10:44 am, January 31, 2011
This month, I’m going to get something off my chest. Sadly, it won’t be my man boobs – there are some things that even Big Mike can’t shift – but while it won’t necessarily give you any advice that helps you run your businesses more efficiently or maximise your profits (other columnists are, after all, available…) it will at least make me feel a hell of a lot better.
My rant is targeted at home ‘mechanics’. Not the type of folk that maintain their own cars impeccably, keep their Haynes manuals oil-stain free and change the fluids in half the time or mileage interval the manufacturer recommends, just to be on the safe side.
No, for such folk are absolutely fine – what a used car lacks in service history when acquired from such a punter, it usually more than makes up for in terms of its overall condition.
Often, this is the kind of anal owner who cleans his wheels with a toothbrush, and swaps from glass to plastic cleaner when he gets to the patch of his windscreen where the tax disc holder is located. Were it not for the fact that such owners normally have base model Nissans or Volvos, I’d actively hunt them out for good quality stock.
But for all the home maintenance freaks out there who are currently preserving 1.7-litre Volvo 440s and Almera 1.4SEs for the next generation of classic car enthusiasts, there is another bunch of clueless idiots who take it upon themselves to fix (or worse, ‘improve’) things when, clearly, they haven’t got a clue. If they were doing DIY in their homes, there’d no doubt be a really bad daytime television programme about them.
Last week, I took a red Citroen Saxo in part-exchange. The boy-racer friendly VTR model, with more mouth than trousers, and a perennial favourite among the reverse baseball cap brigade, I was fairly confident I could rehome the thing without too much trouble, despite the fact it had horrific self-adhesive stripes going over the top of it, was in desperate need of a T-Cut, and had a couple of small marks to the body.
It was only when I got up close and personal with the thing a few days later that I realised quite what levels of buggery-bodgery the previous keeper had stooped to. Even more surprising, though, is that he wasn’t your typical 18-year-old Barry Boy, but a respectable chap in his late Twenties with his own business, who was reluctantly selling his cherished hot hatch for a family model because his wife had something in the oven.
The driver’s door rubbing strip, for example, had succumbed to a parking knock at one stage and been knocked off. Rather than do the obvious, and replace it properly, using a new part, matey-boy had simply put the old one back on, and instead of discreetly gluing it or possibly trying to reaffix the trim clips, attacked the door with a drill and three Philips screws, fixing it at a jaunty angle to further add to the amateurism.
The self-adhesive stripes, luckily, came off without too much complication and only took a tiny amount of the paintwork with them – being solid red, the touch up was simple – and the body responded brilliantly to a cut and polish, making it look immediately better, but nothing, and I mean nothing, could quite prepare me for what the hapless dimwit had done to the sunroof. When he traded it in (against, incidentally, an Audi A4 Avant that now probably wears dreadful over-sized alloys and self-adhesive window tinting film), he proudly pointed out to me how he’d ‘fixed’ a leaking sunroof with a foam-based gutter sealant. The resultant mess had not only sealed the sunroof well and truly in its place, but had also spread itself liberally across the roof, sunroof glass and even the front edge of the windscreen. I can only assume that the bloke was completely rat-arsed when he attempted the repair job, or that he should have gone to Specsavers.
If he’d had any clue whatsoever about cars, he’d have realised that the real fault was simply that the sunroof rubber had come loose from the bodywork slightly at one corner, and that by simply pressing it back into place he’d have saved himself a wet shoulder without the inconvenience of defacing his car.
Luckily, Olaf – the man who runs my local car valeting centre (‘Get a polish from the Polish’ being their motto) – managed to get almost all of it off with a combination of a butter knife, a hairdryer, a bottle of white spirit and the sheer determination to complete a job properly that has put a number of British builders out of business. It looked marvellous, but not before I’d put hours of labour and a case of ‘Lech’ into the damned thing. Show me a grand, and it’s yours…
