Under the Bonnet E-Book

Brian Cunningham

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 231

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

These days, a nice original Vauxhall Viva costs an arm and a leg, but back in the 1970s, £100 bought you a 'good little runner', with the rust, bald tyres and dodgy MOT thrown in for free. All you needed was someone who knew how to fix it when it broke down! Brian Cunningham is that someone – or, at least, he used to be. Under the Bonnet is the totally true* story of being a car mechanic in the old days, when fixing a car was one thing, but keeping it fixed was something else entirely. These are the tales of a bygone age, full of secret scams, chaotic characters and cars almost bursting with personality. * some tales may be taller than others

Leseprobe

Cover illustrations: Vauxhall Viva at the British Heritage Motor Museum

(Paul Brown, CC SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

First published 2021

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Brian Cunningham, 2021

The right of Brian Cunningham to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7508 9769 0

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Introduction

1 Rodent on the Premises

2 Burnt-out Clutch

3 The Car Dealership

4 Shooting Argies

5 The Man from Audi

6 Bad Mechanic

7 New Bodyshell

8 Suck Squeeze Bang Blow

9 Wheel Swap

10 Hello John, Got a New Motor?

11 The Differential

12 Ice Blocks

13 The STP Sticker

14 The Beast

15 The S-Plate Special

16 A Proper Apprenticeship

17 Slant Four

18 Shop Steward

19 Warranty Assessor

20 A Lick and a Promise

21 Now for Something Completely Different

Introduction

If, like me, you are old enough to remember driving in the 1970s and ’80s, you will know that we drove cars which would nowadays be considered lethally dangerous, for driver, occupants and pedestrians alike. There were no airbags, ABS, traction control or impact protection systems and the use of seat belts was considered optional. Attitudes to drink driving were relaxed; after all, you had to get home from the pub somehow and there were no speed cameras to slow us down. Cars were simpler, less reliable but easier to fix, more dangerous by far, fewer in number, more varied in look and feel and performance, more of a statement about social status, class, affluence. They polluted more, but with fewer of them around, the effects on the environment were less. They had individuality, and idiosyncrasies about which everybody was aware. This book is about those cars.

I was a car mechanic through those years and this book is also about how those cars worked and, when they didn’t, how they got fixed. It is not about the Jensens and Aston Martins and Jaguars; there are other books you can read about those cars. It is about the Ford Anglias and Vauxhall Vivas and Austin Allegros, about how poor people kept their cars on the road, sometimes against all the odds, about the scrapyards and dodgy MOTs and ‘tax applied for’ notes in windscreens. It tells of the men and women who worked in car dealerships and what made them tick. It exposes the cons and scams that went on then, and are still going on now, aimed at fleecing the car-owning public. It tells of the men who made it all possible and of the intricacies of the nuts and bolts, the rust and the filler, the oil and dirt and the fiver-in-the-top-pocket bungs that greased the whole machine.

Most of all, I hope the book shows what I have always believed: that the pen is mightier than the spanner. I hope you like it.

Disclaimer:

All names and locations have been changed. Some of the stories have been around the workshop canteen a few times in the telling, and so might not have happened exactly as described!

1

Rodent on the Premises

Either Plug, or The Twiglet, must have seen me drive into the staff car park, and I just noticed the 7:59 stamp on my card in the nick of time, before I punched it into the clocking-in machine. I thought I would be losing fifteen minutes off my basic wage for being late. If I hadn’t noticed, it would have meant a double stamp, 7:59 and 8:04, and a bollocking up in the DP’s office later in the week, at least an hour’s pay docked and a big inquiry about who had clocked me in, though I would never have grassed on Plug, or The Twiglet, or any of the other boys.

We were all laughing about it in the canteen while we changed into our overalls when Bill Plowright, the service manager, came crashing through the door all red in the face and said, ‘If you get asked, we’ve had a plague of rats. No time to explain. Fucking rats everywhere. Millions of them, OK?’

