Forum:
My latest F78 with 60k genuine miles (I'm pretty sure of this because I know what bits fall off when, up to 90k with my Fieldman) hasn't been touched by anything other than garage mechanics (got the service history and MOTs to prove it).
So why is it that when I came to change the oil, some professionaly 'trained' wassock charging £50 per hour has cross-threaded the oil drain plug?
When you find simple balls-ups like this, you must wonder what other foul-ups are lurking in a second-hand vehicle where the grease monkeys have been let loose.
Rf man's oil pressure blow-off is now released (for a while).
service history
when buying a car dont let a full service history let you think it all hunky dory as some people have frends that work in the dealers that stamp the book for them get under and have a look and sea.
as i used to get it done at a suzuki garage and used to even get waranty repares to.
be carefull of what part ur cash with
hammer and chisel.
Recently I asked mechanics at Hfrds what size tube spanner I needed to adjust my landrovers wheel bearings. 'Never use one, they are to expensive - we just use a hammer and chisel' was the reply. Worryingly he was quite serious.
Thanks for the note about peo
Thanks for the note about people getting their mates at the garage to stamp the service history .... yes, I don't take anything on face value any more, but everything seems to stack up, so I tend to believe this one.
Instalment #2
I noted that there had been some problems with the 'vacuum servo' 4wd shift which had meant that the gearbox had been stripped out and sent to a 'gearbox specialist' ..... more HA b...dy HA. I thought that this would mean that the job had been reasonably well done, but it seems that the gearbox wassocks slapped a load of silicone goo on the ordinary gaskets, tightened things up and shipped out the 'job done'. Pity that this lot tends to relax after a while and all the fixings loosen up.
Most of the gearbox bolts were loose when I got the assembly out of the vehicle, but the daddy barsteward of them all was that the 4 bolts holding the gearbox front to the clutch bell housing had worked loose, allowing a 0.010" (0.25mm) gap. One of the bolts had actually fallen out, but, thankfully, hadn't found its way up to the clutch! Guess where all the gear oil fell out of. That's only 5000 miles ago, so I'm tempted to go back to the garage with the photos and give them a piece of my mind.
Dunnow how much good it would do, but it would make me feel a hell of a lot better, and hopefully give some of the wassocks a bad day.
Frightening!
As a new owner of a first 4X4, this is all a bit worrying! I bought the Dragon (an 85 fourtrak) off a "part time" dealer. It's got a class two immobiliser and an alarm, loads of rust, some body filler, bull bars with 4 spotlights, and an interior that smells of diesel and oil which is for the most part in dire need of restoration. This all I can deal with, but when I went to do some "simple" repairs (as I'm not brainy enough or experienced enough for more heavy duty stuff) I found that some.... had tried to glue the oil pan bolt in place. What did he use? Rubber cement. That DID however make it more complicated to take the oil filter off. No one ever taught me the "screwdriver and hammer" method. Now the "dealer" had said that his car was always serviced by a qualified mechanic...who uses rubber cement. As you can guess, your other comments have made me worry about what other bodge up jobs I can look forward to. You might have guessed that I'll be bugging you all a fair bit about what's wrong with the Dragon this week!
Yep .... most dealers will tell you any old bo...cks to flog it.
That's new one about using rubber cement to seal the oil filter. Invest in a strap spanner, and you can forget your filter fun forever. To make filters easy to remove, just put a little engine oil on the o-ring before you fit a new one. All I do is to rub the old filter (oily) o-ring against the new one to transfer a little oil. It takes only a few seconds and saves so much grief later .... I wonder why 'professional' mechanics can't be bothered to do it ????
When you talk about the 'oil pan', I presume you mean the tin oil sump on the bottom of the crankcase. Actually some of the 4traks never had a gasket fitted new (my Independent, for one) and the Japs used some very sticky goo to seal the sump. It's a real bugger to get the sump off .... the workshop manual specifies a special scraper to split the joint, but I used a Stanley knife tapped with a small hammer. To re-seal the sump, I used good old silicone goo which has proved leakproof over the last 2 years.