You know how it is, cruising around the highways and byways, concentrating on the job in hand, and having peculiar disjointed thoughts.
Well today for some unknown reason i remembered the small problem encountered when trying to restart my mk3 zodiac after giving it a quick overhaul, decoke, new valve springs, rings, and bearings.
Well, when i went to restart, it wouldn't. So check for the usual suspects, all ok.
Delving further i discovered that the rotor arm was between contacts at firing point, and then i realised what i'd done, IIRC the distributor was driven off the oil pump drive, it may not have been that, but something along those lines (long time ago now), and i hadn't got the gears in the correct place for firing. (maybe it was timed off the camshaft?)
So faced with stripping out again, i instead got out the faithful junior hacksaw, and cut a new rotor arm keyway in the distributor shaft almost opposite, but at 2 o'clock if that makes any sense.
Anyway, changed the leads around, retimed and all good.
Now i know this is a terrible admission to make, and the proper mechs here would have a fit. In mitigation, i was 18. (its a fair cop guv)
Has that triggered any memories, or prompted any confessions of jobs done, and discoveries of rather important parts that should really have been inside the repair.
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Does filing the corners off a very noisy Mk3 Cortina 1600 camshaft count? Or Araldite-ing the gearlever back on the same car when the nylon doodah that held it in had stripped its threads, causing the lever to come off in my hand?
And those were the less embarrassing ones..
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I've got the opposite - adjusting the tappets on my 86C 1.4 Volvo 340GL. Took the cover off and found a full (albeit dismantled) set of feeler gauges inside! Managed to reassemble them as well. Think my Dad still has them.
Manatee - I had the same incident in my MkIII Capri in the early 90s. Entering Bristol city centre on the M32 I was changing down into third and the gear lever came away in my hand. Panicked but luckily was able to relocate it. Drove around with the centre console missing and a gaping hole onto the road for a week until I replaced it with one from a scrapped Orion (metal thread) - happy days
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Many years ago I had an old 1300 Capri in British Racing Green and it was rattling a bit and using oil.
I couldn't afford to have it done professionally so I decided to buy a Haynes manual and borrow a block and tackle and do it myself.
The insides of engines have always fascinated me!
All went well and I re-ringed it, had the bores honed, fitted a new spigot bearing and decided on a new clutch while the engine was out.
I put it all back together and in anticipation turned the key.............nothing:(
I re-checked everything and finally asked the local garage to come and tow it in.
He took one look under the bonnet and found I hadn't connected the low tension lead, so after patting myself on the back as a female doing the job on her own, I had to resort to a fully trained mechanic ( a male one too) to show me the obvious!
Pat
Edited by pda on 21/06/2008 at 10:14
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Not sure that MTBO syndrome ( Missing The Blinking Obvious ) is entirely gender specific Pat ! I think most of us who have ever attempted any reasonably complex DIY repairs on our vehicles have found ourselves with mystery leftover items at the end of the job. The real conundrum though, is how often the car seems to work perfectly well without them.
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I know someone who sent back a replacement Beetle engine because it wouldn't run. It turned out to be OK - they'd just set the timing 180 degrees out!
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I remember helping a mate service his Rover P4 95. We'd drained the gearbox and were refilling, which you do from inside the car and check the level with a handy dipstick. We were there ages, pouring in oil, remarking on what a large capacity the gearbox had, when we looked at each other and both said 'did you put the drain plug back in?'.
Another time, we rebuilt a Rover P6 2200 engine and seemed to have several nuts and bolts left over when we had finished. Ran fine though.
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I reckon you would be amazed at how many bits you could leave out of a car (or anything for that matter) and it would contiue working well. I have lost count of the number of designers I have asked - why have you done that ? and the response is - well the last version was designed like that and so I based my design on the previous model and made imrpovements.
If someone took an approach that said to the design department - Design this engine/suspension system or whatever from new and you cannot use the previous version as your starting point, I think we could see the cost of things redced dramatically.
I can't give too much away on this but I remember working on 'a unit' where a maintenance part was connected to it's main part up high by a 1.5m stainless tube. (I hope you can follow this). You needed ladders to get to the bit 1.5m away. I asked why it could not be right next to the main unit. The clever designer told me all the previous models were the same. It turned out there was an original reason why it needed to be 1.5m away but not anymore. The next design was different, we saved 1.5m of stainless and the customer wrote to us telling how much easier our product was to maintain because the guy's didn't need a ladder anymore - doh !!!
Edited by Pendlebury on 21/06/2008 at 11:33
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GB
Almost same thing as you-- Mk2 Zodiac - complete engine rebuild and came to start it nothing - got a lorry to tow me round block -nothing - back under bonnet and after a lot of head scratching noticed all HT leads were one out - moved them all round one and started first touch of key. - takes me longer (2hrs) to change six plug now in Mazda then remove and replace old Zodiac engine.
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Years ago,I was working on engine development and noticed in the next test cell to mine a group of very senior engineers standing round an enine listening to the noise from the valvegear and talking knowledgably about quietening ramps on the camshaft etc..They were not happy when I pointed out that the back bolt on the rocker shaft was loose and the whole rocker shaft was moving-I leant forward with a spanner and all was silence-engine and engineers.
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>>I can't give too much away
RR & A ?
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Afte rebuilding a 1956 Morris Minor engine (that for some reason didn't appreciate being dropped into 1st gear at 50MPH) I had a curly pipe left over. Couldn't remember where it came from. Anyway started the engine but the low oil pressure light stayed on, thought it just needed a bit of time to get primed. Drove it around the corner and the engine siezed. Shortly afterwards realised it was the pipe that took the oil from the sump into the engine!
My best fix was on a Mk4 Cortina that just stopped on the M4, on investigation I discovered that the bakerlite cam that opened the points had fallen off. I manged to get it going again with a cable tie, with the lumpy bit in the right place.
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Should imagine there's a lot more embarrassing stories out there than ours, whats coming up though is how much easier it was to repair simply the odd breakdown, and if you'd got a bit of bottle to have a go at quite major work.
I've definately lost it now, terrified of all this computerised stuff, if either of the cars didn't start it would be a real head scratching time, whereas before we'd just go systematically through the routine of electrical, then more electrical and lastly fuel.
I know a lot of us still change our own discs and pads and do our own servicing, but the makers are trying to make that more difficult, i understand you have a a very strict sequence of events to follow if you own a car with very modern emergency powered braking systems.
Take the E class MB from 03 for example, if you don't follow a set routine precisely, once you take out a brake pad, the car will power up the brakes and pump the piston out to the disc to maintain the correct pressure, hope your finger's not in the way, even opening the drivers door will trigger this.
Thanks for those, keep em coming.
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