What's The Most Difficult/Hateful Job You've Done on a Car?

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What's The Most Difficult/Hateful Job You've Done on a Car?

glenn2602

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Let's face it - a nut, bolt or screw can turn one of two ways; clockwise or anticlockwise ... Nothing could be simpler, eh? But of course there are those times when nothing, but nothing goes right. The hours mount up and it seems to get dark very quickly and you've got cramp from crawling under the car, skinned knuckles and depression is beginning to set in .. and no matter what, you can't figure the problem out or get it to fit/work...

In 1976 I had a 1300cc Triumph Toledo .. the rear wheel drive model. At start up from cold the bottom end of the engine would tap for a few seconds and it would take a few seconds for the oil light to go out. Worn big end bearings..

The cylinder head and camshaft was removed, the engine was stripped down and the block sent away for a rebore with new pistons and a crankshaft regrind/new big end bearings.

After reassembly new oil was added .. and coolant .. which just seemed to pour out of the cylinder head before the engine was even started. The head came off again .. and it was found that the brand new head gasket had a manufacturing fault. Back to the car accessory shop and exchange the head gasket ..

It fired up no problem with the new head gasket .. but sluggish? It was like driving a 300cc car. It had the acceleration of a tortoise on Mogadon and a top speed of 60mph .... eventually. Literally. The car wasn't really usable.

I wouldn't like to think how many times the valve timing and the ignition timing were checked. Everybody had their own theory as to what might be wrong, and yes, I am a firm believer that an exorcism can drive out the evil pixies that live in an engine. When you've tried everything you'll try anything including 'pixie flush' (no longer available without prescription..). Desperate times. Sound familiar?

A lifetime later me and a couple of friends did a compression test and found that each bore had a reading of 105psi

Huh? 105 psi? That was way way down. It was almost as if the engineering company who'd done the rebore had forgotten to fit the rings on the new pistons .. or there was some other problem with the head, which was whipped off pronto ..

... and nothing, but nothing was visibly wrong. Then - eventually - somebody noticed that the pistons didn't quite reach the top of the bores when turning the engine .. they were a smidgeon too short. The engineering company had fitted the wrong pistons, which meant removing and stripping the engine again and sending it back to them ..

Fast forward a few years to a 1980 18 month old Austin Maxi, low mileage and in mint condition. No gears. Permanent neutral. The cause is a failed locknut on the main gearbox shaft. To replace that nut you have to remove the combined engine/gearbox unit, remove the engine from the gearbox, then begin dismantling things as you work down the gearbox .. just to replace a nut and locking tab. Fun, it isn't ..

Or what about changing a timing chain on a Renault 5? At some time in their life everybody should be made to change a timing chain on a Renault 5.

Change the bushes on a Cinquecento rear trailing arm? If anybody tells you that all you have to do is drop the arm - don't bother disconnecting the brake pipe - as you can use a socket or threaded bar to remove the old bush .. well .. shoot him immediately. It's an evil pixie in human form. Unless you put the trailing arm in a vice and use an oxy-acetylene torch to burn the old one out and have an orang utan on hand to hammer the new ones in, you'll have difficulty. Buy a new trailing arm that already has the bushes fitted.

Nightmare jobs that you wish you'd never started/glad to finish .. What's yours?
 
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The gearbox.

Other than the weight and lack of a capable jack it took three of us, unspeakably idiotic risks and when we refitted it.. we made a mistake. So it had to all come out again.

Got there in the end. But by god. That is not for the novice.

We did remove it to fit an oil seal last year With a suitable jack - much less dangerous and horrible but still a dog of a task
 
Citroen XM. Turbodiesel. Nightmare called Hydractive.
The car felt like it was built in totally independent layers designed by a husband and his wife trying to kill each other right before their divorce trial and put together by people with the ultimate goal to put the bl**dy thing together so that they can go and get pi**ed.
 
Master and slave cylinders on my Alfa Spider (916).

Slave took a few minutes but the Master was a pain in the faff because some bodging pillock used a jubilee clip to hold the feed pipe on.

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I snapped the pipe at the cylinder and had to use an open hacksaw blade to cut the clip off.

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:bang:
 
Cam belt on a Punt Mk2 HGT. If there was any less space, the engine would have to be removed. I got the belt cover off with 8mm Torx bits turned with an 8mm ring spanner.

The next even worse bar steward was fitting the aux belt tensioner. I did that with a breaker bar and a jack underneath. There is zero space to do it any other way.