With that he was off again, and us all standing about with mouths open, wondering what all this was about rats. Still, whatever the hell was going on with Bill, there was the usual rush to get across the yard, through the roller-shutter doors of the workshop and over to the reception counter where the job cards would be dispensed, to ensure the pick of the first jobs for the morning. A full service and MOT with lots of potential for add-on work, that sort of thing. Plenty of bonus hours.

I didn’t bother, though, this morning; couldn’t be arsed to rush around with a thick head from the beers I’d had with brother Dave the night before. I went over to the hot drinks machine and pressed 103 (coffee, white, sugar, strong) and strolled across to the workshop to join the back of the queue.

First in line at the counter was Plug, tall and gangly with badly splayed teeth, nicknamed after a character in The Beano. Plug had been wearing permanent metal braces on his teeth for as long as anyone could remember, though they never seemed capable of pulling his gnashers back into line.

Leaning against the wall behind Plug was Popeye, named for Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman in The French Connection, rather than the pipe-smoking cartoon sailor) because he liked to wear a little pork-pie hat at work which we would always be trying to knock off his head.

Next in line was Dave Buck, who had only been with us six months and not yet earned the right to a nickname, though we were toying with several possibilities. He was usually just Little Dave (as opposed to Big Dave in the parts department), but we were leaning towards just Bucks or Bucky, which was lucky enough for him really, given the rhyming possibilities at our disposal.

Then came The Twiglet, because, well – because he looked like a twiglet. His nickname came about because he was tall and rake thin with a dark-skinned complexion and lots of big darker freckles. He was never just Twiglet though, always The Twiglet. Conversely, he was sometimes Twig or Twiggy but never The Twig.

Just behind The Twiglet stood Dewhurst the Butcher who was so big he blocked out most of the light coming through the reception-counter window. Dewhurst had a fault diagnosis technique that involved hitting a failed component, let’s say a starter motor, with a lump hammer until it either started working again or shattered into several pieces. His technique often caused peripheral damage, shearing off fixings and stripping threads, but because he occasionally frightened some piece of machinery into doing its job again, he swore by his methods and couldn’t be dissuaded from them. Management had always been strangely tolerant of Dewhurst, we couldn’t work out why, but always made sure that delicate electrical work or cosmetic repairs were given to others.

The last in line was me and they called me Foley, though Foley wasn’t my real name. I once got pulled over for speeding while test-driving a customer’s car and I panicked and gave a false name, and the name I gave was Tom Foley, after a character in a book I was reading. I never got found out by the firm, or prosecuted by the police, though the story was common knowledge in the canteen and even Bill Plowright knew about it and after that they had always called me Foley.

Bonehead the service advisor was handing out job cards and the other guys seemed happy enough with their major services, while Popeye had got a clutch replacement on a Ford Escort, which was the kind of job you could complete in about half the allotted time, particularly if you had an apprentice working with you, so he would get ahead of the bonus game straight away. I drew the worst possible kind of job: an intermittent electrical fault which, according to the customer, caused the engine to misfire and sometimes cut out at low revs, plus a water leak somewhere around the boot rubber seal. I looked at Bonehead and said, ‘Is that all you’ve got for me, Bones?’

He just shrugged and said there was nothing else yet. I knew I’d not be earning bonus on a job like this, but Bonehead was pretty good about balancing things up and would make sure I got something a bit more lucrative next time. I often bunged him a fiver from my wage packet when I’d had a good week, just to keep him sweet, but I knew the other guys did too, so he had to work hard at keeping things fair.

I went out to the car park and located the vehicle, a Vauxhall Viva, not the latest type, this was the HB model, which I always thought looked the best of the Viva range (I drove one myself). I put a plastic seat cover on the driver’s seat and paper mats in the footwell, then jumped in and drove it round to the wall at the side of the workshop where there was a tap and hosepipe. I yelled for my apprentice to bring a torch and he came running from the workshop.

This one wasn’t a bad kid at all, but we all kept the apprentices on their toes and they had to endure all the initiation rites and wind-ups that we had been through at their age. He was an Asian lad and on his first day he had said that his name was Shandu but that his friends called him Shandy, so straight away we called him Mahatma Gandhi, and Gandhi he remained until several years later when he got caught, and nearly sacked, for nicking a car stereo from the parts department, and after that we called him Raffles instead.

