MOTOR-BLOG from Coventry

Another fun filled week. Firstly on Thursday I gave Fuzz a lift back to PC Towers. On the trip I told him how great my SAAB 900 is. ‘It never breaks down,’ I said. ‘It’s never been any trouble. The best £275 I ever spent,’ etc etc.

Now normally I’d never tempt fate like this in any of my other cars, but Sabine the SAAB? Well she’s a different matter. In my two and a bit years of ownership she’s never let me down (except once when I went on holiday for a week and left the lights on. The battery went flat - my bad not hers). So it was a bit of a shock when on the way back the exhaust snapped in half. Bugger.

Luckily it was a workshop day and luckily Big John Simpson (welding supremo) was still there. So it was up on the ramp and the exhaust was welded back together. How long it will last - I just don’t know. I’m a bit mystified by it to be honest, as the metal was shiny and thick where it had fractured - it literally had snapped. This suggests to me that the problem may lay elsewhere - perhaps a snapped hanger or rubber somewhere putting extra pressure on this part of the system.  

Anyhoo, that’s that, so a new exhaust may be on the horizon. Abbott Racing, here I come…

Yesterday I was tasked to fix the exhaust on Helen’s Volvo (yet again). Anyone who read the old blog will be familiar with this saga, but for those of you who aren’t I’ll recap. When my girlfriend passed her test just before Christmas 2006, we had to find her a car. I wanted it to be a safe machine, she wanted it to be faily modern and nice to drive. I wanted it to be cool… With that in mind the search began. As she had just passed her test and we were skint - it had to be cheap to buy and insure.

By this time it was after Christmas and there weren’t many cars for sale. We went to see a Mark 2 Golf  which looked great, but was obviously an end of life vehicle. It drove like a piece of you know what and hardly anything worked on it. Plus despite being a 1.6 litre (I think) the insurance was £700 a year. Coupled with the £500 asking price and the fact it needed to be taxed the answer was no thanks.

I’ve always liked Volvo 480s’ and so does Helen, but the insurance was too much again. So why not a 440 I figured? It’s the same car as a 480 underneath, has a high level of safety and reliability, and because of the ‘old man’ image they are cheap to buy. So we found a low mileage (70,000) 1993 440. We got it for £425, it had tax and MoT and was an automatic. It drove really nicely too and the insurance was £400 - not bad for a new driver in a 1.8 litre car.

Within two days the exhaust fell off. It had been crudely welded back together - but you can’t weld rust and it was never going to last. I hadn’t thought to check the exhaust when we bought it… That’s OK I thought - I’ll just get a new one. Except it was the downpipe that needed replacing - and these are only available from Volvo and cost - gulp - £250. So that’s why it was traded in…

After taking one off a scrapper for £15, we got it fitted - it was the wrong one… We bodged it together but it was still blowing. I was just about to bite the bullet and pay the money for a new one when I found a local exhaust manufacturer that made their own version. the cost? £60 including VAT and delivery. Now that’s more like it. How can Volvo justify £250 for a two foot length of bent metal pipe? What a rip off.

When I got the new one fitted - the fitters broke the rear of the exhaust getting it on. To be fair to them, it was very rusty, so I bought a new rear section from Nyanza Autoparts - my local factors. They had one on the shelf and it cost a reasonable £80 all in. So my friend Scott and myself fitted it. Sorted.

Until it started blowing again - at the only part we hadn’t replaced - the cat. After bodging it a few times with silicone sealant (yes I know, don’t write in but it did work for a while) it was the same story - Volvo wanted hundreds of pounds for one, Parts for Volvo wanted around £120, so I went to the little firm who supplied the down pipe. £74 including delivery and VAT. Sorted. 

Yesterday I fitted it. It all went well as the bolts holding it on were fairly new (we had replaced them when we fitted the new exhaust) and had smeared them with copper grease at the same time..

After speaking to a few people, I was advised that a new Lambda sensor (or as I call them, a Lambada sensor) probably wouldn’t be needed. After getting the old cat off it was apparent why it was blowing - the unit itself was fine, but the mounting bracket was so rusted it had fractured. 

The Lambda sensor was seized solid too, so I had to resort to the ‘big spanner, bloody big copperheaded mallet’ school of removal. In doing so, the threads got damaged on the sensor (or it had been cross threaded when it was fitted - hard to tell really but I’ll take the blame). With it approaching dinnertime, and with my local GSF car parts about to close I had to make a judgement call - buy a metric tap and die set and restore the thread, or bite the bullet and buy a new sensor?

I decided to buy a new one as the car needed to be back on the road asap. So it was off to GSF in my mums’ Punto. They had one for £21. Back to the house and, disaster - it was the wrong one. I had told them it was a five wire sensor - it wasn’t, it was a three wire. my mistake. Bugger. So off I went to GSF again. This was not a wasted trip. Despite the three wire sensor being slightly more expensive, the nice bloke let me have it for the same price and we had a good chat at the same time, which is always nice.

Plus I bumped into a bloke I knew - he restored a Beetle on Discovery home and Leisure in a programme called ‘Beetle Crisis’. He’s also done another TV programme called ‘Campervan Crisis’. Have you seen them? I haven’t unfortunately as I don’t have those channels. He lived around the corner from my parents and also has a Herald called Harold - hence us becoming friends. He’s moved away now, although bizarrely enough to a village right close to Peterborough where I work. Small world eh?

Anyhow, The Volvo now has a completely new exhaust from front to back and is now as quiet as a Volvo 440 can be. Thank goodness for that - I just hope that the SAAB’s exhaust holds out until I can afford to replace it. To celebrate I got my Vitesse out of the garage for a bit of a service. This is only the second time it’s been out since I let the MoT expire last September I’m ashamed to say. All I have to do now is fit the new Automec copper brake pipes and she’ll be ready for Mr MoT man.

After the recent Triumph Spares day I’m dead keen to get it back on the road again - I’ve really missed that car…