The idiot and the cripple - a cautionary mechanical tale

MECHANICAL maladies, to trot out an old cliché, are like buses. You spend ages untroubled by them and then a stack of them all arrive at once.

The Life On Cars fleet normally consists of my cherished old MGB GT, the Mazda MX-5 for when I'm in the mood for a B-road blast and a Rover 214SEi for all the mundane, everyday tasks. However, while I can expect the MG, which was built at British Leyland factory in the 1970s, to be a bit temperamental, in the past week I've suffered a coolant leak on the MX-5 and starting problems on the normally faultlessly reliable Rover. 

All relatively minor problems for anyone with even the slightest bit of mechanical nous, but a talented engineer I am not. Normally I'd entrust such tasks to my long-suffering dad - who is a talented engineer - but because he's suffering from back problems I thought I'd do something dangerously unprecedented in my petrolhead life thus far.

With all the parts already ordered in, I thought I'd have a go at mending the problems myself.

It was a great plan. I'd set off at the crack of dawn this morning in the MX-5, pick up some spark plugs for the Rover, and appoint my dad as project manager while I changed the MGB's candle-in-a-jam-jar headlights for some halogen jobs. With this simple job out of the way, I'd then switch the cracked hose on the freshly cooled MX-5 for a new one, swap it for the Rover and treat that to a new distributor cap, leads and spark plugs. I had all the bits I needed, a full Saturday to do it in and a talented engineer - albeit one who couldn't, thanks to a spot of sciatica, do anything involving physical labour - to advise me.

Sadly that's not exactly how it worked out.

For starters, the MX-5 decided it wasn't going to play ball, and decided at the exact moment of me pulling into PartCo's car park that the my pre-mend bodging wasn't up to scratch. As the man behind the till passed me the Rover's leads and plugs, he looked past my shoulder and out of the window, at the increasingly sick-looking Mazda.

After giving me a slightly worried glance, he asked: "Would you, by any chance, be needing any K-Seal as well?". 

"Yeah, it might not be a bad idea," I responded, before he gave his diagnosis.

"Your car looks like it's about to explode."

Half an hour, a bottle of K-Seal's finest and three miles of automotive limping later and I was ready to crack on with the first of the three tasks - swapping the MG's lights over. It should've taken, at most, half an hour, but everything that could possibly have gone wrong did go wrong. We blew fuses. We rounded screws. We ended up getting endlessly frustrated by impossibly fiddly bits of wiring which could only really be solved by suddenly sprouting a second set of arms. Worst of all, we'd underestimated that dark force of the UK's classic car scene; British Leyland electrics. All the coffee, minor injuries and swearing in the world can't beat that one!

Several hours later and the idiot/cripple team had to throw in the towel, when the talented-but-injured member of our double act found it just too painful, literally and metaphorically, to carry on. Frustratingly, even after all that grafting I'm at the exact same point I was this morning, with an MG with a single working headlight, a Mazda that thinks it's a kettle and a Rover which refuses to start if the weather's being a bit British. 

Naturally, there's only one way to deal with this humiliating defeat on a trio of relatively simple mechanical tasks. Have another go tomorrow, of course...

The Haynes manual enters the iPad generation

THAT enduring mechanic's companion - the Haynes manual - has been just given a 21st century makeover to help it appeal to iPad addicts and web whizzes.

Haynes said this week that they are now offering 50 of their car and bike workshop manuals in electronic form for the first time, called ManualsOnline, with sections designed with tablets (iPads, in plain English) and mobile phones in mind.

A spokesperson for Haynes Publishing told Life On Cars: "With over 150 million manuals sold worldwide, renowned motoring experts Haynes have been helping motorists perform essential maintenance on their cars for over 50 years. This new digital platform will make Haynes manuals available to a much wider international audience.

"ManualsOnline includes all the content from the printed Manuals with the additional benefits of a glossary of terms, searchable menus, quick links and ‘how-to’ videos. Online Manual content is also optimised for viewing on tablet or mobile device, so for the first time motorists will have access relevant tutorials, diagrams and technical information on the move."

