wardens in the past have really hassled us, you know, they don’t appreciate that we have a job to do like they have a job to do. We’ve got to have a little bit of sense and just – it is, it’s common sense really.

Andy: But on a bright note it’s good news about the understanding wardens that you’ve encountered recently. We salute understanding wardens, don’t we? Well, I do.

Steve: Absolutely, I’m all for it. Everybody has a job to do and I’m sure they hate to get abused, but there are ones out there that actually encourage abuse with the way they go about their job. You can understand why people do get wound-up and do, like, howl verbal abuse at them. I’m not condoning it – I can’t condone it – but yes, you know, it’ll make your blood boil, particularly if you’re having a bit of a bad day and their lack of understanding is – it doesn’t help matters. It’s just fuel to the fire really, isn’t it?

Andy: Now Steve, last time I spoke to you, which was in December, wasn’t it, you said work was a bit bitty. It looks pretty busy now, I have to say.

Steve: Yes it’s, you know, we went through, obviously, the Christmas period where it’s always quiet. We then go through, like, this year we’ve gone through a couple of weeks of snow, ice, where we’ve been able to get in open up workshop but there’s been the snow on the roads where people have been unable to get their cars to us. So that made it a bit of a quiet, sort of, four weeks let’s say.

We’re now playing a bit of catch-up because the cars that were booked in then were rebooked so we are playing a little bit of catch-up and, of course, I always like to see the workshop busy like anyone would.
So yes, it’s – we’ve had a few jobs in. We’ve had lots of jobs with wipers: wiper motors, wiper linkages…

Andy: Ah, wintering-type problems.

Steve: Absolutely and most of them are self-inflicted. You know, you see it all the time: snow build-up on the roof of a car, they maybe clean the windscreen or wipe the snow off the windscreen, they then go down the road, hit the brake, the snow on the roof slides forward onto the wipers that are trying to clear the screen and break the linkages.

Andy: So that’s a common wiper injury in winter, is it?

Steve: Yes, it is; it is. When you’ve got snow on the roof it’s all right clearing your windows, but if you think about it, every time you stop, that bit of snow – particularly the snow we’ve had recently, you know, where you’ve got, maybe, a six-inch build-up of snow on the roof – slides forward, damages the wiper linkage, your wipers are then out of commission.

Or on the other side of it you then have zero visibility. And if you’re going down a road or in traffic or something like that, doesn’t matter what sort of speed you’re doing, if you’ve got zero visibility, you don’t know, the car in front may have had to have stopped, you can’t see him. All for the sake of, maybe, taking 30 seconds just to wipe that snow off the roof; just brush it off the roof so it doesn’t actually cause you any damage.

But yes, we had quite a run of wiper linkages during the snow – just after…

Andy: Because if you think about it those wipers are actually under quite a lot of strain, aren’t they, because it’s a very short lever underneath the bonnet that’s moving that big, long lever at the top.

Steve: Yes. I mean, wiper linkages are all the same sort of designs across all the various models and makes. You’ve usually got quite a thin bar, which in a lot of cases can be quite flimsy. On the end of each bar you’ve got a plastic ball socket, most of them are plastic ball sockets, which then push onto a ball which is on the base of the, what we call the wheel box, the wiper wheel box, which is the piece that the wiper arm bolts onto. So, on the base of the wheel box you’ve got a short arm with a ball that is operated by the main linkage.

The big problem is because it’s plastic, it wears. So over a period of time you get a little bit of wear in the linkage, now and then you get this huge weight of snow suddenly falling onto them, something’s got to give. And plastic, you know, that’s the usual thing.

But we’ve also had wiper motors burning out as well where people have put the motors on, or put the wipers on, where the wipers have been frozen to the screen and that sort of stuff. So, you know.

Andy: So what else have we got Steve? We’ve got quite a few vehicles up on ramps here today.

Steve: Yes, there’s quite a few in here. There’s a van in there for a clutch, there’s a Mercedes at the far end that has – it came in with lots of lights coming up on the dash: all the warning lights. The diagnostic plug-in revealed that it’s got various fault codes in various systems on the car. Most of it appears to be going back to alternator. It’s over-charging; it’s spiking. All of a sudden – it’ll charge fine one minute and then all of a sudden we’ve got a 17 bolt going through the system which is a little bit too much. The system gets a bit of a spike and everything starts, sort of, going a little bit haywire, so…

Andy: So, of course, that spike will affect all those little black box brains presumably.

Steve: Yes, they don’t like 17 bolts being thrown through them. And consequently they’ll bring up various warning lights, throw-in various fault codes, quite a few red herrings as well, and generally the car just doesn’t run right. It’s an auto so it doesn’t change gear right, it’s all the sort of thing. So we’ve got an alternator ordered for it, just waiting for that to arrive.

Andy: You think that’s where the problem lies? Because it must be quite complicated trying to diagnose some of these electrical faults.

Steve: Yes, it is, absolutely. I mean, what you’ve got to do – it’s like, you’ve got to think things as logically as you can. I know logics and these onboard computers don’t seem to go hand-in-hand nowadays. Or, you know, you shouldn’t talk about logics and ECUs in the same sentence.

But in this case, yes, I mean, we’re clearly getting an over-voltage so we go down that route first. We’ll do the alternator, see what we get. Then once we clear the codes out, give it a run-up, see what the systems are doing and see what other codes are coming back in. And it’s then a case of, like, going through the various faults, starting from the most obvious to the most obscure really, to rectify the problems. That’s the Mercedes there.

