Dr Kev. - Kam Servicing Network.

Hello Again!

I feel sorry for a couple of my friends. After working hard for the last six months, scrimping and saving, they have gone on a fabulous holiday to Kos in order to soak up some rays. Their reason for going was:

"We want some sun, Raj. We want a week lying on the beach, relaxing and getting some serious tanning action."

So, why do I feel sorry for them? Just look around, regular reader - they didn't need to go to Kos to get their tan. They could have saved all that money and stayed at home to tan just as much! Still, the change of scene will do them good.

As you can imagine, it has been a little warm here in the workshop. In fact, I would so far as to say that it has been sweltering all day, every day, not helped by the fact that we've been extremely busy. Many of the jobs have revolved around cars overheating, naturally, which could in many cases be avoided if the owners had taken advantage of our free cooling system check.

In fact, one of our customers is a long distance lorry driver and recently got stuck on a jam on the A1. Over the course of five miles (which took some two hours!) he counted 22 cars on the side of the road, broken down due to overheating. Must have been a busy day for the recovery services (if they could get through the jams that is!)
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The most awkward job of the week was also caused by overheating. Mr Connelly (name changed to protect his innocence) had brought his 2.8-litre TDI Mitsubishi Pajero in for a full service and free MoT. Everything was going very well, until we discovered a large water loss somewhere in the system. Naturally, the most obvious thing to cause the loss was a split hose somewhere, but one couldn't be found no matter how hard I looked. There was no external leakage visible at all, so the next thing to do was a cylinder head check.

I was sorry to report that the cylinder head check came back positive, something was amiss in the bowels of the engine. The presence of hydrocarbons in the system coolant indicated it was the head gasket. A quick check on prices yielded some staggering results, so Mr Connelly decided to take the Pajero away and hope for the best, against our advice may I add.

Fast forward to the start of last week. Mr Connelly was on his way to Birmingham Airport, and the engine overheated, big style. Steam was going everywhere, the engine started to grind and the Pajero spluttered to a halt on the hard shoulder. It sounded pretty terminal, and once we'd brought the Pajero back, we confirmed that the head gasket had indeed expired.

Of course, with most cars, it is an expensive repair although not completely terminal. The Pajero however was a different story. Basically a Japanese specification Shogun, the Pajero had ceramics in the combustion chamber and on the cylinder head. To cut a long story short, this basically meant that we could not skim the head (which we later found out was unusable anyway due to more warp than the USS Enterprise) so we would have to source a new unit.

And, guess what? Only Mitsubishi make cylinder heads for the Pajero, so you can imagine what the parts prices were like! When I told Mr Connelly, all I got was silence from the other end of the line before a very faint:

"Well, I suppose that you had better get it fixed up then Raj. I love that Pajero..."

It took a week for Mitsubishi to supply the new head (it arrived yesterday) as they had to import it direct from Japan! Once it had arrived, it was a relatively simple job to install it, rebuild the engine and get it all tested. Simple? Well as simple as an engine rebuild on a Japanese giant ever gets anyway! What pushed the final costs up yet further was the fact we had to pay a surcharge on the old head when we returned it to Mitsubishi since it was so badly damaged due to the head gasket not being replaced when recommended.

This problem could have been avoided had Mr Connelly taken our original advice to get the head gasket replaced. But he didn't, a fact that I am sure he's now regretting. Granted, it wouldn't have been cheap but it wouldn't have thinned his wallet quite as much as the rebuild we've just had to do!

I'm expecting a few more jobs like this to come in over the next week or so, if this heatwave continues that is. If you want to check the status of your head gasket, then there are tests that we can do to get an idea of how well it is protecting the engine. Just give us a call and ask!

Well regular reader, that is it for another week. I'm off to try and get some respite from the heat before re-entering the oven that is the workshop to chargrill some more! I hear that Dr Kev is still tangled up in his wiring jobs, the last time I spoke to him he was rewiring a Citroen Saxo who's owner had melted the wiring loom by installing the biggest sound system since Glastonbury...
Until the next time,

Dr Raj.