Heyyyyy, thought i'd share with you the palava me and benzboy get into the other night with my mk3 Escort ;D
We decided to embark on a trip to North yorkshire to pick up some E-tat that benzboy had scored. A 90 mile journey each way, but the 1.1 has been very reliable since buying it earlier this year and so I thought it would be without incident.
In fact, so confident was I that we didn't even take a simple tool kit with us..... That was to prove a mistake!
The journey there went without incident. Benzboy picked up his Ebay treasure (99p's worth I might add!) and we set off home at about 10.30pm.
^ (Don't have a pic of that particular part of the journey to illustrate with, but this artists impression is pretty accurate. That's me driving, and that's Benzboy with all the rotating heads. Yes, I know the colour of the car is more Rosso Red and not the Sunburst Red of my Escort but, well.... Just use your imaginations
)
All going well, steady driving, plenty of fuel and some tunes on the stereo.... but then the car started to develop a bit of an idle problem which caused it to stall at every junction. No big deal, no need to stop and investigate, I thought. I'd simply use the handbrake to slow down for junctions while keeping the throttle blipping to avoid stalling...... This was mistake number two
About 40 miles from home and getting on for about 12.30am, I applied the handbrake to slow for a roundabout.
We noted a little "bang" sound from the rear of the car... I immediately thought it was probably the handbrake cable giving out and didn't think all that much of it, but then at the next roundabout another "bang" sound came from the back of the car, only this time the rear suddenly developed some forklift-style steering and send us across two lanes!
Fortunately we weren't going that fast, but we ended up wrestling it onto a big traffic island, and got out to investigate.
^ This pic is from today, but at the time we jacked it up and quickly realised that the tie-bar had sheared, meaning the rear wheel was free to go left or right! That would explain the forklift steering!
The rear-braking must have put undue stress on the tie bar and caused it to snap
A hunt around the car soon revealed that the jack was the only tool that came along for the trip. Not so much as a screwdriver in the door pocket... Nothing
By this point it was about 1.00 am, and every chav in the area seemed to be out and going around the island beeping and jeering at our unfortunate incident
With no breakdown cover (I know, you'd think i'd have learn't by now!), in the early hours of the morning, 40 miles from home and feeling a bit tired, we were surely in deep trouble.
Not really having any other option we set off for a walk around the area to see if we could find anything to bodge it with, because leaving it there would almost certainly mean it wouldn't be there in the morning.
The area was spartan, nothing but traffic signs and a few industrial units, all with locked fences (and a massive barking dog in one case!).
Our last hope was a tool hire shop. Of course at 1.30am it wasn't open but we rifled through the bin outside in the hope that we could find something... ANYTHING to work with!
In that bin we found our answer. You know those plastic straps that cardboard boxes sometimes have round them when you get them delivered? We found a few handfulls of them, and we noted that they were STRONG!
We took them back to the car and set to work. We figured that if we tied the wishbone to the mounting point of the busted tie-bar, forward motion would make it taught and prevent the wheel from pushing back into the wheelarch.
Because they had all just been cut off boxes they were all different lengths, but we tied them together and made about 7 long enough to use.
So with 7 strands of packaging holding our rear suspension together, and a few more tied around the middle to bundle them together for luck... we lowered the car to the ground and got in.
I had that feeling that you used to get as a child when standing at the top of a steep hill with a go-kart you'd just finished making...... would it hold together? Will it snap as soon as we try to pull off?
With great trepedation we made our way off the island and onto the public highway
To our amazement the packaging suspension actually worked... really well!
Speeds were kept to around 25-30mph and because it was around 2.30am by now, traffic was thankfully minimal.
I though i'd be fighting the thing all the way home but the suspension was actually pretty good- Once the forward motion had pulled the packaging tie-bar taught the wheel wasn't able to move around too much, and had no ill effects at the low speeds we were travelling at.
Of course we still had our idle problem, which made things worse! But we finally rolled in to our home town at 4.30am..... Never been so glad to be home in my life!!
So whats the moral of this story? Always have breakdown cover, and if you can't get breakdown cover always carry some spare tools!
I don't know what tools would have got us out of that scrape, but we might have been able to snip some wire from a nearby fence or something.
