Today, me and my dad were supposed to give Bruiser a good wash and polish ready for this weekend - the Festival of Power at Santa Pod Raceway.
Bruiser had other ideas.
Around 8am, I'm fast asleep (having gone to bed at 4am thinking I'd be getting up at about noon), sprawled across my bed and drooling everywhere, the usual. My dad comes in and tells me that Bruiser's coolant leak has got worse, but he's figured out where it's coming from and he wants to fix it. He told me he needed me to get on the 'tinterwebs' and find an exploded view of the 2.0 Duratec engine so he could figure out where the hose went to underneath the car. That alone was easier said than done. After about 10 minutes of Googling around, it seemed like nobody had bothered to make an exploded view of the engine. A few Ford forums had links to things like that, but the posts were outdated and the sites no longer existed. We ended up looking at pixelated JPEG photos of Mondeo engines, which wasn't much help. In the end, my dad decided against trying to replace the old hose and instead resorted to trying to fix it himself.
He got some spare copper pipe, bought some jubilee clips and anti-freeze from the local village, and set to work cutting out the split part of the hose. I quickly got dressed into something more suitable than pyjamas and joined him in the garage. He managed to cut out the split part of the hose, but that was the easy part. Here's the culprit itself:
The split is tiny, but with all the miles we'll be covering this weekend, it will have no doubt progressed into an even bigger split.
Now came the fun part. After cutting the copper pipe (and his palm - multiple times), my dad set about squeezing it into the existing hose. Much, much,
much easier said than done. He got part of it in, but it wasn't nearly enough for it to stay there under pressure. My dad was getting frustrated, anti-freeze was spilling in every direction and I was freezing my backside off holding the torch. Eventually my dad got so frustrated with it, he threw the torch, which promptly broke it. Great. Anti-freeze is everywhere, the wind is absolutely freezing and now we have no torch. I went back inside and got the only replacement torch we had - one in the shape of a penguin. Manly.
After much swearing, many smoked cigarettes (from my dad, I don't smoke just FYI) and a lot of hitting the pipe, we got it inside the hose a reasonable amount. He fitted the jubilee clip as tight as he could and that was that. But then we had to get the other end of the hose onto the other end of copper pipe. It had taken us around 3 hours to put one end on, so this end wasn't very well welcomed by either of us. But all of a sudden, my dad got a brainwave and disappeared inside. He came back out with a jug of boiling hot water and put the rest of the hose in it. Genius. We waited a bit, my dad had another smoke and then we set to work again. The hose was, obviously, boiling hot, but after ignoring the third degree burns my dad's plan worked and the hose was on in minutes. We then loosened the jubilee clip on the other end and poured the rest of the hot water on to try and shove the copper pipe in a little more. It worked, we put the jubilee clip back on, another one on the other end of the pipe and that was it. Bruiser was now wired up with spare copper pipe from under the house (we don't have a basement, it's just bricks and foundations - and copper pipe). We topped up the anti-freeze, let the engine run and the anti-freeze circulate, and it was job done.
By this time it was noon, so we had a break, got some lunch, and then went outside to start what we originally planned - giving Bruiser a proper inside and out wash. But he wasn't done yet. The driver's side door speaker stopped working. Now if it was down to me, I would have left it, it had been on and off for weeks and all the other speakers worked so it wasn't as if we couldn't hear anything. But my dad was adamant that it needed sorting. So, he set to work on that too, armed with screwdrivers and insulation tape. It was my job to hold the door open so the freezing and bracing wind wouldn't smack the door in my dad's face, the wind instead smacked me in my face and I was freezing once again.
I can't really say what happened at this point, I'd lost interest and I was more concentrating on trying to not get hypothermia. I just know a lot of screws and insulation tape was involved. Here's the speaker mid-way (we'd taken a break because cold)
Needless to say, my dad got it working again, and we even tested it out with a bit of Rudimental
. By this time both of us were cold and fed up, but we carried on anyway. We vacced him out, wiped the dash, cleaned the mats, and then washed the outside. It was forecast to rain, and my iPod even said it was currently raining, but we managed to get him shining again and leathered off - aaand then it rained.
I didn't get any pictures of Bruiser after the wash because I was simply just too fed up to bother. I'll try to get some shots of him over the coming weekend though.
But yeah, we normally do all the work ourselves if we can. We've started going to Greenwoods Victoria Garage in Lockwood instead, they've got reasonable prices and brilliant customer service, really friendly guys. 👍
Your street. And as for all the stuff thats up with the car, its to be expected. Kinda the cycle that manufacturers seemed to have thought cars would last IMO.
