Dr Kev. - Kam Servicing Network.

Well, folks, Derby’s push to the top was going superbly in the first half last Saturday. A series of well-stitched moves put us one-up against Burnley. However, in the second stint, the game unravelled like the jumpers my great-aunt used to knit for me. Two-one was the final tag line. Still, chin up lads, there’s always this coming Saturday.

I was on the phone after the game, commiserating with a friend of mine who is actually in the UN Peacekeeping force. He is on red alert over the situation in Iraq – I don’t know about you, but I find the whole idea of war (again) slightly worrying. America tried it once before and failed dismally – what will make this attempt any different (other than Dubya’s psychotic defence secretary Condolezza Rice who wants to nuke anything that moves by all accounts)? In the words of Frankie Goes To Hollywood – War – huh – what is it good for?

War of a different kind was being fought in the Heanor workshop on Tuesday. Well, you’d have thought so, judging by the immense number of smoke bombs that seemed to be going off simultaneously. Actually, the culprit was a diesel Transit belonging to Paul Taylor (and that is his real name, as requested by the party himself), an old friend of mine and the decorator who is doing up my house. He’d been round at the weekend to assess the volume of work that needed doing, and I’d noticed that the Transit was blowing smoke like you and I blow up balloons.

I had suggested that he brings the vehicle in, but as it was on contract hire, he had to check with the hire company first. Since they had tried three other garages already, they decided to let Kam try to succeed where others had failed.

Since Paul was decorating my house, I figured that the easiest thing would be to have him bring the van to my place, swap his tools into the works van that I was going to lend him and I would bring his smoker back to the depot. As a plan, it was flawless – except that I had to pull over less than three miles into the trip since there was so much smoke that I couldn’t see the road in the rear view mirror (I was expecting the environmentalists to hijack me at any second as well!). I didn’t even have to tell the Kam Rescue Team where I was- Shaun simply followed his nose…

Once back at HQ, I set our diesel specialist Glynn on the job – after all, he does all the work on his boat’s diesel unit himself so is well versed in the art (I’ll say no more…). His first thought was that the fuel pump might be faulty, but after an inspection, it proved to be perfect. As Paul had said, the previous garages had replaced every filter and seal, so it couldn’t be that. The van had even received new injectors…

“There’s only one more thing that it could be, Kev,” he said. “It has to be the tappets. One of the valves must be jammed.”

I would have thought that the other garages would have already checked this, but I didn’t say anything.

A moment later, I happened to walk past and caught Glynn beaming away to himself. “Success?”

“Of course Kev! I was right, there is a loose nut on the rocker shaft which prevents the rocker from working and that jammed a valve open!”
This of course allowed oil to seep into the air intake and be burnt with the air/fuel mixture. Plus, it prevented cylinder three from firing properly – hence a lack of power that I’d noticed on my short drive.

Once Glynn had applied loctite to all of the nuts and reset the tappets, the engine was purring like a cat with milk and mice on tap. Paul was delighted of course – and even more so since we made no charge for him using our van. It’s important to any businessperson to stay mobile, and our works van allowed him to carry on with all of his daily jobs.

While we were on the job, the contract hire company also authorised us to change the timing belt. You know what I’m going to say next don’t you – so there is no need to use up more ink at the printers. Suffice to say, four broken timing belts came into the workshop – and three vehicles required open-heart surgery. It isn’t pretty (or cheap)…

Until next week, check make sure you’re properly belted up (and give us a ring if you aren’t sure!) …

Dr Kev Allen

# posted by drkev : 11:02 AM  0 comments