Henry Getley has, for people of a certain age, an entertaining TCW piece on car maintenance as it was once upon a time.
Car fixing: Those were the DIYs
DURING a clearout of my garage the other day, I pulled from the back of a drawer a book stained with my blood, sweat and tears – not to mention a lot of oil. Seeing the light of day for the first time in half a century, it was a flimsy paperback called Car Repairs Properly Explained...
I had bought the 50p book in 1973 when, unable to pay ruinous garage bills, I was trying desperately to keep my temperamental 1966 Austin 1100 on the road. It had been a good and faithful servant, but it was feeling its age and things were starting to go wrong. A few weeks earlier, the fuel pump had conked out and I’d cobbled together a temporary petrol feed to the carburettor using the washer bottle – not the ideal fix.
Yes, I remember those days, working on our Ford Escort for years before we eventually bought a Datsun Sunny. I remember how amazed I was that it just started reliably every morning however cold and damp it was out there on the drive.
I’m sure there are many talented amateurs out there who can still carry out such tasks – saving themselves a fortune. (My local garage now charges around £120 just for an oil and filter change). But I suspect that if I tried to get to grips with anything ambitious on a modern car, it’d probably lock itself up and set an alarm blaring, or send a satellite signal to the manufacturer, who’d have me arrested for breaching health and safety.
Car fixing: Those were the DIYs
DURING a clearout of my garage the other day, I pulled from the back of a drawer a book stained with my blood, sweat and tears – not to mention a lot of oil. Seeing the light of day for the first time in half a century, it was a flimsy paperback called Car Repairs Properly Explained...
I had bought the 50p book in 1973 when, unable to pay ruinous garage bills, I was trying desperately to keep my temperamental 1966 Austin 1100 on the road. It had been a good and faithful servant, but it was feeling its age and things were starting to go wrong. A few weeks earlier, the fuel pump had conked out and I’d cobbled together a temporary petrol feed to the carburettor using the washer bottle – not the ideal fix.
Yes, I remember those days, working on our Ford Escort for years before we eventually bought a Datsun Sunny. I remember how amazed I was that it just started reliably every morning however cold and damp it was out there on the drive.
I’m sure there are many talented amateurs out there who can still carry out such tasks – saving themselves a fortune. (My local garage now charges around £120 just for an oil and filter change). But I suspect that if I tried to get to grips with anything ambitious on a modern car, it’d probably lock itself up and set an alarm blaring, or send a satellite signal to the manufacturer, who’d have me arrested for breaching health and safety.
23 comments:
I still repair my 2003 Toyota Yaris. My mother gave it me when she gave up driving at the age of eighty. I hav'nt replaced it because it's very reliable and not over computerised so I can repair it. Next up - renewing the rear wheel cylinders!
I owned a couple of Honda motorbikes and felt that working on them would be so easy that I'd do everything myself. But they were Hondas and never broke down.
Later I decided to do a bit of my own car maintenance because my father had a pit in a roofed building. Crawling under cars in the rain or snow was not for me.
Reliable, long-lasting cars are one of the blessings of modern life. Which must count against EVs since "range anxiety" must be rather like the "breakdown anxiety" of the past.
My first car (this was my first marriage, back in the 1970s) was an Austin A35. The bloke in my in-laws' Lincolnshire village who used to fix it thought it was wonderful. Everything was so easy to understand and you could reach everywhere. "It's brilliant - like a lawnmower!", he used to say.
I used to tinker with cars a little bit, but only simple stuff. Batteries, oil change, lights, spark-plugs, and the like. One of the most important issues for the average (i.e. poor) car-owner was finding a bloke who did repairs on the side. They normally did it in the evenings and weekends to make a bit of cash. They had to be easy to contact, and cheap. They always had very dirty fingernails and filthy hair, and they all seemed to be called Dave.
Tammly - my cousin has a Toyota Yaris of about the same age. She uses it regularly with no problems and at the moment there doesn't seem to be any reason why she'd need another car.
dearieme - yes, reliable, long-lasting cars are one of the blessings of modern life. It's common now to see cars over ten years old but still clean, no obvious rust and a good shine to the paintwork. It does count against EVs, range and uncertainty about batteries can't be good for a viable used EV market.
Sam - I saw an Austin A35 on the road quite recently, probably off to a show or just having a run round Derbyshire. My in-laws used to have one, but it surprises us now to see how small they were, yet families went on holiday in them. Much less luggage probably.
When I was a newly married man some 56 years ago,the only car we could afford was a rather tatty Mini countryman.One day the coolant transfer hose split and started leaking coolant everywhere.So on Saturday morning I attempted to replace it.It was only about 2 inches long and seemed to be made from a specially hardened rubber compound which I could not bend to fit the gap no matter what I tried.As this was a winter morning my hands were freezing so I went indoors to have a coffee and think. My wife was doing the washing and our machine was the early sort which pumped water into the sink through a hose.I was watching it do that when I suddenly thought I wonder if that is the same internal diameter as the transfer hose.It was so, I cut the right length off it,took it out to the car and it fitted easily. It was still doing its job when I got rid of the car many miles later.
John - that's how it was wasn't it? Sometimes we had to improvise which why we carried tools and if we had them, oddments like tow ropes, jump leads, a roll of insulating tape, whatever had been useful at some time in the past. Now I don't even have a set of tools in the car apart from the jack and wheel brace which came with it.
Marvellous stories here!
My dad gave us their Fiat 500, when it was due to fail its MOT, back in 1975. He said that if I could get it going, it'd be a gift!
