I took the car to the garage this morning. You may remember reading exactly the same opening sentence to yesterday's blog. There's a reason for that. I had exactly the same opening sentence to my day. This is because unfortunately, despite my mechanic being both very good and very reasonably priced, he has a limited grasp of scheduling.
The way it works in his garage is that he says "yes" to any work that appears on the horizon and then proceeds to handle them sequentially. If it transpires that he's taken on more work than can be done in a day, the ones left over simply get shunted to the next day. Which is fine (I suppose) if you can leave your motor with him overnight. I can't. So when I call up towards the end of the day I get "sorry, I've not even looked at it yet."
Which has now happened on four out of the five occasions I've taken the car to him. In any other circumstance this would be grounds for me to take my business elsewhere (with a level of huffiness dictated by my grumpiness at the time), but he IS cheap. And the garage IS within walking distance.
Anyway it turns out all this enginemanagementpoorperformancelumpyrunning business is my own fault. I haven't been checking my oil regularly enough. He actually said that. "I get the impression you don't check your oil very often." Yeah, that would be right. Well, to be entirely honest, "at all" would be closer to the mark. I usually leave it until the oil warning light flickers when I'm taking a hard corner, and then think "ah. Must get some oil next time I fill up."
This, apparently, is not the best approach to take. Especially on modern engines with hydraulic tappets. Because, well, being hydraulic, they need - you know - oil. If the oil level drops all their little reservoirs go dry in a kind of homage to the state of the country's water supply a few weeks ago, the valves don't open properly, and the engine management unit registers a misfire and turns on its little light to tell me all about it. Occasionally the whole situation gets so bad the misfires become audible, and affect more than one valve, which explains last Friday's (and Sunday's) journeys.
He cleaned it all up, reset the EMU codes, and topped up the oil. For my part, I'll be doing weekly oil checks from now on. Me ol' Dad would be proud of me. Exasperated, but proud.
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2 comments:
You probably don't have to check it weekly, but every 500 or so km wouldn't hurt. Me dad would follow instructions to the letter and actually get the oil changed every 2000 km whether it needed it or not!
Weekly would be good. That's easier to schedule than by mileage.
Yup, you've got to do this stuff if you want to run a motor.
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