A funny thing happened on the way to the forum!

My wife and myself were on the way to Reading very early in the morning to get my car back from the menders, prior to driving to work. We were driving along a dual carriageway which is almost like a motorway. A car crossed from the other carriegeway and broke through the hedge (no crash barrier at this point). It hit us amidships with a glancing blow and we were both travelling at about 70 mph at that point.

That all took no more than 1 second, probably less! The rest seemed to happen in silence and slow motion!
It made us spin around. I just sat there and watched the world slowly rotate. I gave me a false impression of slowness, this rotation, but we were actually moving along the road at nearly 70 mph as well. The car got sideways on and started to roll but miraculously, it fell back again once the wheels where aligned with the direction of travel again. We lost a rear wheel, though we didn’t know until much later!

We found ourselves travelling backwards down the motorway on 3 wheels at high speed and with no hydraulics and no handbrake even. I pulled it on but it just went loose in my hand. K managed to keep the car almost straight using the internal rear view mirror only. After a hundred yards or so we hit the centre reservation which steered us back into the road so we continued across to the hard shoulder and crashed into a wooden fence there. All in all I think we travelled backwards about a third of a mile. It was quite a walk back to the other car!
The other car continued diagonally across the road in the wrong direction finally smashing into the crash barrier.

Both cars were total wrecks I guess and we were all lucky to climb out alive.

Well, that is the mechanics of the thing. Tomorrow I will tell you what it felt like and maybe a little bit about the conduct of the various stakeholders in this incident.

Something Happened on the way to pick my car up....

Goodbye Fiesta!

But more about that little incident later!

Tension Belt Trauma

I decided (probably wrongly) to take my car to a main dealer. This of course is not what is normally done when you have a car as old and well used as mine. Having seen the fantastic pictures that were sent me by a member of the Club, I felt sure that I could do the job myself. Anyhow, what's done is done and so for everyone's education, here is the bill.
I also asked them to change the automatic transmission fluid at the same time. According to the dreaded Haynes Manual you are supposed to do this every 36000 miles. For me that would be about every year and a half. I asked for it to be done when I bought the car and that was over twice the recommended mileage ago!
I would say that the staff at the Reading Branch of Greenoaks were very polite and they seem to treat customers who own older cars with as much courtesy as the ones who own brand new cars. (Although of course I have never been in that favoured position so maybe I can't judge….maybe they get a complementary Bollinger as well as a valeting.)
When I brought my car in, it had just toured France so it was full of crisp packets, sand and that peculiar smell of sandwiches eaten in a car…a mixture of plastic and banana. When it was returned it had been thoroughly cleaned out. So I was happy with the service and my car is a whole lot better now.
One thing I didn’t realise was that the loud cranking noise that I used to suffer from when making sharp turns (especially in reverse) was caused by the loose fan belt. When the power steering pump placed demand on the belt, it would flap about. This in turn causes the free running pullies to rotate in a jerky fashion hence the noise. This is now cured.
So: verdict: more costly than normal but I am happy with the service and happy with the job!

The Dreaded Bill

More on Engine Oils Abroad

I wrote to Castrol, asked these questions and I had this response:

1. Please could you recommend an engine oil for my car. I have a Mercedes 230TE which has a fuel injected petrol engine. My car first hit the road in 1987 and it has now done over 240,000 miles and still going strong!

GTX Magnatec 15W-40 would be recommended for this engine, but Magnatec 10W-40 is also suitable.

2. I sometimes take my car abroad and get connfused with the different names of your oils. For instance in France what is GTX2? I can't find a data sheet for this on your website.

Unfortunately, I don't have the details on GTX 2. From previous customers, I think that GTX 2 is equivalent to UK GTX. One way that you can check on the specification of the oil, using the 15W-40 grade oil, is the ACEA rating on the back of the can - Magnatec meets A3/B3, and this exceeds A2/B2 which is the GTX spec.

3. What does the viscosity rating mean (SAE 10W/40)?

Essentially, there are two things you need to know; the higher the number represents a thicker oil, and all oils thin down a lot as they get hotter. 10W-40 means that the oil is a multigrade and behaves like an SAE 10 oil at cold temperatures but like an SAE 40 at high temperatures. For a 10W-40, the oil is fairly thin at cold temperatures to allow for easy starting and rapid oil circulation, but doesn't thin down so much as for example an SAE 10 at high temperatures, which maintains protection by means of a strong oil film.