He looked at me in genuine fear when I told him to get into the boot, but I promised I wouldn’t fuck about, and I meant it too. I had been badly frightened as an apprentice when Bill Plowright had put me in a boot to check for a water leak and then driven me round the block several times at speed, before leaving me in the locked boot over the lunch break.

He had done it, he said, because I was a cheeky little sod, but I had panicked in the cramped space and thought I couldn’t breathe properly in the petrol fumes and I had started screaming and hammering on the boot lid until they let me out. I went off sick for a few days and Bill and the other mechanics were terrified that there would be an inquiry, but I didn’t grass and they all thought the better of me for that and eased off a bit on the wind-ups.

Gandhi jumped into the boot and I slammed it shut and turned on the tap. I started to play the water over the boot lid so that it ran down into the gap and onto the rubber seal. After a while he hammered on the lid with his fist and I opened up. He showed me where the water had trickled in past a perished portion of the rubber seal on the near side just behind the hinge. It would need a new seal. I left Gandhi to drive the car into the workshop and went around to the trade parts counter and rang the bell, keeping my finger on the button until a parts man appeared.

It was an act of defiance that all us mechanics had recently adopted. Clemmie the parts manager had taken exception to us ringing the bell constantly at the back counter and hollering ‘Stores!’ at the top of our voices. He insisted that we ring the bell once and say ‘Parts department please’ in a normal tone of voice, and instructed his staff not to serve us unless we complied. Of course, we were having none of it and neither was Bill Plowright, who called Clemmie an officious little prick. There had been a long, tense stand-off and the dealer principal had to step in when none of the cars due for repairs were getting fixed. In the end, the fear of missing out on bonus forced a grudging acceptance that we wouldn’t shout ‘Stores!’, but by common agreement we still rang the bell incessantly until we were served, causing further retaliation when Clemmie threatened to disconnect the bell.

After searching his catalogue and microfiche slides for several minutes, Big Dave said they had no boot seals in stock and would have to order one from the factory. Without the replacement part, there would be nothing to charge the customer today, so my time diagnosing the problem and then waiting at the parts counter would go to waste. I had nothing in the bank towards today’s bonus yet and it was already gone nine o’clock.

Gandhi had made fast progress with the engine misfire fault though, good lad that he was, and showed me where the high-tension lead from the coil to the distributor cap kept arcing out against the engine block. I left him to replace that while I went to the counter to write the job up. Bill Plowright was in service reception and he asked me to have a smoke in the car park with him. We walked outside together with me fearing a ‘car park conversation’, which was never usually a good thing.

‘Foley, are there any whispers about me in the canteen?’ he asked.

I told him honestly that I had heard nothing and then the story about the rats all came out. The previous day, when I had been off on holiday to help my brother move out of his flat, Bill had had a phone call from his mate at head office to say that the owner of the business was on his way to do a random inspection. The dealership was owned by two brothers, Basil and Norman Holder, and while Norman counted the money it was Basil who kept an eye on the day-to-day business at their three car dealerships. Basil was a small man with a sharply pointed nose that twitched when he was lying, or thought he was being lied to, hence his nickname, The Rodent.

On getting the warning phone call, Bill had gone straight to the Tannoy system and given us all the heads-up, ‘Rodent on the premises! Repeat, rodent on the premises! Stand by your benches, rodent on the premises!’

When he walked back into service reception, he found Basil had already been there ten minutes and wanted to know what all this was about rodents, which was when Bill started to bullshit on the spot and made up a story about an infestation of rats from across the railway sidings behind the site. Basil’s nose had just twitched and he hadn’t said any more about it.

Two weeks later Bill got busted down from service manager to road tester and we got a new service manager from one of the other dealerships, Terry Rutherford, who was all into the analysis of workshop utilisation, productivity and efficiency, and so quickly became known as Stato. Funny enough, Bill was much happier as road tester than he had ever been as service manager. He thought of himself as one of us, not one of them, and we thought of him as one of us too. Bill was the only guy at the dealership who didn’t have a nickname of some sort. He was just Bill Plowright, plain and simple.

