At first, it was great. £500, a year's MOT, good condition apart from a few dents, economical, fun to drive, cheap insurance.
All that good stuff.
Then, after a few days, the fun started.
My friend and I drove back to his place after lectures for a lunchbeer. And noticed that the radiator fans came on whilst driving. The temperature gauge wasn't showing any overheat, but it was a bad sign. When we got to his place (a good 20 miles away) the radiator was stone cold, and all hoses leading to the radiator were under incredible pressure.
We knew before buying the car that the XUD series engines, apart from being superb little diesels, had a tendancy to blow their head gaskets if
you didn't look after the antifreeze.
Thinking that maybe possibly there was just an air lock in the system, we refilled and bled the system thoroughly. Then took it for another drive, when the same thing happened again it was obvious the head gasket had gone.
Learning you've bought a lemon in the first couple of weeks isn't nice.
Knowing that a garage would charge more than the car's worth for the job was even worse. We figured we'd do it ourselves. However since we are both engineering students we didn't have enough time so decided to wait until the holidays.
So for the next few weeks I got into a routine of refilling and bleeding the coolant, every time I drove anywhere. Since there was no water in the oil and vice-versa and it wasn't overheating at all, we figured this would be ok for the time being.
And things were for a while.
Theeen it started overheating, a lot. The first time I had to pull over on the M20 to let it cool down and refill with water, only just having carried enough water to refill it. After that, everything got ugly. Being my only mode of transport, I was stuck without it.
It was getting more and more poorly over the next couple of days, and I knew that driving it was inevitably doing it even more damage.
Eventually it gave up in a petrol station outside of Brighton, I was on my way to Gatwick (at 6:30am) to pick up somebody and it had overheated. So I did the usual trick of filling and bleeding it.
But it refused to start. After waking up my friend and picking up the person from Gatwick, I called out the AA and got towed back.
So recently my friend and I have finally got around to fixing it, last week we put in a day to take the cylinder head. After lots of swearing at the haynes book and wondering "now where did that spring come from" we got the head off. To our dismay it was a mess.
Apparently it had been done before.
And the head was faced with sandpaper.
The head was also rather badly warped, so would need skimming properly. Taking the head to a engine refurb shop seemed like the nightmare would soon be over, with lots of talk of "yeah, that'll be ok, £90+vat"
Yesterday I travelled the 80 miles to Brighton so we could refit it. And the shop was closed. Great.
This morning I called them to see if they were open "Ooooh, the XUD, we did a pressure test and the whole casing is cracked around one of the waterways, never seen anything like that."
*head approaching desk*
So now I've bought myself a brand new head complete with valves and camshaft. Hoping to god that it'll finally be sorted.
Car: £500
Insurance: £600
Tax: £145
Head set: £30
Pressure test: £god knows
New head: £280
Used car nightmare: priceless.
