Saturday 7 September 2013

uh oh...

Towards the end of today, one of my pupils made a bit of an error. No contact was made with anything, but somehow there was a clunk, and the car suddenly sounded and felt wrong. We were only a few hundred yards away from our destination so we drove on, parked up, and I prepared to drive home.

Before leaving, I did a few visual checks. There were no branches trapped beneath the car or anything, and a look into the engine bay showed nothing amiss. Yet the car is definately behaving in an unsettling way.

I think the gearbox has somehow come a bit loose or something. Being a Saturday evening, there's not much I can do about it beyond cancelling tomorrow's lessons and trying to get a replacement vehicle on Monday.

It means letting several people down unfortunately. Not good.

driving lessons in North Wirral? learn to drive in Hoylake? driving instructor in Birkenhead?

2 comments:

Pete said...

Are you sure there was no contact? Short of slamming the engine into a low gear at an inappropriately high speed, I would be surprised if you could seriously damage a gearbox on today's cars just using the controls. Could it just be a clutch adjustment required? Hopefully so. Check for any leaking oil, transmission fluid under the car in the morning. Just some thoughts.

Paul said...

Two seperate things in the end. The more debilitating fault was easily sorted. Another, more niggling fault will need more work.

The fault that caused the car to behave very oddly was a loose engine mount. This will have been partly due to the harsh treatment it recieves at the hands (and feet) of it's drivers, and partly due to now living in a caravan park, and having to negotiate a number of vicious speed bumps several times a day.

The other fault is a sticky second gear. This will need a substantial amount of work to fix, and I've had to book three days off next week while they deal with it.