I worked for an industrial window company back then, and we had loads of aluminium sample pieces and strips, which I tap screwed all over the floor and holes, and for good measure, used a greenhouse strip for a whole cill, and painted in black...
It passed with flying colours and went for several years until I sold it to a farmer for forty quid, so he could shepherd his sheep on his fields (off road) in the dry, on Romney Marsh!
He still used for several years after that, I often saw it parked outside his barn!
Scrobs - if you'd kept that Fiat it could eventually have become impervious to rust, being a unique all-aluminium car. Fixable forever!
Older cars were definitely best ... for a start, people like me could repair them.
"A temporary petrol feed to the carburettor"
When a fuel tank rusted through I located a replacement at a scrap yard out in the sticks. In order to get there I rigged up a 2 gallon jerry can on the roof rack with a gravity feed hose tucked under the edge of the bonnet!
"Finding a bloke who did repairs on the side"
Dad had someone like that - he wasn't a "Dave" though. It's rumoured he got his (substantial) wife to sit on a car's front wing to compress the suspension when MacPherson struts needed the shock absorber inserts replacing. Nowadays I have a pair of screw clamps to do the job, and garages have purpose made hydraulic presses.
"The coolant transfer hose split"
I take it that would be the one underneath the thermostat? This usually needed the head lifting to fit a genuine new hose, but one of the after-market companies designed a convoluted replacement which could be fitted in minutes.
After struggling to replace the water pump on my first Maxi I redesigned the cooling fan mounting so I could replace the pump without having to remove the radiator first. I'm sure British Leyland could have done that, but their dealers would have lost a well paying job...
"But it surprises us now to see how small they were"
ALL cars were smaller then - my old Maxi was about the same size as the modern (BMW) mini. Even my 1990's vintage Fiat Panda towers over the original Mini!
"Used a greenhouse strip for a whole cill"
There was also the "Fill the cill with expanding foam" bodge...
We often used to take our ancient Morris Minor into the Highlands. This put quite a burden on the windscreen wipers. Eventually they stopped working but I repaired them with Spangles wrappers.
Maybe reliable cars are the reason Spangles are no longer sold.
James - yes, I had a go at quite a few jobs on our Ford Escort. Anything I could do outside with some basic tools.
Dave - sounds like the voice of long experience. The 2 gallon jerry can on the roof rack would have made a good photo. I can see it on the front of a book - "DIY of Yesteryear", something like that.
dearieme - my brother, cousin and I once bought a cheap Morris Minor Traveller and went camping in it for two weeks. Ended up in Ardnamurchan before setting off back to Derbyshire. No problems with it at all, but we were lucky and had very little rain.
I still do general maintenance and some repairs, but there are a lot of jobs on my cars now that I will take a look at, then just think, 'I'd rather pay Danny to do this'.
It's going in soon to have four ABS sensor rings raplaced. I didn't even know what they were before they started playing up. The guy on the Youtube video had to get the blowtorch out and I noticed a required tool that i didn't have. Danny wants £180 to £200, depending on how long it takes.
It's a far cry from the days when I removed the engine from my Fiesta and rebuilt it
Bucko - I don't know what ABS sensor rings are either. I never went as far as removing an engine and rebuilding it, but I like watching YT videos of work done on vintage cars. I'd rather pay for the work now, but it seems a pity somehow.
Open the bonnet of a modern car and all you see is mysterious black boxes connected together by wiring looms. Nobody knows what any of them do, but dabbling will probably cause the whole thing to stop working.
Leave it to the "experts", there really is no choice these days.
Suggested essay topic: "Are modern cars unserviceable by owners because today's youth are an over-coddled bunch of safety-obsessed untechnical airy-fairy incompetents, or is the cause/effect the other way around?"
Peter - yes it's all very mysterious. I don't do much more than oil, water and tyre pressure. There are exceptions, but most young people don't seem to be particularly interested in cars. A chap in the next road was having his car cleaned by a mobile valeting service this morning which seems a bit over the top... I wonder how much they charge?
"our washing machine was the early sort which pumped water into the sink through a hose" Which suggests it would be warm and therefore flexible, unlike the one outside on a frosty day. Rubber hoses are more compliant if you warm them up.
Tim - we used to do that with rubber tubing in the lab. Warm it up under the hot tap then quickly push it onto the glassware.
"Our washing machine was the early sort which pumped water into the sink through a hose"
I remember those - Mum's Hoover Twin Tub had one, and IIRC the "U" bend was moulded into the hose. Nowadays they have a piece of corrugated plastic pipe with a moulded U bend to clip over the end...
* ABS sensor rings - these (in conjunction with electronic pickups) detect how fast each wheel is turning. If one slows down, due to slippage on a poor surface, it triggers the ABS to modulate brake pressure on the appropriate wheel until grip is restored. In practice, this is repeated rapidly during operation - and leads to a loud BRRRRRR you won't miss!
Dave - I think I've only heard that loud BRRRRRR once when braking at an icy junction. Very obvious when it happened.
Driving down to the New Forest a couple of years ago I got the dreaded warning message that the ABS was not working. Unfortunately this meant that traction control wouldn't work and more inconveniently the adaptive speed control and automatic handbrake wouldn't work either.
For the sake of one ABS sensor on the back wheel I had to drive 'old school', and with only a small 'handbreak control' it was much harder work than I liked.
DJ - I've never been keen on the idea of an automatic handbrake, although one or two people we know who have it say it works well. Not always from the sound of it. The complexity of modern cars seems excessive, yet they generally work well, last longer and are more reliable than the cars I first struggled with in the seventies.
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