Don’t you just hate it when you’re barrelling along the M1 and there’s an almighty knock as the bearings fall out of your engine? Yeah, me too.
So here’s a thing a learned that day: Always check you’ve got oil in the engine before rushing from Scarborough to Coventry because you’re late to work – and maybe don’t try and do it at ninety all the way either (I-told-you-so-ers need not apply.)
Anyway, one extremely slow recovery journey and a few days later, I tore the engine apart on my drive in Coventry. It was bad news (obviously.) The big end bearing on #3 had ‘spun’ which I think is the technical term for completely let go and decided to fuse with its opposite number…
Even the non-mechanically minded can see that this is, in actual fact, buggered.
So, what was I to do? It was late May, and I’d been hoping to use the car all summer for turning up at car shows and BTCC meetings with a silly grin on my face and slightly fewer audible frequencies (I don’t need my ears in my day-to-day life as a theatre sound designer anyway, so why not buy a noisy car?)
The answer was obvious. Jump in the trusty Seat Ibiza Estate we keep for just this very emergency, and rush off to Brighton with bemused spaniel in tow to collect a £35 engine I’d found on eBay the night before. The plan was simple. Bash the current head on, new shells, fix the pesky thrust washer issue and I’d have an engine for summer. Result!
Actually, that’s pretty much what happened, although I also went with new piston rings and a light hone of the bores just to be on the safe side. For £30 it seemed silly not to. The biggest issue I had getting it all back together was a poorly starter motor, which sapped all the current from the battery. A new of both was ordered, but the problem persisted. Slow, laboured turning over, and before long the battery was flat.
The issue eventually was traced to a poor engine earth, and with that fixed I was soon ready to whisk the car down the road to the end of my street, whereupon I blew a head gasket.
I’m not sure exactly what the issue was here – I wheeled her back, checked everything meticulously, and eventually concluded that I’d made a mistake tightening the head down, or badly filled the water system and got a deathly air lock. (Or my £35 engine was a scrapper? Nahh!)
Decent money was duly spent on David Manners’ finest Payen head gasket, the cooling system was slowly filled with saintly patience, and that Saturday we took Gem to her first car show of the season without any further issues!
2 Replies to “Summer Breakdown”