Hia, welcome to the first blog post from Team Bear Bones!!! We’re going to try and do one every week or so to keep everyone up to date on our progress.
This week is mainly about our car!
On Tuesday this week we had a bit of a set-back; our car failed its MOT on a number of points. The key failures were the front offside spring, which was cracked and actually had a chunk missing, and the nearside top end dust cover of the steering rack was also broken.
We got a bunch of quotes for having this fixed by professional mechanics, normally around £250, which would be a huge chunk of our budget, so we took a step back and figured it out.
It turned out that the fixes were not very complicated and the raw parts for the mark 1 Skoda fabia are cheap (springs were £11 each and the top end ball joint was £20). We were also told about a place called ‘This is your Garage’ near Oxford. You basically rent a car lift and tools by the hour and you have a crack at it. How hard can it be?
Ed was able to recruit his dad, who likes to think he knows a lot about cars, and then turned up and got on with it. While we learnt a lot about our car we were not equal to the task by ourselves, luckily the owner saw us and took pity. He helped us to disconnect the drive shaft, required to get the offside spring off, and also helped us out with the pinch joints – without his help we’d probably have been stuck there for quite a few extra hours.
Three hours later with a lot of swearing and learning we had the new springs on! It was quite tricky as many of the bolts were rusted and nearly completely seized, but luckily an air gun was enough persuasion for the bolts to came off. The top end joint was pretty easy, taking no more than 20 mins. In the end the car came down off the ramp by 1pm, Ed rang up the MOT place and it had passed the second attempt by the end of the day!
For the car we are still looking for a working stereo and some disk break covers, as ours have rusted off. We’ve been ringing up scrap yards to see if any have some sympathetic owners and some Mark 1 Skodas – so hopefully we’ll be able to have an update regarding this very soon!
Bear Bones out!