Technical conundrum

Technical issue, and car-related, so if that's not your, er, bag, man, please move on.

Ford Mundaneo, 2 litre TDCi. A while ago, the reversing lights stopped working. I traced the fault to the switch on top of the gearbox. Getting at it necessitates removal of the air cleaner and associated gubbins. I removed enough stuff to determine what tools I would need (yup, got 'em) and then put it all back. As it was summer, I then forgot about it. Recently, the reversing lights have started working again, just in time for the dark mornings and evenings. Thank you, whoever you are.

However.

At around the same time (impossible to say for sure), I started getting issues with the car. One was the 'engine malfunction' light, which came on at start-up and stayed on permanently. The other was poor cold starting - the car would start OK, but for the first 10 seconds would run very rough and pour smoke out of the exhaust. After that, it seemed to clear and ran fine thereafter. Performance up to maximum speed was completely normal, fuel consumption normal too. I took these two together and came up with a faulty glow-plug or two - I've had exactly the same symptoms as before on a Land Rover diesel where a glow-plug went bad. As the car was running fine otherwise, I wasn't too concerned. It passed an MoT (with max revs emissions test) in this condition.

When the nice man at Enfield Auto Recovery in St Neots drained the nasty old petrol I had mistakenly put in the car at the weekend, he told me that the air-flow sensor had been disconnected when he looked at the car. Impossible, said I, as the car is running fine: easy cruising at 100 mph and averaging 50 mpg (not at the same time, obviously). Also, the connector for the AFS is on top of the engine, easily visible, and I see it every time I check the oil. The connector is about 12" from the oil filler.



Can I really have missed it every week for six months? What he said makes sense, as I can remember disconnecting it to remove the air cleaner, but a) he was convinced the car would barely run with it in that condition and it was fine, and b) it was replaced for the return journey and the EML stayed on, with no change in performance. Oh, and c) I am pretty rigorous about checking everything is in place after I have finished a job. Working on bikes makes you a bit particular like that.

However.

Yesterday I started the car again for the first time since I returned. It started perfectly, with no rough 10 seconds of throat-clearance. And the EML light is off. I've just tried it again now. Perfect. I am wondering if the garage really have cured the problem and it has taken a couple of heat cycles for the fault to clear in the ECU. I am delighted, of course. But I have a couple of nagging questions:

• Did I forget such an obvious thing when I took the air cleaner off in the summer?
• Can I really have missed such an obvious thing for six months?
• Would the car really have run this well with the AFM disconnected, and even passed an MoT?

I am thinking 'not very likely' to each of the above.

I think it will remain a mystery, but this will not spoil my enjoyment of having a car which starts well and runs without error codes again.

Mind you, passenger and load-carrying duties are over for a while now, so it probably won't be used again for a week or three. Back to two wheels, thank Heavens.

Happy Birthday, Driving Licence

I'm not sure of the exact date (it might have been the 23rd), but it was in February 1971 that I passed my driving test. I passed my bike test the following year. So I have now been driving (legally) for 40 years.

Bloody hell.

In that time, I reckon I have driven about 650,000 miles on four wheels, and about 150,000 on two wheels. The difference is down to the usual reasons - newly married and only able to run one vehicle, young children ditto - and a ten-year gap when illness prevented me from riding at all. But if you add it all up, it's almost to the Moon and back, twice. Or 32 times round the world.

In that time, I have owned 20 cars, from a Citroen 2CV to a 4.6 V8 Range Rover, and 17 bikes, from a wrecked Triumph Tina scooter that I ran in the fields at age 15 to a Honda Pan European ST1300. The worst car I ever drove was a Moskvitch (it wasn't mine, just a loaner while one of mine was in for service), which was truly horrible. There have been no bad bikes. Even the Jawa 350 that I owned in the early 70s was fun at times, and I don't regret having it, although it did perform the greatest service to me by making everything since feel like a luxury.

I've had a few minor swaps of paint, but only one serious accident, when a car turned across my path on a dual carriageway and we met head-on. Luckily it was wet and wintry and I wasn't going fast. My passenger had whiplash which has troubled her all her life since then, whereas I walked away with nothing more than a permanent twitch of the braking muscles whenever I see a car waiting on a central reservation. The 2CV was repaired and back on the road in a week. The Triumph Dolomite that wandered into its path was a write-off.