I hope this helps. If you need any more information, please don't hesitate to contact us again.

Regards
John

So if Castrol don't know their overseas products then who does?

Trouble and Tension

If you have a Mercedes of any type at all, then go and join The Mercedes Benz Owner’s Club. I cannot state this more strongly. It is very good value for money indeed. I have been a quiet member for a few years now and I don’t really contribute very much. When I first joined the club the best thing about it for me was the magazine…..I didn’t bother with the various meetings and stuff.

Although they have a presence on the web, they generally had the policy of ensuring that nothing was published on there that was not also in the magazine. However, all that seems to be changing now and that is because of the very excellent Bulletin Board that they maintain.

Since I am not really all that clever with cars I have on occasion come unstuck in the middle of a job but I have always found a solution on this board.

On this occasion I was concerned about this problem with my belt tensioner. One of the regulars on the bulletin board sent me these pictures of the mechanism stripped off an engine and all is revealed! This was a job that I could easily have tackled myself. I say ‘could have’ because I booked my car in to a garage about 2 minutes before I got these pictures. With the aid of these pictures I could have done this job I reckon.

Oh well, the weather was particularly wet and I have no garage to work in but I shouldn’t have chickened out of it.

Let’s see how much it costs to have the professionals do the job!

I has been in the garage now for 3 days and is stuck there waiting for a part…….



What the tensioner looks like 1


What the tensioner looks like 2


What the tensioner looks like 3

Dammit!!

During our foreign trip the fan belt started slipping for some unknown reason. As everyone knows, this causes an embarrassing squealing noise. Being a lazy sod and being on holiday, I decided to leave it alone until I got home. I thought I could put up with the funny looks I was getting from the French neighbours.

Well, today was the day that I got round to tackling it.

On this car the belt is tensioned by adjusting the screw that you can see in the photo (13mm) but first you have to loosen the locking bolt (19mm). This was incredibly tight but I did manage to loosen it though.


Tensioning Bolt


Then disaster struck!

I over-tightened the tensioning mechanism and sheared the sodding tensioning bolt off! For some reason I screwed it beyond its limit……(what an idiot). It seemed that no matter how far I turned the tensioner bolt it would not tighten the belt. Don’t know why this is unless the belt has stretched a lot but I’ve never seen that happen before?

Well, there is nothing I can do about removing a sheared stud so I gave the AA a call. This would be about the third time I have ever called them in over 20 years of motoring! They were very responsive and called round in less than an hour. The poor old AA man took a look at it and decided he couldn’t fix it (not surprised really). However, since I am relatively paranoid about problems with cars I have the top level of AA cover. This means that I will at least get it towed into a garage when I find one that can do the job. Apparently I will get a hire car for 48 hours as well. So at least I am on the road at the moment!

Factoid No 1: Incidents along the way.....

There were a few oddities during this long trip though there was nothing that constituted a show stopper.

Firstly, I reckon that over the last year or so the engine has started to use more oil than it used to. I've not measured it and it's not major so it might be difficult to tell really. I got an inkling that oil use was increasing after I used Halford's own brand oil. I'm sure that this oil doesn't last as long and I generally use Castrol GTX 10/40 'recommended for modern engines'. Do I have a modern engine? Dunno! I'm never sure which oil to choose. Obviously it's easy to choose between 'diesel', 'petrol' and turbo but what next? It seems that you can choose an oil for 'new engines' or 'older engines' and there seems to be a wide difference in price.

Here is a Castrol website containing a few data sheets about their oils. According to the GTX sheet, it is suitable for engines manufactured since 1990, so to be strict, my car is excluded but I use it anyway.

The Haynes manual suggests that I should be using SAE 10/40 to 15W40 so that seems to fit OK.

Just to add to the complication, there are different oils when you go abroad, and of course the containers may be written in a different language so it may get even more confusing. On this occasion I chose an oil called GTX2, which seems to be a completely different colour to the UK variety but appears to have the same spec. What does the '2' mean? I'll see if I can get that answer from the horses mouth....Castrol that is!

And Another.......

August 14th 2004

There has not really been much time this month because of our annual holiday. This time it was to Bordeaux and becaus of this trip the car has topped 240K miles now. This is getting impressive.