WHAT’S THAT TICKING NOISE?
THE GOOD OLD DAYS
Cars don’t break down as much as they used to and, most of the time, they don’t break down in the same way.
If you were born in the 1960s or earlier you might remember endless motorway journeys where the tedium of being glued to a vinyl seat in something like a Ford Escort or a Vauxhall Victor could be marginally relieved by counting all the other cars broken down on the hard shoulder and wondering when yours would join them.
Like the corpses of flies at the bottom of a closed window, these sorry-looking casualties littered the roadside, bonnets up, owners poking about fruitlessly to try and find out why the damn things wouldn’t go. Having failed to find out, they’d then trudge hundreds of yards along the hard shoulder, lungs and clothing irreparably damaged by the fume-enriched slipstreams of passing Foden trucks and rattling Royal Blue coaches, as they searched for a motorway emergency phone that, inevitably, wouldn’t work.
In an era when everyone and their dog has a mobile phone and the ether fairly fizzes with electromagnetic pollution, this might seem especially anachronistic, but it was actually just part of normal, pre-1980s life. You should fondly recall it as a time when motoring was the ‘real thing’.
THE END OF DIY
One reason why so many of them continually broke down was that fixing one’s own car was a default setting for the majority of male drivers. In the first 30 years after the Second World War, many men had seen military service and had grown up in a world where ‘make do and mend’ was a necessity that resulted in a great deal of vehicular bodging, inherited from a soldiering culture where if your tank broke down you fixed it with a claw hammer, an empty can of bully beef and a safety pin.
Servicemen who returned to Civvy Street households that were lucky enough to own cars often didn’t have sufficient cash to get them serviced, so at weekends on streets and driveways all over the country, blokes would be seen banging their heads on the undersides of bonnets of Morris Oxfords and Hillman Hunters, gashing themselves on sharp bits of engine, and cauterising their wounds on overheated spark plugs while simultaneously leafing through an oil-smudged Haynes manual (but not until they were first published in the 1960s). Often they would do these things with a lit Woodbine hanging out of the corner of their mouths – ill-advised when they were inhaling a dangerously combustible mixture of oxygen and petrol vapour.
If some nostalgia freak tells you that ‘they don’t make cars like they used to any more’, agree at once, because it’s true. But state knowledgeably that this is actually a good thing. Something called progress has made modern cars more complicated but also generally less lethal, wasteful and unreliable, so they now don’t require mechanical poking and prodding every other weekend in the way that their forebears did.
THE OLD MECHANICAL VERNACULAR
However, this has removed a lot of the bluffing pleasure involved when one of these geriatric rust buckets finally crossed a ‘professional’ mechanic’s threshold. In the good old days of motoring, an owner would often have a rudimentary knowledge of what was ailing the crippled vehicle, and was able to cherry-pick at leisure from many of the necessary technical terms stashed away in fond memories of endless hours sitting at the roadside waiting for the AA to turn up to augment your motoring vocabulary. (‘I’m sorry to say, sir, that we might be looking at a case of badly worn trunnions.’)
Acknowledging that, for most of us, a ‘trunnion’ sounds like something a proctologist might need to investigate, Morris Minor owners will know better, although they’d also know that trunnion failure was preventable, by regularly squirting unguent into a small orifice or more liberally over a gudgeon – something that several generations of mechanics did on a regular basis. Why? Because it almost invariably worked.
Many period car bluffers would tell you that a trunnion is a spindle that sits in a sleeved metal casing called a stub axle, and is part of the front suspension, to which a front wheel is attached. It needs regular greasing to do its job, courtesy of a grease gun which squirts its lubricant through a suggestively named ‘grease nipple’.*
Morris Minor owners who were too dim, forgetful or broke to get this done every 3,000 miles would eventually work out that the reason that their car’s steering was stiff was because its lubricant-starved trunnions were seizing up. Eventually they’d weld themselves to their stub axle’s innards and snap, and the afflicted Minor would pitch its blunt nose into the tarmac as wheel and stub axle detached themselves and ended up on the pavement.
THE NEW ORDER
When today’s cars go wrong, the faults are often more esoteric because a lot of the processes that make them work are nursemaided by computers. These computers oversee a car’s vital signs like hospital monitors hooked up to an ailing patient. They decide how much fuel a car needs, how much air should be mixed with it and when all this should happen.
They live in dull-looking metal boxes called ECUs (engine control units) and have replaced antediluvian mechanical systems which couldn’t finesse the combustion process required to meet anti-pollution laws. ECUs know how hot a car is and even how much oxygen its ‘cat’ – a device that concerns the exhaust system’s anti-pollution equipment – has. It is also known as a catalytic converter, but not by people who talk frequently about cars, and therefore not by you.
