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Cars or jobs you hate working on


sierraman

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Rover P5 front & rear screens

Replacing brake pipes

Aligning body panels

Welding upside down

Mercedes R107 dashboard

Ford sunroof mechanisms 

Getting creases out of headliners

Drilling holes in freshly painted bodywork

Removing under seal or schutz

Locks/door handles

Drilling out spot welds

Replacement wiring looms

New or refurbished starter motors (I always seem to get defective ones)

 

That said I'd still rather do all of the above over sitting in an office answering phones!

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Electrics. If I touch it, it will go wrong. I once blew so many fuses (invisible or hidden ones) trying to put a stereo in my Mercedes 230E that I had to rewire the entire dashboard to the one live wire I could find that still worked, which was one of the rear window circuits. The window would descend slower than a glacier after that, but at least I had dash lights. I never did get the radio working :(

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Hate welding rusty old shite .

 

Vehicles wise it’s Disco 2’s that are closest to being banned from the workshop .

Transit front brakes are a pain when they are rusty .

I bet an MOT fail for a Focus with inner sill rot and bollocksed trailing arm bushes is your nightmare if it comes in. Double points for it needing a VSS sensor!

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Most jobs which aren't simple bolt on/off affairs...

 

Anything on the underside of a car is going to be corroded as fuck. The Civic and Dolly 1850 in particular looked like they'd been stored in the sea and when sorting the calipers on both every bolt rounded or snapped...

 

I now dread working on brakes. I fear discs worse than drums...

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I hate bleeding brakes/clutches, this may have been caused by a certain purple Austin that nearly sent Vulg loopy too.

 

As a result of this the 405 is going to a garage tomorrow.

Ditto. Especially after getting brake fluid on the wing of the MGB when replacing it's master cylinder. Its taken the top layer off the paint and left a nice trickle mark down it. :(

 

The 1100 meanwhile is going to get new masters, all pipes replaced, rear cylinders replaced and I'll see about getting the front calipers refurbed. I've also invested in a Sealey pressure bleeder. Hopefully this will make the job a bit less painful...!

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Suspension work. Removing sheared bolts. Once had a Fiesta change the wishbone, pinch bolt sheared where it holds the swivel in. Awful job drilling the bastard until I could knock it out.

Totally!  I have never attained the heady heights of those swines with a propane gas axe who just free everything off in 2 secs with a blast of heat.

 

For me it's always hours of slogging with various contraptions, the false promise of quack remedy "release" snake oil potions at great expense, swearing and collateral damage.

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Working on anything less than 20 years old. Fastners will be seized, rounded off. Many of the fastners used become useless once they start to corrode and round off. Torx screws on drop links were a fucking great idea.

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Any job where mediocrity is the best you are going to do.

 

1. I had a functioning car.

2. Something broke on it.

3. I need to repair it.

4. If I do my best I will return it to the state that it was in before something broke.

 

So in return for effort and maybe some expense I will get back to where I was. I find this sort of work very trying. It becomes a lot more trying if (i) I hate the thing I am working on, (ii) I need to lie on my back to do it, (iii) I need to do a lot of extra work because some twat designed the car wrong in the first place (clutches can wear out - who knew?) and (iv) the car in question has been anywhere near Aberdeen ever ever ever.

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Anything that involves removing plastic parts like arch liners where the fittings are a steel bolt fitted into a plastic captive nut. You try and undo it and the plastic nut just shears then you're left with a bolt that spins that you can't pull out. The easiest way then I've found to remove them is to grip the head of the spinning bolt in a drill and just spin it up whilst trying to pull it out, you basically rely on the the friction of the nut to melt it's way free from the rest of the plastic. then you have to go back and work out some sort of clever arrangement with tie wraps to put it back together. 

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I did a Mk3 Mondeo clutch on the drive a few years back, vowed that would be my last major DIY undertaking.  Everything about it was absolute misery from start to finish.  It was basically a combination of all the jobs I really hate rolled into one.  Removing the exhaust, trying to separate the lower balljoints, removing driveshafts, dropping subframes.  Just at the point we thought we were on the home straight we realised that the bearings in the intermediate drive shaft had all fallen out and were loose in the CV boot. This meant it was necessary to separate the drivers side bottom balljoint again, the balljoint which had been apart just 20 fucking seconds ago - would it come apart again?  Would it bollocks, after about 3 hours I lost my rag and cut it off with an angle grinder.

 

I can barely bring myself to do an oil change these days because somehow i'll manage to turn it into a 2 day balls up of epic proportions.

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