In My Humble Opinion
Mike remembers when he changed a clutch at Christmas.
▶ Around this time of year, my heart goes out to that unsung hero of the automotive world – the mobile mechanic. In a previous ramble I have touched upon the fact that I had once operated in this field during a three-year return to the North East. I made some good friends and contacts during that time – some of those people still live in my mobile phone number list, and most of them will boil the kettle and dig out the biscuits when I call in to visit.
Winter is a bloody rotten time for mobiles. Work tends to drop off a cliff edge owing to the public’s money spending priorities, and those jobs that do come along often guarantee a cold or wet day of messing around. During the summer and autumn, you have to work like crazy making sure you put a few bob away for emergencies and when the winter comes. Alternatively, you do what I did by signing on with a few agencies turning the wheel of a lorry or coach when the phone isn’t ringing.
One chap I put the world to rights with every now and again is Peter
Bell, who now spends his retirement messing around on his boat or restoring his Bentley. During his tenure in trade, he ran a small retail Rover dealer not far from Darlington. In the later years he owned and ran the imaginatively titled “The Diesel Car Centre”. Here I would MOT prep or service his used cars for sale in exchange for a cheaper rate and the use of his two-post ramp for my own jobs. If not for his generosity life would have been so much harder.
His premises allowed me to make hay not only when the sun shone, but when it rained too. Not all the jobs went that smoothly though. One experience makes me tremble to this day, over a decade after the event which took place on Christmas Eve 2005. One of my regular customers was a chap called Mark who ran a fading coach operation and small taxi business. His cab fleet was a strange and eclectic mix of vehicles, three of which were Rover 400 saloons that I would often have to patch up and improvise on to keep running.
As he was based just over half way to Durham in a town called Ferryhill, to make it pay I would always add on a bit extra to cover my fuel and travel time. One day in early November, he called to ask if I could fit a clutch to a car he’d just bought. If he could live without the vehicle for a full day and get it down to me in Darlington, I would get the work done at Pete’s place, in relative comfort and convenience to me. But as it happened the job got cancelled as his local garage found the time to do it instead – or so I was told.
We now fast-forward to a few days before Christmas 2005 when Mark called again enquiring of my availability. It turns out he’d run the car into the ground and the clutch had totally failed. Despite the new quote being higher than before, he still wanted me to do it and I was given the address of where the car had expired – a deserted car park on a Shildon industrial estate. It was a freezing cold but sunny morning when I arrived. Mark had left the parts in the boot and hidden the keys, so me and a mate who I’d commandeered for the day as a helping hand started work.
Annoyingly, Mark had failed to tell me that the car – a petrol Rover 420 saloon – was fitted with an LPG conversion that obliterated much of the accessibility to the top of the gearbox. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it started to snow. We eventually removed the gearbox despite the pipework and electronics, to reveal a destroyed clutch and a flywheel that was also in bad need of replacement. I called to explain this, to be told that as long as it would run over the Christmas/new Year period he didn’t care if it caught fire, so long as it earned its keep for that week. In no uncertain terms I was told that it had to be back on the taxi rank by midnight Christmas Eve – a little over 24 hours later.
Hurdle after problem, we eventually had the car back off the axle stands. A quick road test found the Rover had drive in all gears, but the most horrendous judder. We were finished around 6pm and for most of the afternoon had been working by lead lamp, torch and my van’s dipped beam. Even a local panda car from Durham Constabulary visited us owing to a concerned member of the public reporting that we were stripping parts off the car. The two bobbies drove off only to come back offering us two polystyrene cups of hot tea and two Kit Kats – God bless our boys in blue eh?
With my mate driving the van I took the Rover round to Mark’s house. By now I was cold, wet, hungry and very miffed at the whole deal, and he could clearly see this. As a way of appreciating our trojan efforts, he paid a tidy bonus and we left the scene of the crime.
After topping our tanks at a nearby Macdonald’s I dropped my mate back at his place, stuffed some paper money in his palm and drove back home. Despite the extra cash, that was – until a recent kidney stone incident – the worst Christmas I’d ever had.
The following period of Christmas 2005 into the New Year of 2006 was spent nursing a severe cold and chest infection. As my long-suffering missus often reminds me, money isn’t everything you know.
My season’s greetings and best wishes to you all for 2020.
‘Even a local panda car from Durham Constabulary visited us owing to a concerned member of the public reporting that we were stripping parts off the car.’