April 2020

I thought I was going to get through the winter without seeing a car with glow plug problems. Here I am, with spring about to burst forth, and then right at the end of the season, that car rolled in. Seriously though, I don’t mind dealing with them – I don’t mind working on anything that comes through the door, as long as there’s no shouting and we get paid. Well, I can shout at my boys, but no one else can shout at them, and no one’s allowed to shout at me. Anyway, I’d better get on with it, I talk when I type, and I type very hard like you would with a typewriter, and Mrs P is shouting at me as a result. Back to the glow plugs. A regular customer brought his car in following the sudden appearance of the exhaust warning light. This was his work-car, owned by the company, but run by him for the last three years. Apart from the windscreen washer reservoir suddenly giving out and needing replacement last year, it has been for our customer a hassle-free car. We did a scan, and the codes on offer were slightly contradictory. It pointed towards a glow plug problem, but it could have been a software problem. As we were not sure, we thought it best to clear the codes, and see what happened. Our customer was happy with that as he was not going any distance for a couple of weeks. We charged for the scan etc, and let him go on his way. That was a Friday. The weekend passed, and he did not call in. Then a few more days, and then BING! Back came that light. He called us up, and booked in again. This time, it was clearly the moment to start disconnecting things. In I went, bum up in the air, unplugging the glow plugs. One, two, three, all the same. Then, waggle out number four and… what’s this? The other three are all the same, all OE for the engine. But this fourth one does not match. The problem, it turned out was that the odd one was shorting out. Luckily for our customer, the engine would still start, although long-term I think this would have stored up trouble. It was interesting when we fed back to the customer. He has had the car for three years, and it was used by another member of staff there briefly before that. No one remembered needing to do anything with the glow plugs. To be honest, you’d think the car’s not old enough to have any problems in that area. After all, they are not a service item, and can go on almost forever, until they don’t. If you are going to have to swap them out though, why not do the lot in one go? Why not put the right ones in too? This is a car that is serviced regularly, is repaired by the same garage, has been under the same ownership for a few years, and yet a problem like this still pops up. You can never predict what problems you will find when you open a bonnet. This was a relatively simple one to solve, and the customer was simpatico with our methods. If only it was always like this… BASKING IN THE GLOW 66 AFTERMARKET APRIL 2020 TEABREAK: MEMOIRS OF A MOTOR MECHANIC www.aftermarketonline.net