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.
The 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
