I've been having some fun and games on the 4 wheeled front.
The Soobie we bought was cheep, has some rough edges which I'm ticking off one by one. There's this thing here called Black Friday. Bit like the January sales but the frenzy is mainly over the early hours of one night. Look it up on the BBC you have to see it to belive it
But did manage to get myself a huge saving on a new set of tyres ready for the winter.
I thought the engine wasnt breathing quite right so I had a look at the air filter. the box holding the filter had I would say about 1 1/2 litres of rocks, leaves, twigs, bugs, maggot type things. Plus the ducting towards this has various appendages also full of this stuff.
, cleaned this stuff out and I've never had the fitting of a new air filter have such a dramatic effect on a vehicle. This obviously hadn't been looked at in a long time.
So the weather being good this weekend I thought I'ld tackle the spark plugs. Being a flat hoizontal engine. the plugs are down either side close to the inner sides of the bodywork, quite lowdown. One side this involves removing the window washer bottle and battery to get access. As Arkward as this sounds this turned out to be so easy. A big relief.
Well the plugs were badly worn, so in went a new set. The problem here is unlike the UK were wevery one seems to complain about shops doing too much during a service, It seems the US is the opposite.
So that job done I ask the better half when was the plugs on the VW Jetta last checked ? Never ! was the answer. Front wheel drive, always easy to get at the plugs on those. Took the silly plastic cover off only to find 2 of them are so deeply buried.
I got number 1 out. it was very badly worn with a huge gap 50% bigger than it should be. I regapped it pending getting some new plugs.
The I gould tackle number 4. this had finger marks on the cable as if it had been pulled off in the past rather than pulled by the metal end of the lead and it was so tight, and stayed tight for about 3 turns before I thought this has been cross treaded, probably with an impact hammer. So I thought I'ld let sleeping dogs lie & screw it back in as I hadn't the time of facilities to fix this now.
This morling the wife calls me as the car has suddenly started running very rough, sounds like a miss-fire. She's already been put in a bad mood as she's co-ordinating a big presentation @ University due this morling. and dispite chasing some other students to put their contributions in; Which they only begrudgingly sent her on the weekend after some choice phrases from my better half. Only for her to be told by them this morling certain bits should have been done differently.
So she's spitting feathers and it look like I will be doing the same in the dark tonight trying to sort out some of the damage caused by some ham fisted oaf and get this car running properly again.
So much for a quick check on an easy job.
