General In praise of mobile recovery (RAC in this case)

[larkim]

Got to 200m from my destination yesterday for a family day out, car bottomed out at reasonably low speed over a manhole cover and smashed out the sump screw and some of the casing. Think it must just have been a quirk of the timing of when the suspension reacted as the surface wasn't actually that poor.

Pulled over almost immediately to see the oil draining from the sump, and went back to pick up the piece of metal lying in the road.

Called the RAC (probably wrong choice in hindsight as this was in theory an insurance collision, so they should have handled recover) and (conveniently as it turned out) they arrived 4 hours later (we managed to have our day out uninterrupted!).

Expecting to then be delayed for a tow back home, the RAC guy whips out a tin of chemical metal, cleans up the sump and the chunk I had lying in the road sticks it all back together, leaves it to cure and then filled up with £17 of oil.

And impressively we were able to drive home, and there's been no further leakage overnight. Engine sounds as if no damage done, which feels like a miracle too. Thought it was going to be our final journey in the Multi at one point!

So, praise be to the gods of the roadside recovery vans - as far as I was concerned, they earned their annual subscription today!

(Car is now off to the insurers garage with a £nil excess, so could have been a whole load worse)

 

[martyc5674]

Had same incident in mine... used the chemical metal purely so I could run it to see if any damage done... there wasn’t !!... and ended up leaving the chemical metal on it for a few months till I got sump... sump BTW is a tricky job... ribe bolts and 2 of them are accessed through slots in the flywheel... you need really long ribe bolt tools(get hex key set in ribe is my advice as they need to be skinny too)
Marty.

 

[larkim]

Repair was an insurance job and fortunately had both protected NCD and a £0 excess on it so we had the use of a nice Zafira Explorer Elite for the 10 days it took them to sort.

Whilst I don't always trust these anecdotes, the garage said it was a £900 job they've billed to the insurers - given the state of our Multipla (2008, 110k miles, engine fault, internally not exactly sparkling, spare tyre in boot as cable snapped, rear wash wipe broken, locking mechanism damaged!) I think that would have been perilously close to a write off!

 

[martyc5674]

Well a new sump is over 500€ IIRC... and it’s definitely a tricky enough job. I got a replacement for about 100 I think and fitted it myself... it was hard to find one aswell.

 

[larkim]

Funny thing is the RAC guy seemed to think it was likely to be a £150 job - I think he said about £40 for the part and an hour's labour! He'd obviously never fitted one on a Multi!