I've had a few close calls on the bike, but have only fallen off three times, each time due to my own over-enthusiasm and lack of self-restraint. I like to think each one was a learning experience that I will not repeat. I hope I am right. Scrapes and bruises, but no broken bones or worse. Have I been lucky, or just careful? Who knows.

My Dad always enjoyed driving, and he was happy for me to learn because he knew I would enjoy it too. Neither he nor my Mum were very keen on motorbikes, but to their credit they never stopped me once I was 18, and never made me feel guilty or wrong about what I did. (They did utterly forbid me from having a bike when I was 16 and was hankering after a black Honda CB72 which a mate was selling. I moaned at the time, but looking back it was absolutely the right thing to do. I had no sense at all.)

So, 40 years and the best part of a million miles. A few moments of anger and stress. A few hours of boredom in traffic jams. But in all, hugely life-enhancing. I dread to think of the cost of it all, if you put it together into one sum, but mobility has let me do things that previous generations could only dream of: find work that suited me, even though it wasn't within walking distance of my home; meet people and do things on a whim that would have been impossible without personal transport; just go out and drive or ride because I wanted to.

I'm often rude about cars in this blog, but in all honesty I still get a kick out of driving and would set off on a thousand-mile journey at the drop of a hat, with the same sense of adventure I had when I was 17 (but with a much better chance of getting there in one piece). Bikes, though, are something else. I can never swing a leg over a two-wheeler without a faint memory of that first thrilling ride on a mate's Lambretta when I was about 14, wobbling helmetless down the road trying to juggle clutch and brakes, and wondering why my cigarette had torched down to the filter in half a mile, while the paper was still intact.

Happy days, all of them.

Rejoice, I say, Rejoice

For lo, mine chariot which hath the wheels of the number four, and four is the number thereof, has passed its MoT. And the passing was not of the passing kind, but displeased Pharoah's minion, for it involved a failure for headlight aim, which the minion thereunto addressed himself with a screwdriver, and which thereby was transfigured into a pass. And there was also an advisory in the land, which was the advisory that the brake discs were not of the shiny type, but were becoming rusty as becomes metal things which have not the joy of regular use, and great was the lamentation of it. But this was advisory only and did not corrupt the passing nature of the testing of Pharoah.

Congregation: For yea, we are pleased that the LORD has been gracious unto us.

And lo, great was the weeping and gnashing of teeth in the land of trees, for this testing and the proof thereof caused the felling of many, for presented unto my eyes were six scrolls, and the scrolls were green and pink and yellow, and the scribings upon them were manifold:

• Pass certificate in English and Welsh
• Failure certificate for the headlights in English
• Failure certificate for the headlights in Welsh
• Advisory certificate for the rusty brake discs in English and Welsh
• Emissions certificate in English and Welsh.

And lo, great was the joy of Richard of the tribe of Blog, for the LORD would now allow him to drive his chariot throughout the land, and not against the laws of Pharoah, who demandeth such scrolls or the driver of the chariot be cast into the darkness and fined many goats and cattle and sheep, yea, even unto the fourth generation.



Another happy car, today.

This, I can tell you, is a huge relief.

Memo to self: train as an MoT tester. Fifty big ones for 40 minutes' work. Not bad.

UPDATE: list of certificates corrected. Not quite as bad as I thought, when I actually got round to looking properly.

Brrrrr ...

I just can't seem to get warm these days.

Ice crystals on the Bonnie ...



... and hoar frost on the Yamaha ...



It's getting to just above freezing in the day, allowing the previous night's frost to thaw slightly, and then freezing hard every night. There's ice crystals everywhere. By early morning, it has been down to -6° regularly, which is almost unheard-of for what is supposed to be a Gulf Stream climate. I have a distinct lack of interest in going outside unless wrapped in many layers of insulation and sealed within a windproof shell. With a hat. And gloves. Transport which blocks out the surrounding environment and replaces it with a warm, wind-free one, especially if there is little possibility of falling off it, is preferred.

Even if I had one of these ...



... I would be taking the bread-and-butter Ford. Really.

I wish all that lovely warmth that Gore and Monbiot keep promising would turn up. I'll be running out of firewood soon.

Headlights (update)

Having observed over several days, and determined that the problem of missing or maladjusted headlights is not a figment of my imagination (the percentages I noted in a previous post seem to be broadly accurate), I think I have found a possible reason for the problem.

