When the Wheels Come Off E-Book

Brian Cunningham

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Brian Cunningham's popular first book, Under the Bonnet, was a colourful and humorous collection of memories of his time as a car mechanic in the 1970s and '80s. When he wrote it, he was sure he had put everything of interest down, but it turns out there were quite a few escapades he'd forgotten to mention. Time, then, for part two . . . When the Wheels Come Off is a joyous return, covering what he missed first time round: cars fixed and some broken, fads and crazes, crashes and scrapes and near misses, evolutionary dead-ends in technology, underhanded practices and downright skulduggery, run-ins with management, the tools used, the cars 'stolen' and scrapyards visited. A lively and engaging trip back to the workshop.

Leseprobe

Everything in this book really happened, but it probably didn’t happen exactly as I have described it. All names and locations have been changed.

Cover images - Front: A vehichle scrapyard at Hempstead, Gloucestershie, photographed in the 1980s. (Stephen Dorey – Gloucestershire / Alamy Stock Photo); Back: Wankel rotary engine. (Lothar Spurzem, Germany, CC 2.0)

First published 2022

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Brian Cunningham, 2022

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 1 8039 9230 3

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 The Scrapyard

2 Scandi Cool and Rubber Bands

3 Gone in Twelve and a Half Minutes

4 Wankel

5 Hanging on the Telephone

6 Breakdown and Recovery

7 The Listening Stick

8 ‘Breaker, Breaker, Ten-Four’

9 Underpants on the Outside

10 Burn-Out

11 Damage Beyond Repair

12 One for His Nob

13 The Meat Wagon

14 The Flying Brick

15 Motor Show

Postscript

Introduction

The first book of my motor trade memoirs, Under the Bonnet: Confessions of a 1970s and ’80s Car Mechanic, was written over a long period of time, pieced together as memories of those years floated to the surface in my mind. Forty-something years is a long time ago, and it was strange how much of the technical detail remained clear in my mind after all that time. Doubtless, I didn’t get all the minute details 100 per cent correct, but the wider lens gave an accurate enough picture of a period of recent history in the car trade that, in retrospect, feels like we were in the Wild West. Of course, nostalgia played a big part in my recollections, and I was very much wearing my rose-tinted glasses as I wrote it.

I thought that I had included everything there was to tell, but since publication many readers of the book have told me their own stories of those times: working in the trade, buying old cars and fixing them up on the weekends, the things they got up to in, and with, their motors, back in the day. Those conversations stirred up long-forgotten memories of things that I experienced and witnessed, and I realised just how much I hadn’t included first time around – cars that I fixed and some that I broke, fads and crazes, crashes and scrapes and near misses, evolutionary dead ends in technology, underhanded practices and downright skulduggery, run-ins with management, the tools that we used, the cars that we ‘stole’, the scrapyards we visited. It’s all in here, and I hope you enjoy it.

Most readers said kind things about the first book, I think mainly because it was very different to all the other car books out there for sale at the time. I don’t believe that anyone had presented the car industry in quite that way before in a book, certainly not from the journeyman mechanic’s perspective.

I was an ordinary working mechanic, the real kind, not the kind that gets portrayed on television; supermen who can take a rusty old hulk that hasn’t run for decades, sprinkle magic dust over it and turn it into a showroom condition classic, all achieved in one hour-long episode, or lift the bonnet on anything from an old Citroën Tin Snail to a De Tomaso Mangusta and instantly know what the hell they are doing.

Those readers who gave the first book poor reviews said either that it contained too much boring stuff about fixing cars and not enough workshop banter between the mechanics, or too much tomfoolery and not enough about how the cars got fixed. This time, I have tried to tread a middle path and, rather like tuning a pair of old twin-choke Weber carburettors, hope that I’ve got the balance right.

1

The Scrapyard

I told Big John that he should park up the road from the scrapyard and we’d walk back, rather than drive into the yard and pull in next to the Portakabin office. His tatty old Ford Escort Mk 1 estate was a prime candidate to be mistaken for a scrapper by the crane operator and be grabbed and chucked on top of a pile of other wrecks, or at the very least, be gutted for parts by someone wanting bits for their own Escort while we were off hunting in the yard.

It had happened before, and this particular yard, Fitz Salvage, down on the industrial estate beside the reservoirs, was notorious for it. The guys in the canteen at work had stories to tell about the bloke who had parked up his Lotus Cortina a little too close to the crusher and had to take the bus home, though when challenged, it was always a friend of a friend who had witnessed it.

