NORFOLK GARAGE
THE Norfolk Garage does not get many visits from mobile tool vendors of the sort that seem to have a semi-permanent presence outside the larger garages. I very seldom buy new tools. It is not because I am mean and tight-fisted (well, not entirely because of that) but because there are only so many tools that one actually needs to work on older Land Rovers, and I already possess almost all of them. And whatever I don’t have, Dave the landlord usually has at least two of. He has been in the motor trade a lot longer than me. Some of my tools have been around a long time: I still have a few sockets left from the Halfords set that I bought to work on my first car, aged 18. To be fair, the ones that have survived are the odd sizes – how often do you come across a 16 mm or 20 mm headed bolt?
If I buy something new, it is either to replace a tool that has worn out, or because I have a specific job to do that I have not done previously, and which I cannot work around by adapting an existing tool or making one myself. Over the years I have been taken in a few times by advertisements for this or that 'wonder tool' that promises to solve all kinds of problems. I think the last one I purchased was a magic drill sharpener which I binned after it had reduced the ends of half a dozen drill bits to blackened round blobs. But just occasionally I buy something, use it a couple of times and wonder why it took me so long to realise I needed it. That is definitely the case with my newest acquisition, a cooling system pressure tester.
It is a very simple piece of kit, consisting of a hand pump with a pressure gauge, a hose and a selection of adapters to fit most radiators and expansion tanks. You pump the cooling system up to the desired pressure (normally around 15 psi) and see what happens. If there are any leaks in the system, including internal leaks within the engine, the pressure will start to drop. You can then go looking for the leak. As I have already found, pressure testing will pick up the tiniest seepage from hose ends, thermostat housings and water pump seals – leaks that would quite often be missed if the engine was just run up to temperature.
I bought the pressure tester because I had a specific problem to deal with, but it has already earned its keep on several jobs in a short space of time. As I write this column I have no fewer than three Defenders sitting around with the cylinder heads removed – two 200Tdis and a 300Tdi. There is no particular reason for this flurry of head problems. As I have observed before, I can go for months or years without doing a particular job, and then three or four come in at once. The Tdi engines are admirably tough, but suffer the same problem as any engine with an aluminium cylinder head on an iron block: differential expansion between the two metals stresses and eventually weakens