Tuesday, November 30, 2004

152,500 km on the clock and still going strong?

So there we were, about half way up the mountain and approaching the entrance to the cave, and suddenly the car is engulfed in a cloud of white smoke blinding me momentarily and scaring the shit out of Nontas in the passenger seat.




Hm - I think to myself, billowing white smoke, best stop, even though it is most likely to be just water and steam that's come out of somewhere under pressure. But where? Well, the pic above shows where it came from. A burst pipe, the one which takes the hot cooling water from the engine back to the radiator. can't really move the car without it. So we get into this whole idscussion about what should we do and how to deal with this. Fortunately both Nontas and Mike are technically more advanced than I am with this sort of thing and took it on themselves to fix the problem, but not until after we had finished the work we had come for.

So off we went up the mountain, all of us in the one car now, and me rather a little annoyed with Mr. George the service guy. I'd done the service at 151,500 and dammit he should have seen that the rubber pipe was worse for wear to the extent that it was likely to burst and spray hot and dirty cooling fluid alll over the place.

At the stopping place, we got all the gear out of the car and Eri and I got ready to go on in, while the boys went back down the mountain to look for a replacement piece of tubing. It was not going to be an easy task.

Of course, they could not find a Fiat piece of tubing, and brought up a piece of seat tubing, with the same diameter (roughly) as our broken piece. After exiting the cave at about quarter to midnight, the time came to turn our hand to McGiverisms and improvised solutions. First we saw that the new tube was too narrow to go into where it should be, and had to grease up the tube and the entrances. Next it was too long and would kink in the wrong places, in the end we made a frankenstein’s monster of a solution, using part of the old damaged Fiat tube and some of the new tube and made it all the way home…



The quick-fix solution, in place. Thanks boys!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ok, I see now that you did!!!!

eri