For those of you that haven’t heard, we have decided to take part in a charity run down to Modena in Italy. The jaunt, entitled Bangers4BEN will see a number of teams from across the motor industry drive in cars they have picked up for around £200 and raising money on the way.
The trouble is that in years past many teams have, quite frankly, cheated. Last year we noted that one insurance company turned up in an Audi TT… If they are writing those off for £200 then we won’t take out cover with them!
Well, there has been no such skulduggery with our entry. We were determined to find a car that was both Italian, and in need of some attention and new parts. It probably won’t surprise you that we had no end of potential candidates, but in the end we settled on an Alfa 145 Cloverleaf – the sporty one with the 2.0 Twin Spark engine. Unfortunately this particular hot hatch had most definitely come off the boil. The car had a hard time in later life, as it had been painted with what looked like a twig and had numerous dents, scratches and dings all over it. When we picked it up it had a broken mirror, a missing indicator and crucially, no battery. The car had been earmarked by the previous owner for a ‘track weapon’ project that never happened, so most of the interior trim was in the boot.
In short, the car was stone-cold dead. However, it looked straight and reasonably rot-free, so we appealed to our network of technicians, garage owners and parts suppliers to help us get it back in one piece. After fitting a replacement door mirror, an indicator as well as a few other bits and pieces, we took it to Top Technician 2011 winner John Tinham for an MOT. It failed on one shock absorber and all four springs got advisories. Also, the windscreen washers didn’t work , the headlamps were out of alignment and one of the number plate lights failed, because it was in the glovebox.
All in all, there was nothing that couldn’t be fixed. So, after having procured some more spare parts, we were off to South London to meet some technicians who had kindly offered to help. You wouldn’t get planning permission to build a garage in the leafy suburb of West Dulwich these days, so it is pleasing to see Autocar Repairs, a workshop built on somebody’s back garden at some point in the 1920s is as busy today as it was in the days of the Austin 7.
While the garage has been established for longer than anyone can remember, John Tullett, the current owner took the premises over in the 1980s. He had been running his own business since the early 1970s, when he ventured into general car repairs after a stint working in motorsport.
This workshop boasted three ramps in a reasonably tight space. One was a solid old Ti-Bradbury bought secondhand by Mr Tullett when he took over the garage. Another is a two post lift, but the third is a scissor lift. These devices are common in Europe, but reasonably rare over here.
Anyhow, my mission here today is to deal with the problems that are keeping the car off of the road. On arrival, John Tullett introduced me to technician Stephen Tickler who wasted no time on getting the car up on the ramps. Once in the air, we could quite clearly see that the rear springs and dampers were absolutely shot. The coils were rusty to the point where they looked like they might collapse at any second, and one of the dampers was haemorrhaging oil through a rust hole. The front struts were a little better, but the suspension still didn’t ‘feel’ right as it crashed and banged over the roads on the journey to the workshop.
Removing the rear dampers proved to be no trouble for Stephen, and thanks to a handy spring compression machine in the workshop, putting the new units on proved to be no bother either. The fronts were slightly more tricky, but after a short amount of grappling they were removed from the car and a fresh new set of dampers, courtesy of KYB were installed.
As the car was in the air I took a good look at the underside. While it was not exactly new under there, it wasn’t too bad either – nothing a wire brush and some underseal wouldn’t sort out anyway. However, Stephen did notice that the bolts in one of the exhaust fittings was rotten so he drilled them out and replaced them with new ones.
Back on the ground, we checked all of the levels before paying attention to the leaky washer bottle. Straight away there were several things that were apparent. Firstly, it was leaking as one of the motors had been removed. Secondly, it wouldn’t work anyway as the remaining motor was broken, and finally, it appeared that the Alfa factory had started by hanging the bottle on a piece of wire and constructing the car around it. Seriously, it would have required dismantling most of the front of the car, including removing the bumper, headlamp and grille, but fortunately Stephen had some extra long needlenose pliers that allowed us to replace the motors and sealing rings with new units with the bottle still in situ. Job done? Not quite. The juts were more bunged up than a cold after Christmas. Fortunately the air-line blew out all manner of long-congealed gunk, and after re-aiming the jets to avoid giving passers-by a soaking we could now conclude that the washers provided a clear view of the road.
Of course the air-conditioning didn’t work in the car. I hadn’t really expected it to, but it would be nice to get it running. As all of the techs at Autocar Repairs are F-gas qualified, it was no problem to them to test my system to see what was up. Naively, I presumed that the gas had long since disappeared into the upper atmosphere, but a test showed that the pressure was still good, and the problem appeared to be with the clutch on the compressor. Fortunately, the good folk at Denso have agreed to get us a new one, so here’s looking forward to a chilled summer.
With a fresh battery installed, courtesy of Unipart, the car could now go back to John Tinham for a retest. How did it get on? Go and click aftermarketonline.net to find out this as well as our future progress.