Zen and the Art of Rover Maintenance

Recently, my 1975 Rover 2200 TC had started to make more noise than it normally does,. This was probably due to a new leak in the outlet manifold, which already had been repaired a year ago.
Since I had more time available than money I decided to replace the manifold myself with a completely new one, which I had been able to acquire quite cheaply. Also it would give me a great amount of satisfaction to do a fairly large repair myself, at last.
It was just as well that it was financially really not possible to have it done by a professional garage, because I might have given up completely after having visions of shearing bolts which I would then never figure out how to remove, or parts that would come out but wouldn't go in again. I rigorously tried to ban these thoughts from my mind but didn't succeed completely at that.
With a roaring exhaust pipe I drove from Eindhoven, my hometown, to the South where my mother lives in a house that has a garage, as opposed to my apartment which has no garage.
The kind of apartment I live in is called a studio in The Netherlands, but I have always thought that the British have a much better, albeit less yuppy, expression for it, namely a bedsit. I can picture the person renting it sitting sadly on his bed thinking "now what?". The name conveys the true nature of this kind of apartment much better, by indicating that indeed there is only one room that combines the functions of a bedroom and a room to sit in, the living room, not to mention the kitchen. Fortunately in my bedsit the designer did have the mercy to put the lavatory and shower in a separate room. The advantage of an apartment like this however is that the monthly costs aren't that much more than those of the Rover, which is a bit much for a nearly thirty-year-old car but not very much for a place to live.
After I arrived at my mother's and had given the engine enough opportunity to cool down, I walked into the garage with my Haynes Manual. Haynes was a man who single-handedly took apart an Austin Seven in 1956, then put it together again making accurate notes of what he did and how he did it along the way. There appeared to be much demand for his notes at that time, (the Austin Seven being a popular car then as it was the bedsit amongst cars). so Haynes began making manuals professionally for other types of cars. When I first bought my Rover, to my surprise I was able to get a brand new manual for my then twenty-five-year old car, as I discovered after an e-mail exchange with the Haynes Company.
To get an idea of what I was about to undertake I looked up the paragraphs concerning dismantling the outlet manifold and inlet manifold (which I had to remove to get to the outlet manifold). I wanted to know if there were any parts that might come off relatively easily but then be very tricky to put back on again, or maybe would need a very accurate adjustment. Now, the Haynes manual isn't the most reliable source for this kind of detail. Often you'll find treacherously simple descriptions like "remove securing nut" with an illustration next to it clearly depicting the afore-mentioned nut. What the manual doesn't say and the picture doesn't show, however, is that this securing nut is situated behind a bracket and that a crash-course in neurosurgery is in order to obtain the necessary fine motor skills required simply to place the wrench, and that several weeks lifting weights in a gym would also be handy to be able to get the nut to move at all.
As I mentioned before, in order to get access to the outlet manifold the inlet manifold has to come off first, because with this engine it is mounted above the outlet manifold. During earlier, exploratory looks under the hood I had noticed that the bolts holding the inlet manifold in place had been situated in various strange places and under difficult angles, but I hoped I could reach them with several extensions I had bought for my socket-wrench set. But even before having a go at the inlet manifold I would have to undo several hoses and cables that were connected to the carburettors. One of these, the cable that operated the manual choke, was attached to the carburettor mechanism by a small securing bolt. It really was a very tiny bolt, situated underneath the various rods and hoses of the carburettors.

Twenty years ago I was doing a mechanical design excercise at the Technical University of Eindhoven. One afternoon I had to come to the university to have my design reviewed where I would have to explain and defend it. While waiting outside the exam room I heard someone inside yell in the most unbelievable way: "Ridiculous!!! How can anyone design something like this?? It's absolutely, bloody impossible!!!" This went on for at least half an hour, in a tone of voice that would have been useful in certain political circles east of our country sixty years ago. Just before I went in I heard the voice scream "And what the hell is THIS??? This is the bloody limit!! How is it possible someone comes up with something like this????" Finally, a student walked out of the room in rather a timid way and told me that the man inside was now looking at my design. When I entered the room I saw a short, stocky man with glasses, who appeared to be responsible for the racket that had been going on for half an hour, and two students behind a table. It appeared that the stocky man was just an extremely annoying know-it-all in the shape of an oversized bullfrog and that he had nothing to do with reviewing my design but just had happened to walk in. I got a B from the two students (I flunked university after all but that's another story).

