I LOVE HEARING

stories like that Simon. Takes me back to the old days when I was driving my old man somewhere or other out in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly, there’s an increase in engine noise and my old Toyota, while still running fine, is making a terrible farting noise that gets louder when I put my foot down.

Because I knew pretty much every nut and bolt in that thing, I soon realised it was a loose exhaust manifold nut, so I pulled over, waited a few minutes for things to cool down, grabbed my socket set out of the boot and gave the offending nut a quick nip-up. At which point it sheered the stud clean off, hard up against the face of the head. Bugger.

We weren’t in any particular hurry (luckily) so I drove carefully to the next town (which I think was Burrumbuttock or Walbundrie or somewhere nearby) and rolled into the local fixit workshop just before knock-off time. The bloke – who’d probably heard me coming – swung the doors open and guided me into his fairly rustic old workshop before I’d even stopped out the front.

Dad and I went across the road to the pub for a frothy (just the one, you understand) by which time Old Mate at the workshop had managed to wrestle the old stud out, screw in a new one and bolted it all back together. And then charged me – I think – twenty-five bucks. And you know what, that repair lasted the rest of the time I had with that engine (it eventually got replaced by a Japaneseimport twin-cam, but that’s another story altogether).

Anyway, thanks for sharing and if anybody else out there has got an example of a fixit or spare parts business going above and beyond, let’s have them. Maybe it’d be worth some kind of honour roll that we could all refer to when we needed help. Actually, that’s a great idea. I was once in a car club that listed geographically members who were willing to help out a fellow member stranded far from home. A list of towns, names and phone numbers was all it consisted of, but I imagine it helped out a lot of folks over the years.