John opened the tailgate and went to lift out our two cantilever toolboxes, but I said we wouldn’t be allowed on site with them in case we concealed removed parts and made off without paying. Old Fitz was a bastard about that sort of thing. You couldn’t get away with anything and he even looked you up and down carefully while you were paying, checking for suspicious-looking lumps and bumps in your overalls. The best I could ever get away with was a pocketful of nuts and bolts in useful sizes, side-light bulbs, tyre valve caps and the occasional 12-volt cigar lighter, but even then I risked a run-in with Fitz (or worse, his Neanderthal twin sons) and in the end I stopped trying to pinch stuff because it just wasn’t worth the trouble.

We each took a handful of tools, the maximum permitted per person. I chose a set of A/F-sized combination spanners, mole grips and three screwdrivers – a medium flat and a Phillips, plus a small, flat electrical one. Big John would carry the persuaders: a ball pein hammer, wheel brace, pry bar and a hacksaw. I thought that ought to do it.

As we walked down the road towards the scrapyard entrance, I reached inside my overalls with my free hand and found the folded up MOT failure sheet in my top shirt pocket. Flipping it open, I looked again in despair at the long list of required repairs. In order for it to live another year, the Escort needed two front tyres, track-rod ends and rubber steering-rack gaiters, front and rear shock absorbers, an exhaust rear silencer box and the electrics sorting out, because when John put the indicators on, the brake lights came on, and vice versa when he depressed the brake pedal.

Even apart from the MOT failures, there were all sorts of bits falling off the car and we were hopeful we could source most, if not everything we needed, in one hunt at Fitz’s yard. It wasn’t so much the amount of work involved that worried me, it was the money – or our lack of it.

It didn’t help matters that Big John was skint. He had managed to find the price of the MOT test itself (the re-test following a failure would come for free) and £15 for repairs, though he had been forced to spend £3 of that on petrol, just to keep the car moving. Knowing the prices Fitz charged, I didn’t think £12 would stretch, assuming we found everything we needed, but I thought we would just have to cross that bridge when we came to it. With our limited budget, buying brand-new parts was just out of the question.

We walked straight into the yard and, ignoring a blazing row in progress outside the Portakabin between Fitz and a customer over prices, we adopted the ‘keep turning left’ principle to ensure that we didn’t miss the perfect donor car down any of the various lanes and alleyways of the big site.

Fitz’s place was probably 300 yards deep from the road, terminating at the railway sidings, and almost as wide, bordered to the left by a leather-tanning yard, the stink from which would knock you out in the summertime, and to the right by a wide stretch of no-man’s-land protecting the water reservoir itself from the industrial effluents and fallout from the various businesses surrounding it. Regardless of this protective barrier, Fitz was always fighting off the Water Board, whose representatives were concerned about chemical contamination of the soil beneath the site, while the leather-tanning yard had been closed down in the past for disposing of chemicals illegally into the sewerage drains.

While a few forlorn-looking ducks bobbed about on the wide expanse of wind-blown water, and screeching gulls circled high above the reservoir, the whole area was otherwise a nature-free wasteland, without a blade of grass or a tree in sight. In the corners of the scrapyard, and beneath the half-buried carcasses of cars from the 1950s and earlier, which were slowly rotting back into the earth, coarse bramble and weed would sprout and try to entangle the old wrecks, but the leaves were always brown and sickly looking and nothing ever appeared to flower or fruit.

Whenever a patch of nettle and bramble and couch grass started to take hold, one of the Fitz boys would attack it with a flame thrower or empty the solvent from the de-greaser tank onto it, and nature would be forced back underground again. Buddleia bushes seemed happy enough, seeding from bird droppings and clinging on to unlikely soil-free locations in gutters and brickwork and even in the wooden frame of an old Morris Traveller. Rats and magpies seemed to flourish, and I once saw a ragged fox nosing about in the early evening as the yard was closing up. Otherwise, it was like the aftermath of some terrible apocalypse.

As we walked, our boots were sucked down into the awful chemical muck of a scrapyard pathway. The original mud surface of the yard had been reinforced in the lanes between the rows of scrap cars with clinker, salvaged over many years from the railway sidings behind the site. This provided a stable, if lumpy, surface, but in many places the ground had subsided, leaving murky, oily pools of rainwater, the depth of which it was impossible to estimate by sight.

The gooey top 2in or so upon which we walked consisted of, in unknowable proportions, mud, clinker, rainwater, engine oil, brake fluid, petrol, diesel, antifreeze, cleaning solvents, asbestos dust, battery acid, fragments of shattered windscreen glass, rust and urine (there were no toilet facilities provided on site). It should have been highly flammable, but wasn’t, as we were always dropping cigarette butts and struck matches upon it and there was never, to my knowledge, a conflagration. What I can say about it, from bitter experience, is that if one ever returned home and forgot to remove boots, living room carpets were destroyed by it – and doubtless many marriages too.

