The Book Garden Blog

My VW has been extremely reliable since purchasing it over 3 years ago, only work it ever needed doing was a few bits and pieces at the annual service for the MOT. One of the many reasons why I went and bought a T4 rather than the older T25 or even the older air cooled vans.
Last week I had to resort to calling for a recovery service for the first time. Having driven from Bournemouth to Grimsby(via Bristol), approx 300miles, stopping numerous times on the way without a single hitch, the started motor burned out on the doorstep of Sasha’s parents. Having unloaded for a few days stay indoors, I got in to move it round the corner to park up, turned the key and just heard a ‘click’ and saw a dimming of the lights. As soon as I verified the battery was good, I guessed it had to be the starter. Being a Friday night I just left it parked around the corner for the weekend before calling for recovery to a locally reccomended garage.
Quite handy breaking down here in reality as we didn’t have to get concerned about the bus being in the shop for more than a day as we had a roof to sleep under. Also, as we could get recommendations for a local garage, we knew we weren’t going to be fleeced and the job was completed quickly too.

The next week I drove across to see my folks in the lakes, spending a couple of nights wild camping in the bus and seeing my folks during the day. Leaving my Dad’s place I noticed the front passenger side tyre looked pretty low, so drove up the road to put some air in it before driving the 5 miles to see my Mother.
Arriving at my Mothers I could here air escaping as I got out and saw the tyre was already showing signs of deflation. A closer examination showed air was leaking from the valve stem, and I could regulate the airflow by moving it about a bit.
Probably one of the most inexpesive parts of the motor, but one requiring specialist equipment to sort out. No stranger to changing a wheel I set about doing it for the first time ever on the bus.
This uncovered quite that the tiny wheel spanner in my toolkit just wasn’t up to the job, being very much of the Toy Town Garage type. Summoning the Brother (ex-grease monkey) was simple enough and a bottle jack and wheel spider appeared with him. This was shortly followed by a string of curses!
The last time the wheel had been off that I was aware of was when the brake pads where replaced 18months ago. Seems they’d tightened them up with an Airgun and not bothered to torque them. After a bit more cursing and a few phone calls, my brother managed to locate a friend with a long torque bar and we eventually managed to get the wheel off.
I was pretty pleased to have been doing this outside my Mothers, with brother and friends for assistance rather than on the side of a motorway in the rain!
Then it came time for the spare wheel to be wheeled round and stuck on. I was quite surprised to find a Goodyear tyre when the other tyres were all Kieber’s, especially as it still had the bristles on the surface indicating it had never been used, though the steel rim was very rusty. Then someone started examining the sidewalls to find some very strange markings. The carrier had left some rather large indentations in the side wall on both sides, almost like it had melted into the tyre, though more likely caused by years of just slight vibration of metal against rubber. This sugested that the tyre was very possibly an original and had never been used since new, approx 10years!
So here I am, ordering new tyres from mytyres.co.uk and someone to fit them who will also hopefully clean up some of the rust on the wheel rims whilst at it.
My advice here is, check your spare regularly, make sure it’s not clamped in too tight, make sure your road tools have proper tools in it and not Mickey Mouse toys and lastly, if anyone does take off your wheels for you, make sure when they put them on they torque them properly!