2

Burnt-out Clutch

I woke with a start and hit the off button on the Teasmade, before the buzzer roused the kids in the next room. My missus slept on beside me, oblivious. I hated the damned Teasmade. It had been a wedding present and we had only used it to actually make tea twice, before realising that it was too much hassle and far easier to go into the kitchen and put the kettle on. The buzzer was an insistent grating clamour and I was all for throwing the thing in the bin, but Pauline wouldn’t hear of it because it was from her uncle Ted who had cancer and might not see out the year.

I went to the kitchen and filled the kettle for hot water to have a wash. While the water came to the boil, I brushed my teeth at the bathroom sink. All the rooms in our flat adjoined a small hallway, so I could move between rooms with just a couple of paces. I carried the kettle through and mixed scalding-hot water with cold from the tap and had a stand-up wash, though I didn’t bother to shave as this was a Sunday. I tried, as I always tried, to wash away the ingrained grease and oil from around my fingernails and in the joints and crevices of my knuckles. I used a scrubbing brush and that helped to shift a little of the black muck but also made my skin red raw and chapped.

At work we used Rozalex barrier cream before we started and gritty Swarfega soap to clean up afterwards, and both did the job but were very hard on your skin. This was long before the introduction of blue nitrile gloves for car mechanics, and anyway, I sense that they would have been considered somehow effeminate back then. I caught sight of my forearms in the mirror as I brushed my hair and noticed that I had made a tidemark up near my elbows where the dirty skin and washed skin met.

When they portrayed mechanics on television, they always got the dirt wrong; the actor having a dark oily smudge across cheek or forehead and everywhere else squeaky clean. It wasn’t like that. Mechanics have deep embedded grime in all areas of exposed skin and hair, all the time, whether they like it or not. It used to take a fortnight’s holiday at the seaside for me to get really clean, and I only got that every couple of years.

I didn’t worry too much about cleanliness that day though. It was Sunday, but I would still be fixing cars, just like I did all week. I worked five full weekdays and alternate Saturday mornings at Holder Autos and the last thing I ever wanted to do on my day off was fix other people’s motor cars. Mechanics are in great demand though, and we were always skint, and I didn’t often have much say in the matter.

There were two types of job that a mechanic did on weekends: the paying private job and the love job. The paying private job was generally very lucrative. It was always cash in hand (no need to trouble the Inland Revenue) you could charge good money for your labour time and still save the customer over what they would pay at the dealership and, best of all, you could often steal the parts and engine oil or coolant from work and charge the customer at retail price. It was good money, but you had to pick and choose. Straightforward servicing or repair work only, nothing complex, no diagnostic work. Even then, when you had serviced a car and something broke several weeks later it was on you – you were the last to touch it! Love jobs, for family and close friends, were different. This would be a love job.

Dad had phoned the previous day telling me that brother Dave’s car had broken down at his girlfriend’s place out in the sticks. It sounded like a badly slipping clutch. I had picked up a clutch pressure plate, friction plate and release bearing from Haynes Autos and put all the tools and equipment I thought I would need into one of my cantilevered toolboxes, which I’d left just inside the street door overnight along with ramps, axle-stands, chocks and a bottle jack.

Now it was just after 7:30 on a bright chilly Sunday morning and I ate some cornflakes and drank a mug of tea, dressed in yesterday’s working clothes, and headed out the door. My two kids were up and playing on their beds as I left and I kissed them both on the top of their heads and sent them in to wake their mum.

Soon Dad and brother Dave and I were heading out into Hertfordshire, me driving in my F-plate Vauxhall HB Viva. Dave’s was the same model, so I knew pretty much what to expect, as long as the symptoms he had explained to Dad, and Dad’s subsequent explanation to me, were accurate. I had checked that Dad had asked all the right questions, had asked about sounds and smells as well as physical driving experiences. Burnt-out clutch was the most likely problem, I figured.

When we got there and had done all the pleasantries, I went to have a look and found the car on reasonably solid hardstanding, which was a good start. I started her up and tried to drive, but the clutch was slipping like mad and I could only make forward progress by revving hard. This was good news as it meant we were on the right track; if I had found a broken clutch cable or, worse, sheered-off metal up in the pedal housing assembly, we would be off searching for a local Vauxhall parts stockist, on a Sunday morning in a strange part of the country.

