thegarageblog.co.uk : A bit of ‘mechanical sympathy’ goes a long way.

Generally speaking (and unless you’re really unlucky), most cars these days are fairly reliable. Assuming the usual things like the battery are OK, they’ll more often than not start first time and not conk-out at every opportunity. They shouldn’t need the oil refilling after every journey, shouldn’t leave oily puddles wherever you park them, and should generally be capable of a fairly long journey without too many problems. Once you get used to having a reliable car, anything ‘unusual’ about its behaviour is normally fairly easy to spot.

Suppose you check the water and oil levels every couple of weeks (like a good motorist) and it never needs topping-up with anything. If one day, it suddenly needs 4 litres of water in the radiator, it’s fairly conclusive that something is amiss. Likewise, if you only ever have to put 1/2 litre of oil in every 6 months (between services) and one day you find it’s almost empty on the dipstick, you can bet that it’s going somewhere. It’s either going to be burning oil in the engine (in which case you’ll often see blueish smoke in the exhaust) or leaking oil (and have puddles on the driveway).

Now, this is the stage where it’s usually not too late to get something done about it, before the engine just gives-up and dies at the roadside, usually accompanied by a cloud of smoke or steam. A car engine is a wonderful piece of equipment when it’s working properly, but in just the same way as a baby will cry when it needs feeding or changing, your engine will generally let you know when something is wrong too.

Apart from the usual obvious signs like the oil warning light staying-on, or the temperature gauge staying in the red, there are other signs that all is not well under the bonnet. If you can spot these signs, you can often pull-over before anything catastrophic happens, and save yourself a fortune.

I’ll illustrate this with a little example of a job we did a couple of years ago for a regular customer. She was driving her 4 year old Citroen Xsara Picasso along the motorway, when the red ‘STOP’ light came on, and the temperature warning light at the same time. She decided that although the car was telling her to stop, she would carry on to the next junction instead as she was in a rush to get home. Well, she never made it that far as the engine stopped after a further 1/2 mile and refused any attempt to start it again.

After an hour or so waiting for the breakdown service to arrive, the poorly car was towed back to our workshop. It was fairly obvious what had happened soon after our technician looked under the bonnet – it had overheated in a fairly spectacular fashion! It’s fair to say that the engine was properly ‘cooked’ as the plastic covers over the valves and timing belt had actually melted, and the oil inside the engine had congealed into gooey blobs due to the extreme heat. The engine had no compression whatsoever and it was obvious that the cylinder head gasket had failed. So, what could have possibly caused all this on a 4 year old car? The actual cause was a small piece of rubber hose, that’d developed a split (either through a manufacturing defect, or just from age) and the engine had lost it’s vital cooling water. At the point this happened, the level of coolant in the radiator would have dropped dramatically and the remaining coolant would have boiled quickly, causing the temperature warning light and ‘STOP’ lights to come-on (as they did)

At this point, there would’ve been no damage to the engine whatsoever and had she have stopped on the hard shoulder then and had the car recovered back to us, the final result would have been very different.

All it would have cost to repair, would have been a new hose (which was £7.00), a couple of litres of new antifreeze (£8.00) and around 1/2 hour of labour. The total bill would have been under £50 and the car would be fine.

As it happens, as she decided to drive with no coolant in the engine whatsoever, there was nothing in the engine to cool it down from the extreme temperatures generated on a motorway drive. As the water had gone, the poor engine oil had to absorb some of the heat which was just too much for it. Engine oil is designed to provide protection to the engine between a wide range of tempertures, but NOT when it’s so hot that things are melting! before it had a chance to sieze through lack of oil, the cylinder head gasket failed as the aluminium metal of the cylinder head ‘warped’ from the extreme heat and made the engine stop.

By this time, it was too late and the engine was damaged beyond repair. Having removed the cylinder head, we found that the actual pistons had got so hot and overstressed from the lack of oi, that they too had started to melt and had deposited smears of molten metal on the insides of the cylinders. There was no viable option other than to remove the entire engine and throw it away! A complete replacement engine was required and this eventually cost almost £3000. Plus the £7.00 for the replacement pipe that caused it all!

The whole expensive incident could have so easily been avoided by simply stopping when the car said to. The engineers at Citroen doubtless spent a fortune developing an easy to understand warning system that displays the word ‘STOP’ in big red letters right in front of you. Stopping at that point would’ve saved around £2950 of debt on the owner’s credit card!

It’s all about having a bit of mechanical sympathy for your poor engine. Apart from an annual service and maybe a bit of oil every few months, most engines will give thousands and thousands of trouble-free miles without complaint. If you’ve noticed that yours is needing water or oil more frequently, please get it checked-out ASAP before it’s you by the side of the road, facing a long wait and a £3000 bill.

Of course, not everyone reads my blog (or lacks any sympathy or knowledge about cars) and it’s them that I’ll be seeing on my forecourt, on the back of an AA transporter. I’ll happily repair their car at the best price possible, but to be honest, much as I don’t like turning work away, I’d much rather they came in to ask us to check out a little leak, rather than having to have a new engine!