Walking along the lanes between the cars stacked up to six or eight high, looking out for a suitable Escort Mk 1 estate, or even a saloon for that matter – most of the parts would be identical – we both pondered the inviolable laws of scrapyard hunting. Rule number one: whatever model of vehicle you were looking for, there would be plenty of everything but. Hunt for a Ford and there would be nothing but Austins and Vauxhalls, Triumphs and Rovers, Humbers and Volkswagens, Ladas and Hillmans. Return a month later, searching for an offside headlamp unit for a Vauxhall Viva and the whole site would be a graveyard for Fords, including several of the exact model you had previously been searching for.

Rule number two: if the scrapyard gods decreed that rule number one should be lifted for the day, and you were after parts for a Mk 2 Cortina, then all the Fords would be either Escorts, Fiestas or Anglias, or if Cortinas, they would be Mk 1s, or Mk 3s, or even the occasional written-off Mk 4.

As bad as these certainties were, rule number three was the most frustrating of them all. If your target was a nearside front indicator lens for a Triumph Spitfire, then there would be Spitfires aplenty on site and all with perfectly good offside indicator lenses, but with every nearside one broken or cracked or of the slightly different-shaped facelift model type. Such was life for the mechanics and DIY car repair men back in the 1980s, but we knew no different, and sometimes we got lucky.

We got lucky after half an hour of searching but found ourselves stymied by the fourth and final rule of scrapyard hunting. A potentially perfect Escort estate sat at the base of a pyramid of cars, nine high. The weight of the metal on top had gradually crushed the shell of the car and forced it down into the gloop below, so that everything south of the chrome bumpers and the bottom half of each roadwheel was sunk in the quagmire. It may have had perfectly good track-rod ends and shock absorbers, for all we could tell.

Rule number four – that the right car will be completely inaccessible – meant that only by mining a tunnel below could we have any hope of retrieving anything. John could just about reach the front of the bonnet at a stretch, under a rusted-out Lada that swayed dangerously above – I sensed that if one car were dislodged the whole pyramid would collapse on top of him, like a giant game of Jenga. He asked me to pass him the flat screwdriver and started levering off the chrome F, O, R, D decals. The R and D broke, but he got the F and O off in one piece. FO – we thought the Escort was trying to tell us something.

We continued our search and I occasionally pointed out cars that I thought it shameful to have ended their days on the scrapheap, in many cases, prestige motors only a few years old. These were usually there as the result of smash-ups. On that particular day, the shell of a beautiful Triumph Stag sat on top of a great pile of old hulks, like the star on a mid-January Christmas tree, the rear end stoved in and all its quality running gear stripped and gone. By far the majority of the cars on site, and this was exactly why we hunted in the scrapyards, were in the six- to twelve-year-old age range that, as motorists from the poorer end of the spectrum, coincided exactly with the kind of second-hand cars we were able to buy for £50–100, dodgy MOT included. I knew plenty of fellas who never bothered with the scrapyards, with their shiny new Audis and BMWs. But guys like me and Big John were happy enough, traipsing about in the mud and the muck.

It was rust that killed the vast majority of cars back then; in fact, modern-day production processes, with high-quality steel and multiple anti-corrosion techniques applied as the vehicle is assembled at the factory, make it hard to believe that a brand-new car could possibly rust out to the point of collapse in just five years. That was certainly true of a number of foreign makes at the time – Fiats, Alfa Romeos and anything East European were notorious, as were some Fords; Dagenham dustbins, as they were affectionately nicknamed.

Many cars were known to rust in particular places, such as door wells, under bonnet-scuttles, spare-wheel wells in boots and the sills alongside chassis rails. With Land Rovers, it was the bulkhead that would usually rust out first, an expensive repair that necessitated a complete strip down and rebuild – and to find one that had been galvanised was like digging up pirate treasure.

Almost all cars in production had a particular place where rainwater would gather, and second-hand car dealers usually knew where to look, even if their customers didn’t. I used to make a point of drilling out drain-holes at strategic places on my old bangers and fitting rubber drain bungs so that the water could be drained away after any downpour.

Writing about a visit to the scrapyard with over forty years of hindsight, it is difficult not to overlay a deep sense of sentimentality and nostalgia over what we actually felt at the time. Ridiculous as it may now seem, we had no idea that almost all the old wrecks we eviscerated for parts would one day come to be revered as classics, that even many of the components themselves (those original F, O, R, D bonnet badges) would become highly desirable and difficult to obtain. Just as, when we were kids, we saw no potential future value in our Raleigh Chopper bikes, Hornby train sets or Corgi model cars, so it was inconceivable to us that anyone could ever feel a warm glow about that Austin Maxi rotting in the corner (though, to be fair, only a select few would ever miss that particular model!).

