Hjalpe mig!
It’s becoming a tradition for me to spend Christmas and New Year with friends in Sweden, just eating and drinking, reading and watching films. (FYI, travelling on the 25th is a good idea, and the takeoff on the flight from Glasgow to Amsterdam was excellent fun as there were about 30 passengers on a 300seat aircraft – the pilot held it on the brakes at the end of the runway, gave it the full welly and then let rip, rotating about a quarter of the way down the runway and then taking off almost vertically.)
Paul in Sweden runs a 2006
Volvo V70 D5 and a summer MX5 he brought with him from the UK, plus a 1996 Nissan Micra bought locally with some 300,000km (or 190,000 miles) on it. The Micra still drives fine, but a thump from the rear end turned out to be a shock absorber punching a hole in the rotten body. The Swedes pour salt on their winter roads by the ton, and this has consequences. There is a plan to turn the Micra on its side, MIG it back into solid shape and turn it into the first Nissan Jolly just for a bit of summer fun, but for the moment it languishes off the road.
This situation is not ideal as the Volvo is very expensive to run. Throughout most of Europe, diesel is slightly more expensive than petrol for political and environmental reasons. However, the Swedish government really hates diesel and there it is taxed to cost nearly twice as much as petrol. Insurance and tax for the Volvo are £400 and £800 respectively. The Volvo is a five-cylinder diesel with six gears and on a long cruise it can achieve the high 40s to the gallon which is impressive, but it’s way cheaper to use the petrol Micra.
The Volvo can just be deinsured and sidelined on a more or less day-to-day basis, there’s no SORN nonsense.
That leaves it parked most of the time, and lack of use combined with salt corrodes anything that is not protected. That includes the brake calipers, one of which seized. MPG went down, a noise began to make itself heard, and the smell of burning brake pad confirmed the diagnosis. Paul has an excellent garage workshop, (he cashed in a terraced house in Watford to buy a very nice detached house in southern Sweden with a full-height four-car garage,) so changing the caliper is no big deal, although rusted-in bolts are a worry with the salt corrosion. Squeeze (and check) the flexible hose, flick off a wire clip, break the stiction on the hose connection to
the caliper, two Allen-keyed bolts to get the caliper casting off its housing, spin the caliper off, and in the words of the immortal Mr Haynes, reassembly is the reverse of...
If there are two of you, bleeding the tiny bit of air out of the now unclipped hose is a piece of cake: open the valve, pedal DOWN, pedal presser confirms the pedal is down, 'UP' up and so on until the fluid flows clear with no bubbles. It’s a fine idea to bleed new fluid into the brake system every couple of years anyway as it collects water and rusts the caliper pistons from the inside, but few people do.
Job done, no bother, but as Paul had sensibly bought a pair of calipers, we decided to change the other one as well. If the one we had to replace was rotted out, logically the caliper on the other side is nearly rotted out, and in any case to preserve balance and safety, anything done to the brakes on one side of a car should be done to the other side as well. Easy job anyway, surely.
Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and the occasional skid mark. The first pair of caliper bolts had come out no bother, but the second set on the other side of the car was rusted solid, and the Allen key had to be carefully positioned fully home a hundred times as it was being undone a quarter-turn at a time with a hammer. The brakes were part-seized on that side as well, but it was a badly-made budget steel brake pad base sticking in the caliper frame that was causing the problem. Five minutes with the bench grinder had its edges tidied up and the pad moving freely.
As for the logistics of driving in Sweden, breakdown cover costs about £40, but rescue can take a while because of the huge distances and serious northern winter conditions. You generally just rely on friends. You phone them up and say ‘Hjalpe Mig,’ which means what you think it does. Classic cars in Sweden are MOT tested every two years and they have to comply with the standards expected when they were new. Most of Paul’s cars are so far just old rather than classic, so testing is annual.
I had been wondering about importing American cars from Canada to Sweden, with the idea of enjoying them for a bit and then selling them because the Swedes are weirdly mad for Yank classics, but research last year revealed that the cheapest place by far to buy American cars is Sweden. Which also saves £3000 in transatlantic shipping and extra costs – there are many people holding their hands out when you have cars shipped internationally. So it might make sense to buy something interesting in Sweden as a winter project, then bring it into the UK on a similar hobby/commercial basis, but only a car I would be happy to be stuck with if it didn’t sell.
That list includes 1930s Packards and wartime Willys Jeeps; 1940s and 1950s Cadillacs, Buicks and fastback Chevy Fleetlines; 196468 V8 Mustangs; 1960s Lincoln Continentals; 1966 Thunderbirds; 1966 and 1971 Buick Rivieras; Studebaker Golden Hawks; C3 Corvettes; possibly a Corvair as the aircooled flat-six is conceptually interesting. Possibly too a short Jeep Wrangler, as the mechanically identical fourdoor Cherokee was the best vehicle I ever owned. Watch this space.