ON MOT TESTS AND BODGING OLD CARS…
Even though it’s a new car as far as I’m concerned, my Cayman needed its MOT a couple of weeks ago and, yet again, I found myself worrying about whether it would pass or not. Well, of course it would pass, after all it’s only four years old and has been impeccably maintained. But I always worry.
Naturally, the car sailed through without a problem, although I do wonder how it would have faired had I not changed the tyres from the cracked Pirellis fitted when I bought it. Apparently, as I mentioned in last month’s project cars pages, this cracking is a common problem with Pirelli P-zeros and is not, or so I have been assured, anything to worry about. Whether an MOT inspector would see things the same way is another matter…
In years past, when I was a young lad (honestly, I was young once), MOTS were to be feared. Not because they were incredibly stringent – just the opposite in hindsight – but because, as a young driver running an old car on a tight budget, I dreaded hearing the news that my car had failed. Rust was the big issue, and getting it repaired could be costly.
My first car was a 1964 Austin Mini, bought for the princely sum of £180 in 1972. Although it was only eight years old, it had seen better days – eight years on a car of that vintage was like 28 in modern car terms – and it had already been patched up with filler round the bottom of the windscreen pillars and headlights. The outer sills had been replaced, too. That was a common ‘fail’ point on a Mini.
On the day of the MOT, I sat in the car on the ramp while the ex-police mechanic tapped and poked his way under the car. He was a taciturn type, speaking hardly a word. As I sat there nervously, he opened the passenger door and gripped the sills with his bare hands – and then squeezed hard. I’ll never forget the sound as the inner sill gave way beneath his fingers. ‘Got a bit of rust here, haven’t we?’ he uttered. ‘Ummm, looks like it,’ I replied.
He went round to the driver’s side and repeated the ‘test’ with the same result. ‘Got a bit of rust here, too. And in the subframe.’ (That was the Mini’s other Achilles’ heel).
My wallet (well, imaginary wallet) curled up and died on the spot. I was distraught at the thought of my first car being condemned after just a couple of months.
Back home, Dad suggested we go and speak to Mr Derbyshire down the road who had a welding torch and was a bit of a dab hand at fixing old cars. £20 later, he’d fitted new inner sills and welded a patch over the rust hole in the rear subframe.
The car then ‘sailed’ through its MOT and lived another day. Later on, I stuffed it in a ditch, but that’s another story. DVLA records show that CMU 829A no longer lives, but the memory of that first MOT is still etched on my mind. I can still hear those sills giving way.
I probably shouldn’t mention the ‘repairs’ I did to an old Beetle using metal cut from an oil can, which was riveted in place and then covered with a mixture of underseal and dirt (so it didn’t look too obvious), or shims cut from the same material poked into place to hide play in the kingpins.
Glassfibre and filler (good old Isopon) were my saviours, as they were for many a motorist in the 1960s and ’70s. I’m not proud of my workmanship (ingenuity, yes, workmanship, no…) and such memories remind me how absurd it is that vehicles over 40 years of age are now exempt from MOT testing. Not every owner of an old car is a caring enthusiast. Some might actually still be reparing their cars with hacked up oil cans and a mixture of underseal and dirt…