Tag Archives: changing hyundai trajet cylinder head gasket

Monday 10th August 2015 – MY PATIENCE IS NOW THOROUGHLY EXHAUSTED …

… and my good humour has now totally disappeared. I am never ever going to help anyone out ever again.

hyundai trajet leak oil on concrete drive les guis virlet puy de dome franceJust look at my beautiful concrete hardstanding.

I worked on old wrecks for years at Gainsborough Road in Crewe, and despite everything that was thrown at me, my drive there never ever looked anything like this.

But here I am, having spent a fortune on concreting my drive last summer so that I would have somewhere nice to work in my dotage, and this is what I get for helping someone out.

The guy who owns this old wreck came round to try to finish it off, but forgot to connect up the oil pipe. As a result, when he turned over the engine, I got the contents of his sump all over my concrete.

And if that isn’t enough to be going on with, he wandered off to think of a plan B, not only leaving his car in my drive but making no attempt to clean up the damage. That’s all over where people walk into my property of course, and it’s all soaked into the concrete and thoroughly ruined it.

Consequently tomorrow, as soon as I come back from Gerzat, his Hyundai is going out into the street regardless of whatever else happens. I’ll tow it out with the Kubota, get it as far away from my premises as possible, and then just leave it for whoever wants to remove it.

and if you are wondering why I waited until Tuesday to publish this, had I published this last night before I went to bed, as I usually do, there would have been nothing that would have been fit to print.

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Thursday 6th August 2015 – *@#&*@ç&!

Yes, tomorrow is my last day to work on this car as I’m now booked up before I go away.

And the client says that he can’t come down. Apparently he has a paying job that has come in, and my convenience is apparently so much lower than that. Well, it’s nice to know where I stand.

He says that he’ll come round on Saturday morning and finish it off, but I won’t be here. I’ll be in Montlucon. And the car had better be gone by the time that I come back as I’ll be putting Caliburn in my drive. I’m off for 9 weeks and I’m not leaving Caliburn in the lane under any circumstances. I haven’t paid all of this money for this concreting that we did last year to leave my van on the public highway.

And I also need to clean my drive, with the amount of oil that’s leaked out of this car. That has totally dismayed me.

This blasted Hyundai has totally messed up all of my plans. There’s no chance whatever now of me tiling my bathroom before I go and I wanted to have this long-done before I go.

I’ve had a major sense of humour failure over this car. And the worst of it all is that, having seen the photos that I posted on here a week or so ago, you know as well as anyone else that this vehicle won’t be going very far even if we do manage to get it going. I’ve wasted all of this time and done all of this effort for absolutely nothing and I’m sure that I won’t receive any thanks for it. I shan’t see the owner of this vehicle ever again until his next car goes wrong.

Apart from that, we were radioing today at Marcillat. Two months’ worth of programmes that we recorded for Radio Anglais
 this morning and that will take us up to the end of October with the next recording sessions pencilled in for 26th October. Just one more session, at Gerzat on Tuesday, and that will be that.

Liz and I went for a long chat afterwards and then I came back here. On the way back, I noticed that the construction work on the edge of Marcillat on the bed of the old railway line has now developed into a small petrol station. It seems that we will be having some 24-hour petrol pumps there. The Auvergne is definitely dragging itself into the 21st Century.

Back here, I had a pile of stuff to do, most of which I managed to complete, and I even managed for once to make some food this evening. This is progress.

I should have been having a day out on Monday but I’ve cancelled that now. I have too much to do, and it’s a shame that the tiling isn’t going to figure in that. I’m really fed up now.

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5th August 2015 – ANOTHER THING THAT I HATE …

… is people who say “seeing as how we have the injector seals, why don’t we fit them?”

Still, the client is always right and so at 15:30, having wandered along slowly but steadily towards the end of proceedings, we stopped to fit the first injector seal.

At 19:00 when the car came to pick up the aforementioned client, we were just on the point of taking out the first seal. And had we not taken the seal out, the car would have been gone by then. So one rather unhappy bunny here.

The worst thing about this is that by 19:00 I had suddenly twigged how to do it, and it was a job that could have indeed been done in minutes. But when you don’t know about these things, you have to learn by experience.

During the night I was on the prowl around town with one of my friends off my social networking site – a woman probably about 15 years older than me and she was behaving like a kid of 8 and it was most embarrassing. We ended up in a luxury hotel with another group of people and we ordered coffee, which took about an hour to arrive.

I was told that we would be restarting work at 10:30 as the car’s owner had to go to Montlucon for half an hour. So it was 12:30 when he turned up – I thought that 10:30 was rather optimistic.

And we made steady progress too – head torqued down, timing belt fitted and covers fitted, fan belt fitted, turbo coupled up, engine mounting fitted and a pile of other stuff done too. And then we ran aground on the injector seals.

After we finished, with the water in the solar shower at 40°C, I had a gorgeous shower.

I might have another one tomorrow too!

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Tuesday 4th August 2015 – AS YOU MIGHT HAVE GUESSED …

… seeing as how we have been working on this Hyundai today, we’ve had 29.5mm of rain today.

Luckily most of it fell during the night but there was still sufficient falling down to postpone our start until 11:00.