It lies in the essential reliability of modern cars.

I first learned about mechanical things (an interest that has lasted through my life) from my Dad when I was quite young - probably about 6 or 7, in the last 1950s. I used to go outside with him at the weekends and we would 'do' the car. In those days, cars didn't just run themselves - they needed constant care and attention, and that mysterious thing called 'mechanical sympathy'. Engines needed regular decarbonising, clutches lasted two or three years, tyres only 12 months, and carrying spare bulbs, a fan belt, fuel, some oil and water, a jack, a starting handle or jump leads, a couple of pieces of old sacking (in the winter - we had snow then) and a few tools was considered a common sense precaution rather than the sign of an anal-obsessive that it is today. Dad had to know all this. His job took him round the Yorshire Dales at all times of day and night, winter and summer, and if he didn't know how to fix a simple problem, he could have been sleeping in the car for the night.

Cars were not expected to be perfect. They broke down, and you coped with it. You learned how to deal with the obvious stuff, and you joined the RAC or AA for the rest. Being a 'motorist' was regarded as a kind of skill, and people would do strange things like weekly checks for oil level, tyre pressures and so on. People knew how to do it, or there were Car Maintenance classes as the local Evening Institute if you didn't. If a bulb blew, someone would tell you, or you would find out for yourself very soon, and you could fix it. And you would fix it, because you felt it was your duty to everyone else on the road to be safe and with everything in good condition.

Nowadays, a car is a machine, like a television or a fridge. You buy it, it works, that's all. Quality and engineering have progressed beyond measure since the days I was talking about, and a good thing too. Cars are now very reliable, hardly ever go wrong, and the need for any mechanical knowledge is almost nil. Service intervals have been extended to 12,000 miles in many cases, which for many people represents a year's driving. So you buy the car, fill it with fuel as necessary, and once a year go back to the dealer for a service. That's it.

(Changing a headlight bulb on my Ford, by the way, is far from simple. You must take off a lot of the front trim and then remove the entire headlight unit before you can get access to the bulb. No wonder people don't do it. In the old days, it could usually be done from inside the engine compartment in twenty seconds with no tools. So it's not all the driver's fault.)

That's great. It means that you can spend more time doing the things you want, and it means that more people are able to own a car and use it than could before - the non-mechanical (trying not to be sexist here) have just as much access to the utility and freedom of a car as the guy with the dirty fingernails and the torque wrench in his hand. But it does have a downside. If something does go wrong (and bulbs still blow, no matter how good they are), then the owner:

a) may not realise, as the need for regular checks of the vehicle's health are no longer necessary, and

b) may not care, as long as the car still goes forward in the usual manner - after all, repairs are the garage's responsibility, aren't they? It will have to wait until the next service in a few months.

I can understand this. I own a car, but it doesn't really interest me. It goes, it's reasonably efficient, it carries the shopping and it tows the caravan. It does everything I ask it to, and in return I show no interest at all in its welfare. It's serviced and it's inspected, but it's not cherished or cossetted. It's a car - you don't take your fridge apart every week to do maintenance checks, do you?

Bikies are going the same way, but they are - crucially - lagging behind in many significant ways. Most bikes now have electronic ignition, so the days of adjusting points are long gone. Fuel injection is now also commonplace, so there is no need to clean the carbs or set the idle speed. But they do need servicing, and many owners love to do it for themselves. There isn't the 'sealed unit - no user maintenance' attitude that cars now have. Most motorcyclists love to be able to fiddle with something, even if it's only checking the oil. It's part of the involvement of ownership that makes bikes far more rewarding than cars.

(Aside: bikes are now remarkably reliable in the same way that cars are - they rarely go wrong, and when they do it is usually the result of neglect or faulty maintenance rather than poor design or materials. This is all the more amazing when you consider that the specific power output of many bikes is double that of most cars. It is not uncommon for bike engines to develop 150bhp/litre, whereas the average family car struggles to make 80bhp/litre, and even the latest hot-hatchery from Ford, the Focus RS, can only manage 120bhp/litre. But I digress.)

Ultimately, we will have cars that are sealed at the factory and do not require - and will not permit - any servicing or maintenance for 200,000 miles. This will be great from a utility point of view, but it will mean that yet more idiots are barreling along the A40 with only half the lights they should have, and wondering what is wrong.