It wasn’t just that we were looking at, and at the same time not seeing the potential of, all the Fords, Vauxhalls and Triumphs of our generation, by which I mean the ten-year-old ones at the time (to this day, I experience a weird time shift, a glitch in the The Matrix, when I see film footage of the swinging Sixties with all those brand new HB Vivas and Mk 1 Escorts and Austin Mini Coopers, as if I had actually been there, even though I was only a little child at the time of miniskirts and Carnaby Street and Beatlemania).

Buried at the bottom of those pyramids and teetering piles of metal were the Humbers, Rovers and Austin A60s of the generation before us, and beneath them, rotting away into the filth, the detachable bodies, chassis, fenders, running boards and wire-wheels of the ancient ones, the Alvis, Standard, Jowett and Wolseley grandfathers, some of which had known the sound of bombs dropping from the sky.

Big John and I were starting to lose hope when we turned a corner and found the exact thing we were looking for, a perfect twin for our Escort estate, doubtless having once followed each other off the production line at Dagenham and separated at birth. It sat proudly atop a pile consisting of, from bottom upwards, a Humber Snipe, Vauxhall Cresta, Hillman Avenger, Ford Zodiac, another Hillman – this time an Imp – and then balancing precariously on the little car below, our target. As the wind whipped in off the reservoir, I could see the Escort gently swaying, and knew that this would be a tricky one.

There was nothing else for it, we began the ascent. With me clambering on front bumpers and bonnets and Big John dragging himself up via rear-door handles and boot lids, using exhaust tailpipes for footholds, we were like Hillary and Tenzing on the final push for the summit.

As I climbed up onto the bonnet of the old Zodiac, I found I had a reasonably secure kneeling area and could reach up to work on the underside of the Escort, the little Hillman Imp acting in the same way as the four-poster ramps we used back at the garage where I worked. I could already see that the engine and gearbox were missing, but (the scrapyard gods smiling down upon us) the car had what looked like a new steering rack fitted, with sound rubber gaiters and, as I carefully rocked one of the front road wheels from side to side, no apparent play in the track-rod ends. Not only that, but the two front tyres were in decent nick and only about half-worn. It was an absolute miracle, no two ways about it!

With good tyres not yet removed and any number of valuable components still on the car, I suspected it had only been on site a day or two, the engine and gearbox ripped out and sold on straight away, then the car grabbed and lifted up onto the pile to get it out of the way, prior to a full strip down before the bodyshell’s final appointment with the crusher. For us, it was the penny black in an old stamp collection, the gold sovereign in your pocketful of change!

I was a wiry little bloke back then, and the joke at work was if I stood sideways and poked my tongue out, I’d look like a zip (you should see me now!), but Big John must have weighed in as a solid light-heavyweight at least. As he clambered up onto the boot lid of the Zodiac and grabbed at the rear bumper of the Hillman Imp for support, so the additional weight caused the centre of gravity of the whole heap to shift and I felt the Zodiac move under me and the Escort begin to tilt dangerously down toward me.

I grabbed hold of the front bumper and pushed upwards and John did the opposite from the back end and between us we got it stable, but it was quite obviously going to be impossible to strip the car down from up there. We both stayed completely still for a moment, looking for inspiration, and then there was a shout from below, ‘Oi, you pair of monkeys! Climb down here and stop fucking about!’

It was Jimmy, the more approachable of the Fitz twins. He was grinning up at us and seemed to find our predicament quite amusing. I had had dealings with Jimmy before and, apart from the fact that he was huge, ginger-haired, freckled, red-faced, gap-toothed and terrifying to behold, we had never actually fallen out. It was his brother Freddie who frightened the life out of me; also huge and ginger (they were close, but not quite identical twins), he had the mad glint of the psychopath in his eye and if there were bodies buried anywhere on the site, we all thought he would be the one to know where to dig. Thank God, they usually had Freddie manning the crane or the crusher and kept him as far as possible away from customers. Legend had it that you were always safer dealing with Reggie, rather than Ronnie, Kray, and having met the Fitz twins I could understand why.

We both descended and got down to base camp in one piece and I explained to Jimmy what we were after. He said that next time we should fucking well ask first, then put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, raised his arm up in the air and made a circular lassoing motion with his hand. Freddie, who had been watching proceedings from the cab of his mobile crane, fired the motor up and, with loud clanking and revving and a great cloud of diesel smoke, drove the tracked vehicle across the yard to the edge of the pile of wrecks upon which our Escort teetered.