Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Kam’s Column - 18/02/03
I still can’t get over the pictures of the London Peace March last weekend. The footage of all those people was just incredible, and some estimates put the number of people attending as high as 1.5million. I think the official figure from the police was around 750,000 and the organisers claimed the full 1.5million, so if you take a mid point you still get over 1million people. That’s about 2% of the population of this country in one place at one time. And its surely a fraction of all those with anti-war sentiments who couldn’t make the rally. I wonder if the government will take notice? Then again, they might ignore it like a troublesome spark plug and we all know what happens if you do that…
No doubt you’ll have noticed that it has been really rather chilly recently. Just a little fresh of course, but it has been killing off batteries around the county like you wouldn’t believe. We’ve replaced enough to build a new customer reception area with – and still they keep pouring in! I don’t think I’ve ever known a battery-death frenzy like it…
This week’s story revolves around a rather nice new shape VW Golf brought into us by Mr Hubbard (name changed to protect his innocence). He had recently purchased it for his wife from an auction and, while it had a lot of miles on it for a two year old car, it was in pretty good overall condition.
“It hasn’t got any Go, Kev” he complained. “It doesn’t feel breathless or over worked, but it is just running really poorly. Plus, the central locking in the boot dones’t work and the passenger’s electric window don’t wind down!”
“No problem Mr Hubbard. We’ll have a look at it and see what we can do for you.”
Well, I have to say that the window and locking problems were easily fixed – the boot hatch locking motor and window retract motor were both missing! Someone had obviously had a problem with them, taken them out and just never got around to putting them back! After checking with Mr Hubbard, we ordered the relevant motors from one of our suppliers who gave us a price so low that even we were surprised!
Under the bonnet, the tale was a little more difficult. The car had received a new distributor cap, new ignition leads and spark plugs fairly recently. Shaun checked the plugs and discovered that they weren’t the correct ones. Had we cracked it?
“No, Kev” was the dejected reply when Shaun returned from a test drive. “It isn’t much better. It seems like the Golf is running on a really weak mixture. Someone has also put a new exhaust and cat on it – it looks like they’ve spend some real money trying to get this sorted!”
It was now time to wheel out the latest addition to the Kam arsenal – a brand new engine diagnostic code checker. Once we had the Golf hooked up, the new machine hummed to itself for a minute, and gave what appeared to be a thoughtful reply.
“Is it likely to be the timing?” Shaun asked.
“Possibly,” I replied. “Although it is fairly unlikely in a car this young. Having said that, it has done quite a few miles…” According to my handbook, it was also time to change the cam belt over, so we deciced to remove the belt covers and have a look under there.
Then it hit us (not literally, regular reader) – the Golf had previously received a new timing belt, but it was the wrong one! In addition one of the tensioning bolts had stripped, so the net result was that the belt had jumped two teeth, throwing the timing right out!
Once we had replaced the belt and tensioner (making sure all of the timing marks lined up this time), Shaun took it for another test drive.
“It goes like a rocket Kev! Are you sure its just the 1.6-litre in there and not a VR6?”
Amazingly, the main problems with the car had boiled down to a poorly fitted timing belt, so the previous owner had spent all of that money unneccessarily. Of course Mr Hubbard wasn’t complaing!
If you come down to the workshops in the next few days, you’ll notice that we are slightly thinner on the ground than usual. This is because there are a number of invaluable courses that some of the guys are going on to improve their knowledge and skills yet further. It’s important to keep up to date with the latest advances in automotive technology, and so the guys have taken the opportunity of going to a nice, warm lecture theatre to better themselves. I wouldn’t mind somewhere warm and out of the wind right now, but I’ve already been on the courses!
Until next week,
Dr Kev Allen
