Car went in for a service and its first MOT on Friday. Had the cambelt done, two suspension bushes replaced, new pads and steel braided brake hoses. Came to £680 plus the price of the pads and hoses. Money well spent as this car may have to last me a few years yet, although it left the current account looking a bit poorly.
Yesterday evening the heating failed whilst driving.... then the temperature gauge started its inexorable climb.... was only half a mile from my mum's place so limped on.
After letting it cool for 90 mins I had to put 1.5l of water in to get the level back up. Limped home and left car overnight. This morning the expansion tank took 1.5l again. Hmmmmmmm.
A stone has managed to get through the slats between the central grill and the OS headlamp, punching a 2mm hole in the rad. These slats are less than an inch apart and only 8-10 inches long. The overall area the stone had to come through is about the same as that presented by the side of your hand.
New rad needed. £305 supplied and fitted. Half the front of the car has to come off to do the job. Still, at least it wasn't the intercooler!
Christmas is cancelled. I'm thinking of changing my screen name to absolutely No Dosh.
I could cry.....
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Bad luck indeed. You have my deepest sympathy and a wish that the Lottery may smile on you soon.
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I sympathise - exactly same happened to my daughter on M1 this time last year. Renault Clio, tiny gap for stone to get through, looked impossible to me but it put a small hole in rad -luckily she realised temp was rising and RAC were there in minutes. She tried radweld for a while but did no real good so new radiator. (Good job not as expensive as yours 'cos I had to pay!)
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The nice people at the garage are going to fit some mesh behind the slats to stop it happening again. Now that's service.
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'How unlucky is this?' - extremely. The chances of that stone getting through were so remote, that the chances of winning something reasonable on the lottery must surely be better. Trouble is can you still afford to buy a ticket?!
Fingers crossed, the car now remains trouble free - for ever :)
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Good point Weather and thank you Roger. Off to check my numbers from Saturday.....
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Just to go right off topic briefly - never buy a lottery ticket more than 5.5 days before the draw. At that point you have a statistically higher chance of dying than you do of winning the lottery.
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What a lovely cheery thought for a lovely cheery Monday.
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Combining the two bits of this thread , statistics of dying and stones thrown up.
I had a half brick which I can only assume had come from between the rear wheels of a truck hit the windscreen of the Polo I was driving on the M40 some years back.
Luckily the lamination held but it did make a mess of the bonnet and the wiper arm was bent to pink fluffy dice.The screen looked like it had been hit with a tank shell.
I can still see that half brick flying towards me .If the lamination hadn\'t held.... I would not be here today.
Dosh isn\'t everything - no point being the richest corpse in the cemetary.
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Yeah, something similar happened to me, major 60K service, £650 for two cambelts and all new fluids, new two piece exhaust, etc, etc. Then on the M40 someone hit a pebble on the road and threw it up and hit the one exposed part (6'' by 3'') of the intake right on the upside of the rad mount bracket. Result was pink water everywhere and a £270 bill.
Now, be careful as to what might happen next.
The car was in an eight-car pile up. Written off.
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A few years ago after a DIY service. Engine running nicely.
Final polish in the engine compartment with a bit of old shirt and zapped the radiator.
I now ensure that all buttons are removed from recycled bits of shirt.
I am well aware of keeping clear of moving bits but you can imagine the red face and the ******* that followed.
Then explaining? the £££s bill afterwards.
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I collected a half-brick in the headlamp of my old Citroen XM at about 65mph from (I think) the rear wheels of a lorry. Smashed the headlamp glass (which is very narrow) and shot over the roof. Absolutely no damage to anything other than the headlamp.
Lucky or what?
Hawkeye
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Stranger in a strange land
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Well, there is one shiny bit of news to come out of this. They were able to repair rather than replace the rad. The chap gave a 12 month guarantee on the repair, which for a rad as about as good as you get. £204 all in as it still had to be removed and then replaced.
On the gloomier side, I got a call from Mrs No Dosh. Following the family tradition, the battery has failed on the Laguna. So that's another £50.
If I weren't a moderator I could swear right now.
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ND, going back to the post on Lottery, I think you should buy a ticket now!
The simple reason is that when you first started posting you had the vision to pick a suitable name that would accurately describe you in the future...
So surely you can use this same vision on your lottery numbers...
:)
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Nice idea, but that would mean changing my name now to "loadsamoney" and then sitting through another 18 months of pecuniary disadvantage before the ticket came up!
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Is this nearly as unlucky?
Last Tuesday my '95 M Pug 306 DTurbo's head gasket gave up, and i can't afford to repair it so it's been flogged to a mate for a £1400 loss in just 5 months of ownership.
Luckily i can still get to work this week until i pick up my replacement car on saturday, using my mum's N reg 1.1 Fiesta. Yesterday morning i discovered that i can get the clutch to slip quite easily, so i'll be limping the rest of the 200miles of commuting i have left to do this week. The Fiesta has 26,000 genuine miles on the clock.
Right, 4.5 days til the lottery, so the odds are in my favour that if i win i will at least still be alive!
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Our ex next door neighbour had a new exhaust fitted to his car.
On the way home the engine blew up and he ended up scrapping the car with a brand new exhaust on it that had done about 4 miles.
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Couple of weeks ago was driving 520 pool car down A33 whilst my E46 3 series had a new front bumper fitted (fox attacked it on A404). I was passing a lorry when a heavy leaf spring bounced up the road and took out my bumper and offside headlight - then bounced off and hit a Merc SLK in the other lane straight through the windscreen and smashed out the rear onto the road - driver was unhurt but understandably somewhat shocked.
Lucky and unlucky rolled up into one.
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More lucky than unlucky?? You could both have been killed. Makes the blood run cold. But not as cold as the fox's I suspect. Still, glad you are still with us and may you have many miles of trouble free motoring ahead of you. The really chilling part about it is that you probably had no time to even react.
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No time at all - looked like a bit of rubbish bouncing down the road until it hit.
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Whilst working in Glasgow a few years back one of my colleagues had a similar incident on the way into the office. (Lynn, if you're reading this I still remember the look on your face when you got in).
A car had lost its exhaust, which was lying in the outside lane of the M8. The car in front of Lynn clipped the exhaust. It promptly dug into the road in the same way as a polevaulters pole and shot up, came through her screen and embedded itself in the passenger seat, passing through it by a good few inches.
Since that day I've always treated all road debris as a potentially lethal hazard. That flat piece of board - How do you know there are no nails there, waiting to shred your tyres? The short length of timber batten - I can pass over it ok, but will it spear the driver of the car behind? The sack or tarp at the edge of the road - For all I know, its covering a pile of scrap iron and bricks.
Suddenly a stone through the rad seems suitably insignificant....
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After reading your tale of woe I was happily thinking that my temperamental lancia was being quite good for a change as nothing had broken/fallen off/worn out/ started making strange noises in the last few weeks. Until last night. Queue mysterious thudding and rattling which on the bright side might just be a broken water pump for a few hundred notes or on the dark side a complete engine rebuild if it's something in the bottom end letting go. I now have a nail biting wait to find out just which it is.... ah the joy of owning an italian car :-)
teabelly
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