And failing all that, if your really stuck go and find a bin and get some of that packaging stuff..... All 7 strips of the stuff were intact when we got home! It is STRONG! ;D
Cheers for reading
We decided to embark on a trip to North yorkshire to pick up some E-tat that benzboy had scored. A 90 mile journey each way, but the 1.1 has been very reliable since buying it earlier this year and so I thought it would be without incident.
In fact, so confident was I that we didn't even take a simple tool kit with us..... That was to prove a mistake!
The journey there went without incident. Benzboy picked up his Ebay treasure (99p's worth I might add!) and we set off home at about 10.30pm.
^ (Don't have a pic of that particular part of the journey to illustrate with, but this artists impression is pretty accurate. That's me driving, and that's Benzboy with all the rotating heads. Yes, I know the colour of the car is more Rosso Red and not the Sunburst Red of my Escort but, well.... Just use your imaginations
)All going well, steady driving, plenty of fuel and some tunes on the stereo.... but then the car started to develop a bit of an idle problem which caused it to stall at every junction. No big deal, no need to stop and investigate, I thought. I'd simply use the handbrake to slow down for junctions while keeping the throttle blipping to avoid stalling...... This was mistake number two
About 40 miles from home and getting on for about 12.30am, I applied the handbrake to slow for a roundabout.
We noted a little "bang" sound from the rear of the car... I immediately thought it was probably the handbrake cable giving out and didn't think all that much of it, but then at the next roundabout another "bang" sound came from the back of the car, only this time the rear suddenly developed some forklift-style steering and send us across two lanes!
Fortunately we weren't going that fast, but we ended up wrestling it onto a big traffic island, and got out to investigate.
^ This pic is from today, but at the time we jacked it up and quickly realised that the tie-bar had sheared, meaning the rear wheel was free to go left or right! That would explain the forklift steering!
The rear-braking must have put undue stress on the tie bar and caused it to snap
A hunt around the car soon revealed that the jack was the only tool that came along for the trip. Not so much as a screwdriver in the door pocket... Nothing
By this point it was about 1.00 am, and every chav in the area seemed to be out and going around the island beeping and jeering at our unfortunate incident
With no breakdown cover (I know, you'd think i'd have learn't by now!), in the early hours of the morning, 40 miles from home and feeling a bit tired, we were surely in deep trouble.
Not really having any other option we set off for a walk around the area to see if we could find anything to bodge it with, because leaving it there would almost certainly mean it wouldn't be there in the morning.
The area was spartan, nothing but traffic signs and a few industrial units, all with locked fences (and a massive barking dog in one case!).
Our last hope was a tool hire shop. Of course at 1.30am it wasn't open but we rifled through the bin outside in the hope that we could find something... ANYTHING to work with!
In that bin we found our answer. You know those plastic straps that cardboard boxes sometimes have round them when you get them delivered? We found a few handfulls of them, and we noted that they were STRONG!
We took them back to the car and set to work. We figured that if we tied the wishbone to the mounting point of the busted tie-bar, forward motion would make it taught and prevent the wheel from pushing back into the wheelarch.
Because they had all just been cut off boxes they were all different lengths, but we tied them together and made about 7 long enough to use.
So with 7 strands of packaging holding our rear suspension together, and a few more tied around the middle to bundle them together for luck... we lowered the car to the ground and got in.
I had that feeling that you used to get as a child when standing at the top of a steep hill with a go-kart you'd just finished making...... would it hold together? Will it snap as soon as we try to pull off?
With great trepedation we made our way off the island and onto the public highway
To our amazement the packaging suspension actually worked... really well!
Speeds were kept to around 25-30mph and because it was around 2.30am by now, traffic was thankfully minimal.
I though i'd be fighting the thing all the way home but the suspension was actually pretty good- Once the forward motion had pulled the packaging tie-bar taught the wheel wasn't able to move around too much, and had no ill effects at the low speeds we were travelling at.
Of course we still had our idle problem, which made things worse! But we finally rolled in to our home town at 4.30am..... Never been so glad to be home in my life!!
So whats the moral of this story? Always have breakdown cover, and if you can't get breakdown cover always carry some spare tools!
I don't know what tools would have got us out of that scrape, but we might have been able to snip some wire from a nearby fence or something.
And failing all that, if your really stuck go and find a bin and get some of that packaging stuff..... All 7 strips of the stuff were intact when we got home! It is STRONG! ;D
Cheers for reading
+ 2007 Octavia Vrs estate, 1971 Beetle project, 2004 Shogun Sport