Subscriptions to the fifty manuals, which includes everything from the Ford Fiesta and the Peugeot 306 to the classic Mini and the Land Rover Defender, cost just £25 per manual for a year, or £30 for lifetime access. Fifty more manuals will be uploaded onto the service over the coming months, with scope for more as time goes on.

To celebrate the launch of ManualsOnline Haynes are also running a prize draw, with four lifetime subscriptions up for grabs. More info on how to enter can be found on the Haynes Manuals Facebook page. More information about the manuals is available at www.haynes.co.uk/manuals-online.

Would you use an iPad or a smartphone in the garage instead of a printed manual? Life On Cars would love to know your thoughts...

Giving pre-1960 cars an MOT exemption is a seriously bad idea

MY CAR is sick. As I write it's licking its wounds in a garage because the powers-that-be have decided not to issue it with a clean bill of health. It is a reject. An MOT failure.

How does it feel to be a reject? Well, frustrating obviously, but strangely reassuring at the same time. It shows that the system still works. The MOT protects people like me from ourselves, by stopping us from taking unroadworthy cars onto the great British road network. It is, a great leveller of all cars over three years old - whether you've got a musty old Maxi or a McLaren F1, if it's got a shot tyre or a worn bush you'll still get a politely-worded computer print out explaining why it's failed to make the grade.

In fact, if anything I don't think the MOT goes far enough - it's amazing what mechanics aren't required or even allowed to check when yout car goes up on the ramp. It's nice to think that no matter what you drive, you've got to make sure it'll make the grade once a year. What I should have done, of course, was bought a car made before 1960. In which case I needn't have bothered. I know I've gone on about it before, when I described it as “possibly the loopiest bit of legislation ever to come out of Westminster” but the Government have actually taken some stupid pills and gone ahead with it anyway. It's official. As of November 18 your pre-1960 classic will no longer ever need to go through the rigmarole of an MOT ever again. Ever.

What if you drive an Austin A40 made largely of rust connected with bits of string? Not a problem. A Moggy Minor with knackered suspension? Go ahead. You are helping to cut Government red tape. The nation's deficit will magically shrink and jobs will be created every time you start your rusty old Ford Prefect up.

Of course, you'll still be legally required to prove that your car's roadworthy, but that's easier said than done if you don't go through the MOT. It's easy to clock a bald tyre, but there's lots of things even keen enthusiasts simply wouldn't spot unless the car's up on a ramp. I reckon - and a lot of classic car owners, mechanics and road safety experts I've spoken to agree with me on this one - a lot of people simply wouldn't know. All cars should go through an MOT simply because it's a safety net of sorts.

I'd rather the  mine get spotted now than be dangerous in six months' time. I've said it before and I'll say it again; exempting really old cars from what is a safety test is a seriously bad idea.

Old cars with no MOT? Count me out

CHRISTMAS, as everyone with an old car knows, isn't just a time for giving. It's a chance to get the spanners out and get a bit of automotive nip ‘n' tuck underway.

As you'll read this my old MG will be hidden away in a garage with its wheels in the air as part of a two-pronged effort to keep it out of the winter weather and to get it through the MOT in the spring, although I'll freely admit I know absolutely nothing about mechanics and have to rely on a team of friends and family to help keep the old girl going. I envy people who have even the slightest bit of mechanical nouse, because they can work miracles with carburettors.

But if you own a car older than 50 years old, new Government proposals will mean you won't have to bother any more. In what's possibly the loopiest bit of legislation ever to come out of Westminster, cars made before 1960 will no longer be required to go through the MOT. Ever.

The Government's argument is that all classic car owners are like my dad; timeless tinkerers, who spend entire weekends in their boiler suits, endlessly mending things that BMC, Rootes and all those other long-gone car companies didn't get right in the Forties and Fifties. For them, happiness is a Triumph TR3 that comes out twice a year on the back of a trailer, on its way to a car show.

