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The Joys of Buying a Car a Week

Before the Start of Lockdown 2020!

Who can remember the excitement of buying their first car? To and there it would be staying while I worked on it. The guys in
be able to say yes that is my car, after all, what 24-year-old wants the local parts shop looked after me, a full service kit and oil
his dearest Mammy still running him around? The time had and a clutch conversion kit and concentric slave cylinder for
finally arrived for me to buy my own car. My freedom. My own €360.
set of wheels. The car I was looking at belonged to a customer
of ours. It needed some work but the body and engine were in The first jobs to tick off the list were the service and hoovering.
good condition. Just over 164,000 miles, timing chain recently Oil, air and fuel filter were changed and the old oil was sucked
done by none other than my boss, so that was the biggest job out and replaced with new oil. The seats were covered in dog
checked off the list. What mechanic is scared off by a bit of hair and were in dire need of a good clean so I set off with the
work? Dare I call myself one? little hoover we have in the workshop, I cleaned and cleaned. 3
hours later I had the car looking not 100% but much better than
The clutch was virtually non-existent, needed a service, a good it did beforehand.

Next came the first hardship, the park light on the driver’s side
was blown. What seems like a simple two-minute job, turned
into an hour job to take the whole front bumper off just to
change said bulb. Taking the bumper off did kill two birds
with one stone, fixed the grill in the bottom of the bumper and
fixed the top grill where a bit of the logo had broken off. I was
feeling confident in two days I had checked a few jobs off the
ever-growing list.

Day 3 came and now it was time to tackle the biggest job of all,
the clutch change. Little did I know that the more I stripped, the
more problems I would find. It would be time to spend another
clean out and the one wheel had a puncture, all within my €200 I hadn’t planned for. The front pads were metal on metal
capabilities. The price was more than reasonable at €350, so the so had eaten into the disks, the outside cv boot on the driver’s
Monday before St Patrick’s Day, I went and picked up the car side was torn, the fan belt had slipped and the rear disks needed
with my boss and his wife. Limped the car back to the workshop replacing too.

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