It is good to be back in the driving seat

At last my car is fixed. It is a salutary experience to go without the use of a car for an extended period. Nothing quite prepares you for the sheer inconvenience of depending on friends and on public transport. Only when I am without a car do I truly appreciate the freedom the car brings. When I am reunited with my car I remember why I find it so irritating to be told that the car is a bad thing. Maybe in a large city car-free life is possible but living in a village and working in a small town it is very difficult. Shopping posed the greatest difficulty, the local shop is limited in what it sells and while there is a good butcher and a greengrocer the queues on a Saturday morning are quite off-putting. You can’t go shopping before work because the bus leaves before anything is open and the shops close before the bus brings you back. And if you miss the bus it is an hour to wait for the next one.

Having the car seen to by a professional mechanic (and PGS in Warwick are very professional in the way they work) also highlighted a few things that I will need to attend to in due course. The exhaust system is showing its age here and there, as you would expect given a past history of short journeys; the battery might be on its last legs; the oil needs changing as will the cam belt. I would add to that list a desire to get the suspension geometry checked (there is evidence of uneven tyre wear), the wheels might need balancing and I need a new steering wheel as the one on the car is breaking up. At least with the tyre pressures set correctly the steering has lost some of its weight and the wobble is reduced.

It was tempting to go for a long drive but there will be plenty of opportunities for lengthy journeys in the next week.

I’ll get by with a little help from my friends

As you might remember fourwheelsteer’s usual mode of transport is a Citroën BX – or rather it should be. Just over a week ago a small but vital metal pipe, that supplies fluid to the braking and suspension system, fractured. At the time I didn’t know where the fluid was coming from, all I knew was that it was pumping out under pressure. Thankfully there is an active community of BX owners centred around the www.bxclub.co.uk website. There is very little the people in the club don’t know about the car. It was a club member who took away my old BX and he (along with the two club members who came with him) spotted the break in the pipe.

Having spotted the faulty part all I need to do is find a new pipe. I contacted my local Citroën specialist mechanic; who was confident that he could make one as long as he could get the right type of pipe. To do that I would have to get my unbraked car with floor-scraping ground clearance to the garage. Citroën specialist Pleiades could also make a pipe if I could measure the length but I would have to bend it to the exact shape. Trying the local Citroën dealers was suggested but they struggled to identify the correct part.

This morning I went out and photographed the offending pipe as best I could. It wasn’t easy as the pipe is buried at the bottom of the engine bay. I posted the pictures on the BX club forum and now have a part number. There is even the possibility that someone in the club might have a spare one.