£1000 Challenge
Mitsubishi Galant
THE STORY SO FAR Miles driven 10 Total mileage 237,362 What’s gone wrong We’ve fixed it, but other issues persist… CHARLIE CALDERWOOD
It would be fair to say that we dragged our heels over getting the Galant’s clutch fixed. But could you blame us? We’d just spent a load of money getting it through its MoT, only for it to leave us stranded without a clutch at the top of the Pennines, 190 miles from home. At this point, we almost fell out of love with the car.
I was pretty sure that the clutch release bearing had gone, something that would necessitate replacing the entire clutch, so I reckoned that we were looking at a bill of at least £300. But come the New Year we knew that it was time we got it sorted, so I booked the car in at local garage Express Autocare. Getting it there was another thing entirely, however.
On my return from the Pennines, I’d deliberately parked the Galant nose-in at the back of the car park, and my foresight paid off, because I could start it in first gear, drive into the empty space in front of it and then out of the car park. Once on the road, however, I struggled to find second gear using rev matching, at which point I remembered that it had been sitting unused for nearly a month in the depths of winter.
I let it warm up by the side of the road for five minutes, therefore, and managed to get it into second gear after a few attempts once on the move. Thankfully, it’s only a twomile drive from CCW’s offices to Express Autocare – with only one set of traffic lights – and moving through the gears was easy enough once the car was up to temperature.
Pleasant surprises are rare where old cars are concerned, so you can imagine my delight when I received a phone call later that day informing me that the clutch slave cylinder was plastered with hydraulic fluid and likely the root of the problem. One new slave cylinder later, and the clutch was fixed for less than half the cost we were bracing ourselves for.
I have to admit to a degree of ignorance here because while I had checked the master cylinder on the Pennines, I hadn’t even considered the slave cylinder. The fact that my last two cars – a Volkswagen Scirocco and a Peugeot 205 – had cableoperated clutches is my only excuse because I’ve never had to work on a hydraulic clutch before. I wouldn’t have been able to do anything differently, mind, because I certainly wasn’t going to be able to improvise a repair halfway up a mountain.
Excuses aside, I was surprised that the garage had experienced no problems in tracking down a replacement slave cylinder for the car, though maybe this is because Mitsubishi used the Galant’s transmission on a lot of its cars.
The car still has its problems, though – a month of inactivity has revealed that the offside rear tyre has a very slow puncture and we still need to get on with tidying the bodywork like we’ve been promising to do ever since we bought the car.
Still, that would mean not using it all the time, and that won’t be happening any time soon seeing as editor Simister’s daily driver has just broken down…