Stripping the cylinder head and fitting new valves was easy peasy in comparison.

Renault Espace. Clutch hydraulic line is metal along the back of the engine bay clipped in places that must have been chosen as perfectly impossible to reach with the engine in place. The flexible section over the gearbox is prone to split but its crimped to the metal pipes. I managed to repair it by cutting the metal tube and sliding on a new flexible hose with four worm clips each side. Thank goodness, it wasn't a brake pipe. !!!!

Rebuilding Hope hydraulic brake callipers. The pistons had to be drilled out !!!

Watched an engineering team trying to clean out a power station steam turbine shaft that had become contaminated with oil. They pumped in solvents. No change. They tried ever more nasty solvents no change. They bolted a rag to the end of a long pipe, shoved it in pulled it out. Woo Hoo some dirt was shifted. Next attempt they pulled it out 1/2 way and shoved it back. The cloth folded over and jammed the length of pipe. It took them 2 days to move it. Even the 200 ton crane with steel wire lifting sling couldn't shift it. The broke a number of lifting slings before it came out.
 
Steering rack on a Mk1 Ka. The unions holding the hydraulic pipes are all but impossible to see or reach, and when you finally find a spanner that'll fit round everything else, you can turn it about 1/32 of a revolution before tediously repositioning it, and once it's loosened, the hydraulic fluid starts dribbling down your arm.

The most frustrating job I've never done is probably changing out the heater box on a 500. Even reading the description of the process in eLearn is not for the feint hearted. Someone recently posted on here about doing one with the help of a mechanically minded friend and IIRC it took both of them about a week.
 
As it turns out replacing the front struts on my Fiesta has turned into an epic rebuild of the front end. I've just got it all back together and went for a test drive only to find that it sounds like I haven't done any bolts up. I've gone round the thing twice with my torque wrench and it still sounds awful.

I've just been looking and when you bounce the front end up and down you can see the shocks moving about. WTF have I done?!?!?!
 
You have probably assembled the top of the struts incorrectly.
Perhaps mixed up the order of parts , bearing seat etc or put some thing on upside down or back to front.
Don't worry you will sort it out.
 
Steering rack on a Mk1 Ka. The unions holding the hydraulic pipes are all but impossible to see or reach, and when you finally find a spanner that'll fit round everything else, you can turn it about 1/32 of a revolution before tediously repositioning it, and once it's loosened, the hydraulic fluid starts dribbling down your arm.


I seem to remember a lot of 90s fords needed wacky custom spanners for steering racks. Easily replicated by taking a perfectly good spanner and giving it to Uri Geller
 
cleaning the variable vains on a Mondeo Mk3 TDCi turbo.

If its a newer car with electronic actuator (Euro 4 engine), not a problem just unbolt and slide out the turbo.

If it was the older version with the vacuum actuator (Euro 3), just leave it alone... the unbolting and removing the turbo is fine. But putting it back together you have to adjust a cable (like a bike brake) and ensure its done up correctly to the nanometer, otherwise the vains just do what they want and your boost is screwed and your EML light comes on..


Oh and changing one of the diesel injectors.. nice easy job takes about 30 minutes to change 4 injectors and code them into the ECU and bled.

But make sure that they are put in correctly, because if you need to remove one again in the future and its been seated wrong (btw you cant tell if its seated wrong until you come to take it out again...) then it allows carbon to build up around the injector and the cylinder compresses it, basically seizing the thing to the cylinder head.. meaning the entire engine head needs to come off and thats a 5 hour job to remove for a Ford Mechanic...

I knew there was a reason why i've come back to Fiat. :idea:
 
Citroen XM. Turbodiesel. Nightmare called Hydractive.
The car felt like it was built in totally independent layers designed by a husband and his wife trying to kill each other right before their divorce trial and put together by people with the ultimate goal to put the bl**dy thing together so that they can go and get pi**ed.

This ^^

Any job on a Citroen, or anything PSA. Just any job...


Currently trying to disconnect and clean the ECU plug in order to try and resolve intermittant running issues on my Synergie/Evasion (Ulysee). Not only did they put the ECU in a silly place (what's wrong with the back of the battery box?) where it gets wet and covered in crap, you have to remove the webasto auxilary heater just to get to it.

Then you discover that it's mounted with the plug at the bottom, hard against the inner wing, so you'll have to take the whole **** thing off just to disconnect it, which probably involves removing half a dozen other unrelated components...
 
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