So Rob came round and brought back the cylinder head and I finished dismantling it – using a hammer and chisel on the reluctant nuts. Luckily, it’s all standard metric threads so I soon found all of the bolts that we needed.

But the cylinder head is as bad as the bores, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impact damage, maybe a broken piston ring and that would explain the slack in the bore. It’s not a broken timing belt because there’s little damage to the valves and stems, which is what you exepct in that case. But whatever way you look at this, it’s ruined.

With the cylinder head being dismantled, it went on comparatively easily and the manifold was much less of a struggle than I was expecting. I got 9 of the 10 bolts onto the manifold at the cylinder head, but everything else is properly bolted up, which is a surprise. The bracket that caused us all of our problems the other day – that was a 2-minute job to reattach it. New nuts made all of the difference. The old ones were cheap and nasty, clearly not made to be taken off once they’ve been fitted. I could tighten up to infinity the new nuts using the open end of a spanner. With the previous nuts, even a 6-sided socket would just round them off.

Rob had to leave early so we called it a day. Tomorrow we need to fit the timing and fan belt, refit the turbo controls, torque down the head refit the water pipes and bleed the diesel system.

I had to shave my head too – I’ve been lying for three hours in a pool of oil and my hair (such as it was) was ruined. At least I can wash it easily now.

And Rosemary was on the phone for a good hour or so for a chat, so I missed my tea. But I don’t care.

Having crashed out this evening, I’m off to bed now.

See you in the morning.

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Thursday 30th July 2015 – HERE WE ARE THEN.

hyundai trajet diesel engine blocked waterway les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis is the engine of this Hyundai, with the cylinder head removed. And you can immediately see one of the problems.

If you look in the foreground of the photo you’ll notice that one of the waterways is blocked. And diagonally opposite in the bore of the cylinder is a little trail of rust. Water coming along the waterway is hitting the blockage and being forced out under pressure, right into the bore of number two cylinder.

My suspicion is that we are going to find that the head will be slightly warped. I hope that the new gasket will take that up.

damaged piston hyundai trajet diesel les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut there’s another major problem with this engine.

Look carefully at the crown of the piston in the foreground. Can you see how damaged it is? That’s either major impact damage or else it’s a severe heat seizure, and seeing as how there is play in the bore, I suspect the latter.

Apart from the play though, the bore isn’t too bad. It’s not scored or marked.

damaged piston hyundai trajet diesel les guis virlet puy de dome franceHowever, this engine is ruined. It’s not going to last long and with us having disturbed it, it’s probably not going to last even that long.

So what we are going to do is to replace the cylinder head gasket and patch it up with other previously-used components and then just drive it until it stops. 5 miles, 50 miles, 500 miles, who knows? But it won’t be doing much. And there’s no sense in throwing good money after bad

This is an object lesson for anyone – don’t buy vehicles off Ebay. This is about the seventh or eighth that I’ve encountered that has turned out to be a pile of scrap – a bodged repair job after major damage and quickly moved on.

There aren’t half some dishonest people out there.

So after an early night, I was up quite early having had yet another really good night’s sleep. And I cracked on with revising this blog that I’m trying to update relating to my voyage around Canada.

I must have written about 5000 words I suppose, one entry being nearly 1500 words. Clearly I don’t have anything better to do.

And later this evening, I replaced the door furniture on the shower room door where I’d varnished it.

But what a waste of time that this is turning out to be. This Hyundai has really p155ed me off, what with everything that has happened and what I’ve discovered today.

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Monday 27th July 2015 – I HATE CARS

Especially mass-produced monsters made in Korea.

I had to take the cylinder head off one today , a job that normally takes about two or three hours at the very most. And so we started at 10:00 and finished by … errr … 19:30. And that with no break, no stopping for lunch, no stopping for a drink, anything. Working non-stop.

timing cover bolts grounding out on bodywork hyundai trajet diesel les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe issue with these cars is that the engines are all assembled and mounted onto a subframe, and the body is lowered on top. And this leads to all kinds of complications – the most astonishing of which was that in order to adjust (or slacken in order to remove) the cam belt, which you need to do in order to take off the cylinder head, you need to take off the belt cover. But the bolts of the belt cover ground out on the inner wing of the car so you can’t do that.

And take the exhaust manifold. It can be removed in about four different ways, each one of which involves the removal of a pile of nuts and bolts. And in every case, you can take out all but one, and then you are stuck.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

We finally removed it and the horrible thing about it all is that we have to put it all back together again in a couple of days time. I’m as black as the Ace of Spades, just as I used to be when I was pulling Ford Cortinas to bits all those years ago, and I’m never going to get myself clean.

And, of course, it was raining this morning while we were doing it, after all these weeks of glorious weather. Isn’t that typical?

But I was worn out before I started, having been awake since 05:00. I’d been on my travels, back to school in fact. And I had no shoes – I’d left them downstairs in the main hall but there, when I went down to retrieve them, was a three-piece rock band playing, right by where I had left my shoes. I chatted to the guitarist/singer in the interval to ask him that if he knew of anyone looking for a bassist, to let me know. “But I have a bassist” he said, indicating a young boy playing with him. “And I can sing” I said – “but my sister sings with me if I need a singer”. “But I don’t mean you – I mean anybody” but he was so negative that I quickly picked up the hint – that it was too much trouble for him and that he was not going to do it

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