On more expensive cars, there are computers that make decisions about how heavy the steering should be when it’s going quickly, or whether the suspension should be jacked up or the car should hunker down on the road like a dog following a scent. They have firm ideas about what the brakes should be doing, if the headlamps should be on or not, and when and at what speed the wipers should be on.
Computers oversee a car’s vital signs like hospital monitors hooked up to an ailing patient.
All these things are linked by great lengths of cabling, woven into looms and hidden away beneath carpets and flooring. These days not all of this is made of wire. Fibre-optic cabling is used and in some cases a single piece of this can send pulses and signals in two different directions at the same time.
So modern cars do a great deal of thinking. A lot of what they think is dull, but when they decide something’s wrong the result is usually a bright, primary-coloured warning light flashing up on the dashboard.
The average car has a great many warning lights, and the average mechanic may not know what they all mean. Sometimes, especially if the car is German, it will shout at you as well, even when nothing is actually wrong.
Signs will flash up on the dashboard that say things like: ATTENTION! MY WINDSCREEN WASHER BOTTLE ISN’T EMPTY YET, BUT IT WILL BE SHORTLY, YOU IMBECILE. ATTEND TO THIS IMMEDIATELY BY TAKING THE CAR TO A MAIN DEALER AND PAYING A MINIMUM OF £1,500. NOW!
There might be a slight element of exaggeration here, but you get the picture. These messages are designed to either admonish you or to get you to spend vast amounts of money having your car serviced, or often both, and the onslaught of electronic admonitions is greater still if the car genuinely has something wrong with it.
Often these take the form of repeated ‘bonging’ noises and a selection of flashing warning lights, but bluffers should know the following when dealing with warning light anxiety when your car gets to the mechanic. If asked which warning light came on, there are usually three options: ‘a green one,’ ‘a yellow one’ or ‘a red one’. The colour of the one you saw last is really all you need to pass on.
A green light suggests that the car is telling you, ‘I feel slightly off colour but it’s not serious.’ Yellow means, ‘I am actually feeling really pretty dodgy and I think you should get me looked at.’ Red is, ‘For God’s sake, help!’
Essentially, if you know how a traffic light works (and we sincerely hope you do), you’ll find this perfectly comprehensible. The other warning light technique you can use is to point at whichever one has been flashing and say, ‘That one.’ Most mechanics understand this.
FEELING LIMP
One entirely modern piece of sick-car terminology, which you really need to know about, is ‘limp mode’. This translates as ‘it’s still going, but not very well’ and you can still hobble slowly to a garage.
So, should your car refuse to rise above 40mph, asking your mechanic whether it’s gone into ‘limp mode’ is bound to make him or her look at you with new respect. The answer might be beyond the wit of man, as these days it’s a process that often involves plugging the car into a computer, which will then ask a whole load of other computers what’s gone wrong, and if they decide to be shirty and uncooperative or simply admit that they don’t know, then the mechanic, for whom problem-solving is a forgotten art, will be stumped.
This is a case of ‘computer says no’, which is grimly amusing given that the equipment that has failed to solve the problem is known in the trade as a ‘diagnostic tool’, a term the frustrated car owner might feel could be applied to its human operator.
If your car has stopped, or is dragging itself along like a spaniel with a bad case of rheumatism, you really can’t go wrong by asking the knob-twiddlers: ‘Is it ECU-related?’ Because it might very well be, or it may be related to the wiring that the ECU is connected to. So you will actually sound as if you know what you’re talking about, and your repair bill might be smaller as a result.
RELAY RACE
Relay switches are another sure-fire winner in the nonspecific fault department. They are little boxes containing mechanisms to switch things on and off, and they generally live in a larger box. Sometimes the bits that do the switching burn out, or stick, and quite often when a car gets old, the metal contacts between the relays and the rest of the vehicle get coated in filth or work loose, so the electricity that they’re supposed to shift around decides it has better things to do than force its way across these dodgy contacts. Sometimes a repair is effected simply by waggling the relay around a bit.
SUSPICIOUS NOISES
There are, of course, some hardy perennial problems from which almost any car can suffer. The pistons that live inside most internal combustion engines have already been considered. These have two bearings: a smaller one called the ‘little end’ and one called a ‘big end’.
If your engine runs out of oil and starts to make a horrible, rhythmic basso profundo death rattle, then its big ends have gone, thanks to its lubricant-free bearings having ground themselves to extinction. A higher-pitched clatter could be little ends, but equally it might be floppy tappets or depressed hydraulic lifters. What are these things? Don’t worry. Knowing their names is enough.