Car problems

I thought I would share this experience with you as there is certainly a lesson for us all in this.

Recently my wife and I went to Newcastle and Canberra for a short holiday. During our holiday, our car started making unusual noises that I knew it shouldn’t make. Upon our return to Brisbane, I sought mechanical advice. It seemed our gearbox had some noisy bearings, our exhaust manifold was leaking and the engine was leaking oil. So I made some enquiries and found it would cost $1600 to recondition the gearbox. Fair enough I thought. Best to get it done before it gets worse and makes more damage.

Now you just know that Murphy is hiding around the next corner. Two days after dropping my car in to the gearbox place, yep you guessed it, the mechanic called. It would appear some of the gears in the gearbox were also worn which was creating a whirring sound in some gears. So long story short, Murphy’s law wins again and the bill shot up to $2800.

Next up came the leaking manifold. I wasn’t about to get stung again, so armed with my experience on several Holden’s I had owned years earlier, I decided to take on the task myself. How hard could it be to change an exhaust gasket? So I bought the gasket and set about replacing the dead one. That’s when the drama’s begun.

First of all, being a V6 engine, its not that easy getting to the side of the engine. Add to this the fact that these bolts had probably never been taken out of the engine since new. So after many colourful metaphors, I finally got the heat shield off. Onto the manifold. I noticed that there was a nut missing from one of the studs holding the manifold on. This was obviously the problem from the start. So I set about removing the manifold so I could replace the gasket and fix the whole drama. After removing the manifold, I noticed that one stud was rather loose in the head. So I reached down to see if I could tighten it up, and guess what? It snapped off in my hand. Murphy’s back.

So I called a good friend who is also a good mechanic to ask for advice. He told me how to get the broken stud out. He also said it would be tricky. But I had to try. So I went out and bought a right angled air drill to get into the side of the head, and tried to drill into the centre of the broken stud. Well as you may have guessed by now, I was not very successful with this endeavour and ended up drilling down the side of the stud. So where did this leave me? I guess the head would have to come off now so I could get the remainder of the stud out and put a new one in.

To do this, I needed a tension wrench and a special hex head socket. So off I went to buy them. I also needed a new head gasket. So another $200 later, I was ready to pull the head off. Halfway through the process it finally dawned on me that the whole inlet manifold would need to come off. It was at this stage I realised I was in over my head. So a quick phone call to a mobile mechanic, and I awaited the arrival of the professionals to help me through this tough spot.

The mechanic arrived, took a look at my mess and suggested we just put it all back together and use some gasket goo on the manifold to help take up the slack of one missing stud. I was happy with this suggestion since I needed my car going again ASAP. We finally got it all back together after 4 hours and another $270.

But low an behold, it was not running properly. Too late, the mechanic was gone. I realised that I must have put the timing belt on one notch out. So the car sat in the back yard for a few more days while I waited for the mechanic to be able to come back. In the meantime, I ordered a new timing belt and new oil seals to fix the oil leak. Tonight the mechanic came back, and $300 later, the car is now working good again and the manifold is almost perfect as well.

So what’s the lesson? Leave it to the experts is the first lesson. Listen to friends advice when they say it could be a little tricky. That’s really their polite way of saying, its above your skill level. This whole situation is a classic example of Murphy’s law at its finest. To add insult to injury, It rained tonight the whole time we were fixing the car, and stopped just as we were finished. I hate Murphy!

Keep smiling everyone.