We’ve got a nice little Triumph Stag there…

Andy: Oh, can we go and have a look at it? I haven’t seen a Stag for ages. Where is it, over here?

Steve: Yes, it’s…

Andy: Oh yes. I didn’t see it; it was behind another car. Oh, it’s been years. They’re lovely, aren’t they?

Steve: Yes.

Andy: Well, they look lovely. Mechanically, are they lovely to work on?

Steve: They’re okay. They’re – this particular one’s got a little bit of a clutch slave cylinder leaking. Again, we’ve got a clutch slave cylinder ordered for it. Like a lot of these cars they stand around, don’t do a lot of mileage, consequently rubber seals tend to collapse. They tend to seep; tend to leak. That’s what happening with this one. So yes, that’s the Stag now.

We had a BMW Mini in last week. I mean, they’re called BMW Minis. This was a BMW Mini Cooper, automatic. The woman had tried driving it through a ford which, I guess, under normal circumstances…

Andy: Well the Ford Cortina, but when you say ford you mean a small stream?

Steve: Absolutely, a small stream, and it cut out part-way through this. Now, I guess it was probably a little bit deeper than she thought and this was just on the back-end of the snow where the snow’s thawing, so the water levels are up a bit. Consequently, the water got taken into the intake of the engine which is position right on the front grill at the front of the car. Straight into the engine, into the cylinder, we all know you cannot compress a liquid, something has to give.

Andy: So what happened?

Steve: Well, in this case we had conrods brake come through the sides of the engine, resulting in a replacement engine. It is quite a common thing with the BMW Minis.

Andy: I never realised driving through a ford could result in a new engine.

Steve: Oh yes, absolutely. You really need to be careful. You need to be aware of certain things, you know, if you’re going to do that sort of motoring. You could say you’d be best with a 4×4 or something but…

Andy: Or an amphibious vehicle.

Steve: Or an amphibious, yes. Or better still stick to terra firma and dry road. But that was the BMW Mini, I mean, it’s all done, dusted, gone now. The woman’s quite happy, got her car back, but it was just through driving through a stream.

And we’ve got another one here, this is a BMW Touring, came in with a little bit of a, sort of, chuffing noise which turned out to be, like, a combustion leak from the cylinder head gasket. When we’ve looked at it it’s turned out that the – rather than just having a head gasket gone, where the cylinder head bolts bolt into the block – the threads in the block – the block is only aluminium, the threads in the block had been pulled.
And in a previous life it had been Heli-Coiled, which under normal circumstances is okay. But the BMWs, the blocks tend to go a little bit brittle in those sorts of areas. And there’s a lot of pressure and tension when you’re talking-down head bolts on the threads themselves. And all that’s happened here, the threads have pulled again, or the Heli-Coils have pulled, which means we’ve got a block that’s been Heli-Coiled…

Andy: What does that mean, Steve, Heli-Coiled?

Steve: Heli-Coiled is – it’s like a thread that you can actually put into a thread to reduce it down. So if you have a – if you’ve got a, like, the threads have gone in something, you can tap it out to the next size up and you can put an insert into the hole, just thread it into the hole, it’s then actually reducing the thread size back to what it was. So it’s…

Andy: You’re literally screwing a new bolt but it’s got a hole in itself with a new thread inside it, like…

Steve: Well, it’s more like a coiled spring, because it’s not actually a bolt or anything; it’s like a coiled spring. So you can literally just thread it into it and it would then give you that replacement thread and that’s usually quite, sort of, adequate.

I mean, personally I prefer the solid inserts. There’s various solid inserts you can get which we use a lot on, say, sparkplugs. Because with sparkplugs if you’re taking something in and out all the time, obviously you’re going to get a little bit of wear on the thread and the threads are going to get a bit weakened. Or, you know, sometimes the plugs get a bit tight, particularly on some of the Fords where they have a tapered seat. And that usually results in the threads getting damaged in the head.

So you would over drill it, you know, take it out slightly larger; tap it out, so you’re putting another thread in there, a larger thread; you then put the insert, a solid insert instead of a Heli-Coil; and screw that in with a bit of thread lock, or something on there to lock it into place. You’ve then got a nice, new thread for the sparkplugs and you haven’t got the risk attached to the Heli-Coils.

Where the Heli-Coils can pull up, like an uncoiled spring, these others are solid steel inserts, so they are literally a solid steel – and personally I prefer using those sort of things if you can get them, because they’ll only come in certain sizes, so it is a little bit difficult.

And we’re having trouble trying to locate anything to be able to repair this block and it looks like – short of taking the block out and taking it up to the machine shop and see what they can do with it – this is probably going to result, again, in another engine.

And then you have to start looking at the age of the car: is it worth it? In this case it’s maybe not; it’s quite borderline. So, you know, yes, I mean, that’s just another one we’ve got in there amongst all the various other bits and pieces that we have in here at the moment.

Andy: Well Steve, thanks for that. We better wrap it up there. So you’re still doing the free winter checks, are you, at the moment?

Steve: Yes, yes, we’re still doing the free winter checks. We done that last year very successfully and so far this year it’s proved a big success really. A lot of our customers are taking advantage of it and it is exactly what it says: it is a free winter check. It’ll check the strength of your anti-freeze and your tyres and your lights and that sort of thing, and it’s free.

Andy: Fantastic. So, Steve Kennard of 1st Class Garage, Kemptown, Brighton, UK, thank you very much indeed.

Steve: Thanks Andy.