I positioned the two ramps in front of the front wheels and with me revving like mad and Dad and Dave pushing from behind, we got her up on the ramps, tyres up against the forward safety stops. While I was still in the driver’s seat, I took the keys out of the ignition and threw them on the passenger seat (just in case anyone should try to start the motor with me attached to it). I put the gearbox into first gear, which was a necessary step for much later on when the gearbox was going back in, and then prised the rubber gear-lever gaiter out from under its metal lip, twisted down on the retaining mechanism, lifted the gear-lever assembly out and dropped it into the passenger footwell.

Next, I put on a pair of overalls and slid a sheet of hardboard under the vehicle to lie on – shiny surface up, so I could slide about on my back. I chocked one rear wheel with rubber chocks the shape of cheese wedges, then used a bottle jack to raise the other rear wheel a few inches off the ground and inserted an axle stand under the chassis rail when it was high enough. I double-checked the handbrake was on and selected the spanners and sockets I knew I would need, then slid underneath. Dad was asking what he could do to help, but it was really a one-man job from here on in, so I asked him to unpack the replacement parts and clean the packing grease off the new pressure plate.

The first job was the most awkward: uncoupling the propshaft, because I had to work at the rear of the vehicle where there was less ground clearance. I used two spanners, a ring and the ring end of a combination, and undid the two nuts and bolts that were visible. The nuts were self-locking which meant once they were loose, they couldn’t be undone by hand and had to be turned by spanner all the way until the thread was past the self-locking point. I screwed the removed nuts and bolts back together a few turns and passed them out to Dave for safekeeping before they miraculously disappeared, which was a common occurrence with any roadside repair.

Now I had to ease out from under the car to rotate the prop to access the other two bolts. I took off the handbrake and then rotated the raised rear wheel until, kneeling down and peering underneath, I saw that the propshaft had rotated 180 degrees and the other two bolts were accessible. Handbrake back on, I remembered to pick up a hammer and a small pointed drift and slid back underneath.

I knocked a small dot on both halves of the flange for alignment to ensure that when the propshaft went back on it would be coupled identically, and so retain its balance. Now I removed the second pair of nuts and bolts and, after some gentle prising with a screwdriver, the two drive flanges separated and I lowered the rear end of the propshaft to the ground. In my toolbox I had a spare front coupling from an old scrap propshaft, and I asked Dave to pass it down. I eased the propshaft back off its splines and quickly pushed the spare coupling into place before too much gearbox oil dripped out. I only lost a few drops and those were absorbed into the fabric of my overalls. I rolled the propshaft out of the way. That was an awkward bit done.

Next, I used a ratchet, short extension and socket to unscrew the gearbox cross member from the chassis. As usual, the bolts were rusted solid and one nearly sheared off, but with liberal sprays of WD40, I got all four out and the back of the gearbox dropped down until the engine rocker box was resting against the bulkhead, preventing any further movement. I asked Dad to clean the bolt threads with a wire-brush and then coat them in white grease from a tin so that they would go back in OK, and come out easy next time.

I decided against removing the cross member from the gearbox; it wasn’t strictly necessary to do so and I could manage the job with it left in place. Now I used swan-necked adjustable pliers to disconnect the speedometer cable and two open-ended spanners to loosen the clutch pedal adjuster cable. The long, threaded section also required WD40, but eventually both the locking nut and adjuster nut unwound all the way by hand. I pulled the outer cable forward and out of the bell housing and it now hung down alongside the speedo cable.

I fitted an 18-inch extension and socket to my ratchet and started to remove the five bell-housing bolts, working by feel rather than eyesight as the top three were not easily visible, but I knew their exact locations. When all five were out and stored safely in the top lid of the toolbox by brother Dave, along with their spring washers, the only thing holding the gearbox in place were the two dowel pegs in the bell housing. Now I removed the two bolts holding the flywheel inspection plate in place and slid that down and out, and then all was ready.