If in doubt give it a clout
Kill that buzz.
‘It sounds exactly like hairpins being dropped into a plastic teacup...’ Thus a woman explained the rogue noise her car was making to a bemused mechanic in a cartoon I recall from the days when every car squeaked, groaned and clattered its way down the road as a matter of course.
Indeed, back in the day, I had a chum whose dad wedged so much cardboard around the interior of his car to try to stifle unwanted noises off that the dash resembled an empty self-assembly wine rack.
I came to empathise later in life when the compressed-rhino-spore dashboard of my beloved MkII Golf GTI 16v rattled relentlessly. It was like that VW TV ad involving an interior squeak humorously traced to a popsy’s dangly earring, but a lot less cute. Once the local VAG spivs had said they could do nothing, it drove me to sell the car.
Hence, the arrival of an Octavia cabin rattle that sounds exactly like a giant bumble bee busying itself inside a foxglove has proved more than somewhat vexatious. And I’d forgotten how frustratingly dicult it can be to pinpoint the source of the disturbance in a cabin on the move.
Initially, I had it pegged as emanating from behind the dashboard beside the passenger door. Definitely. But then the elder hooligan joined me on board and determined that it was actually coming from my side of the cockpit. Definitely. When we finally compromised on a middle location we began to get warm, but only when the hooligan gave the overhead console ’n’ sunglasses holder a speculative swat did the buzz that has been driving us quietly dotty for the last two months finally cease. Joy.
The only problem now is that the missus, who has always been a self-confessed liker of a Skoda, is on the cusp of turning against this one and now actively looking to find fault. Though, from the Octavia’s perspective, this is something of a pity, I suppose I should be grateful that said quest isn’t, for once, directed at me.