But what about the likes of me, to whom mechanics might as well be voodoo? I like to keep my own motors mechanically prim and proper but I bet there's plenty of people out there who simply won't bother if there's no legal requirement for it to pass an MOT. I know it's a simplistic argument, but surely there's something reassuring in knowing that ALL cars - and especially ones with the stopping abilities of an ocean tanker - have been into a garage at least once in the past 12 months? Even a Jaguar XK150, which I reckon is about the fastest, most advanced car to fall into this bracket of golden oldies, will be comprehensively outdragged, outbraked and out-Euro-NCAPped by a three-year-old Focus or Astra, so surely it needs an MOT just as much.

I know the chances of coming across a rusty Morris Minor with no MOT on it whatsoever are slim to nonexistent, but it's still a chance I wouldn't want to take.

The quantum mechanics of MOT testing

AS of right now my Mini is a four-wheeled Schrodinger's cat. It is not just a car. It is a paradox of quantum mechanics.



For anyone not into their tricky brainteasers, Schrodinger's cat is an unfortunate feline which gets stuffed into a box*, alongside, say, a vial of poison, and then locked out of view. Said moggy is, until you open up the box again, both alive and dead at the same time. It exists in two simultaneous states. Just like the internals of the 19-year-old Mini Sprite now that I've booked it in for its MOT.



The box itself - the bits of the Mini I've been able to check out - are fine. The tyres are in good nick, all the lights and switches work as Austin Rover intended, the gaping holes that used to be the boot floor have been welded into a pleasing patch of clean metal and there aren't any rough edges you'd accidentally stab yourself with. The sills appear solid, but that's the problem. They appear solid.



To stretch a metaphor a tad too far, the "cat" is all the bits I haven't checked because I haven't had it up on a ramp, like you're supposed to. Has corrosion taken hold in places you can't see unless you've access to a proper garage? Are the shock absorbers shot to bits? Have the emissions dipped to dangerously carcinogenic level? Basically, my car mechanically is brilliant and rubbish at the same time, because I honestly won't know until tomorrow. This is why I, as someone who is rubbish at mending things, dreads the MOT.



Stay tuned to find out just how bad the news is when it emerges from the garage tomorrow morning...



* No cats were actually harmed in the writing of this article



UPDATE, August 11: The cat, it turns out, is dead, because the Mini has failed its MOT. The good news is that it shouldn't be too tricky or expensive to revive it. Cue the phone call to PartCo!

My MGB: defeated by the Bank Holiday weekend

ANOTHER week, another reason why my MGB isn't on the road. Only this time, it's been defeated by the Bank Holiday weekend.

This time last week I was a happy chap. The very Seventies sports car had, after what had seemed like an eternity, finally passed its MOT with flying colours. A very dull trip to the DVLA's office up in Preston now meant that it was not only taxed, but taxed for nothing, on account of it being an historic vehicle. Even the cheapo classic car insurance was ready and rolling, meaning all I had to do was jump in, fire up the old girl and drive off into the sunset. Or rather I would have done were it not for the British Bank Holiday.

You see, the slight snag was that the MOT tester noticed it was leaking coolant, which last Thursday we finally traced to being caused by a water pump that may as well have been made of clay. Usually you'd just ring up the following morning, get a new one, and have it fitted an hour later. Unfortunately, the following morning was a Bank Holiday.

In fact, the only day when it wasn't a Bank Holiday was Saturday, when Partco is open for just a few hours in the morning, and, predictably, they didn't have one on the shelves. I don't blame them; would you keep obscure bits for a long-gone sports car in stock for the one idiot who needs them? The upshot is that - as I write this column - a job that should have taken half an hour is now into its fifth day.

This, as anyone who's ever used a Bank Holiday weekend as an excuse to tinker in the garage with their pride and joy, is the nightmare of having shops shut, and I expect with another four day weekend on the way a lot of stout chaps in boiler suits are going to find themselves, thanks to the Royal Wedding, right royally knackered.

Britain's cottage industry of nailing together things in sheds depends on Bank Holiday weekends, so having the shops which supply the stuff shutting for days on end is a nightmare. It's not just cars either; I imagine there must be millions of Handy Andys, Alan Titchmarshes and Fred Dibnahs, who despite finally being freed from their everyday jobs can't buy the bits for their hobby of choice.

I'm not asking for a religious holiday to be hijacked by rampant commercialism to keep some classic car owners happy. I just want my water pump on time.