"What the hell IS this? This is the bloody limit! How can anyone come up with a design like this??" I grumbled, while trying in vain to get hold of the securing nut with a pair of pliers that wasn't really fit for doing that, but it was the only one I had small enough to reach the nut at all, all the while trying to turn the bolt at the end of the loose cable with a wrench.
I straightened my back, trying to ignore the pain in my back and my exasperation over an equally impossible design as the one I had been under attack for, twenty years ago. This wasn't fair, first to have been in trouble trying to make a good design and now to be in trouble again because of someone else's bad design.
The project didn't look very promising if an insignificant, tiny bolt like this one could already cause so much trouble but I bent over the engine again because I had no choice. "Don't give in so easily, for once," I said to myself. I might have flunked the Technical University but surely loosening this ridiculous bolt should lie within my capabilities. So I kept poking and wriggling until eventually I got it loose.
Now the tricky bolts of the inlet manifold would have to be loosened. It wasn't as hard as I had feared, probably because one year ago they had been loosened as well. One of these bolts however was placed in such a way that it surely would have made the bullfrog from twenty years ago spontaneously combust if he had spotted something like that in a design. This bolt was located within a kind of housing, connected to the outlet manifold. I could only just reach it with the longest extension of my socket wrench. I was already worried about how on earth I was going to get that bolt back in again, when remounting the inlet manifold.
The bolts of the outlet manifold came loose quite easily and the only thing left now was loosening the three bolts connecting the manifold to the exhaust pipe.
I should have known.
Three bolts with nuts that had seized with rust considerably. First of all I could hardly reach them and secondly the bolt wanted to turn with the nut. So I had to place a wrench on the nut with one hand while trying to turn the socket-wrench with the other, all of this with completely stretched arms, lying stuck between the front wheel and front wing. It was hopeless, just putting the wrench and socket-wrench on the nut and bolt alone took me ten minutes. And then when I turned the socket-wrench the wrench kept falling out of my hand. What use was it to try this any further? It would never work.
Suddenly I thought of my father, passed away a long time ago, who once triumphantly walked into our kitchen with the bolt of a broken mounting bracket of the alternator of a Ford Taunus I drove back then, which I had been trying to get loose for half an hour. My father was very persistant when it came to apparently (and sometimes really) hopeless cases. It was something I envied about him. It was one of the qualities he had that lead to marrying my mother and consequently was the foundation of my sheer existence. I realized that however useless any of my further attempts might seem, it would always be even more useless not to try anymore. Half the engine had been taken apart and there wasn't anything else to do anyway.
After another ten minutes of painful wriggling and pulling suddenly a nut came loose. I felt very relieved. The other two came loose as well, but they put up a fight as hard as the first one.
Silently cheering for myself I walked into the house to tell my mother I had it all out. "Oh, thank God", she sighed, because she had been getting nervous about it. On the other hand my mother gets nervous about all kinds of things on a regular basis, so that in itself is nothing to get nervous about.
"Wouldn't you rather buy a normal car?" she asked me on earlier occasions when something of the Rover broke down. It's a question that I've been asked several times and the answer always was, and still is, "No". You see, the problem with normal cars is that they're so normal.
Now I only had to mount the new outlet manifold and put all the bolts in, which couldn't possibly take more time than getting it all out. Cheerfully I walked back into the garage to put this brand new outlet manifold in the twenty-eight-year old car. I positioned the four ends of the manifold before the four holes of the engine block and tried to push it into place. This didn't go as easily as I thought it would. Also, I had to try to connect the other end of the manifold to the exhaust pipe, but that didn't fit either. How could that be? It was exactly the same manifold as the old one, surely it should fit?
Finally, I seemed to have placed it in a reasonably good position and I decided to try to screw the bolts into the block, which would draw the manifold into place eventually. The last bolt went in with difficulty and I realized its thread was stripped. I tried another bolt, but after I got that out again it too was a goner. "Oh damn!" I suddenly thought, "What if the inside thread of the block has been screwed up?"
Why had I been so pigheaded about this to try it myself? People who knew had warned me about something like this. How could I get new bolts anyway? These weren't metric sizes but inches. It appeared to have ( for a continental European), the improbable size of 5/16 inch. It was Sunday. It's always Sunday when I work on the car because on Saturday I often need the car. So it was impossible to get a new bolt before I would have to go home again. To my surprise I didn't feel frustrated about this but instead accepted that there was nothing to be done about it now and as a result I had a fairly relaxed Sunday afternoon before me.
One week later I took a train to my mother's again, with several new 5/16 inch bolts in my pocket which I had been able to acquire quite easily after all in a specialized store.
In a mental state of serenity, which could be almost called Zen-like, where the ultimate goal had become less important than the road leading towards it, I entered the garage again. Maybe this had been my father's secret. Maybe, although born of Dutch parents, a bit of oriental wisdom had been passed on to him by his place of birth, the Dutch Indies, that enabled him to come up with new ideas and solutions with endless patience.
Once again, after removing the exhaust mounting bracket, I tried to get the outlet manifold straight on the engine block. That didn't quite work either so I tried to turn the bolts into the holes by hand until I felt the thread of the bolt catch in the block. Eventually the outlet manifold was mounted again and the inlet manifold could be put back on. This gave me some trouble as well but I wasn't to be discouraged anymore. I kept pushing, pulling and shifting it patiently until it fell into place. I even managed to get the earlier mentioned, impossibly located, bolts into their holes, although that took a lot of patience too. Even the tiny securing bolt from the choke cable could not disturb my mental balance though it took me fifteen minutes to get it fastened again. I found a temporary solution for a water hose that got torn when dismounting the inlet manifold by shoving a replacement hose over the left bit of the old one.
From this moment on, I decided, everything would be different. I would tackle every problem in my life in this manner. Indefatigable I would keep trying and trying, until the solution would present itself, never losing balance.
At half past four everything in the engine was back in its place again. Perfect. I only had to test for leaks in the outlet system and then there would be drinks in front of the television with my mother.
I opened the garage door, sat myself behind the wheel and turned the ignition key.
Click. Click?
I turned the key again. Another click.
How come "Click"? Why not the growl of the big four cylinder springing to life, that I was accustomed to? In short: What The Bloody Heck IS This???
I fell into a particularly non-Zen-like rage, got out of the car and yanked the hood open. It was easy for those Bhuddists, they didn't even have cars and the only thing they ever did was mumble their mantras in a monastery on a mountain and walk around in yellow dresses. None of that ever produced one of these fine Rover cars, that the once hard-working, imperturbable, fish-and-chips-eating, fag-smoking British craftsmen did.
There had to be some loose contact preventing current from reaching the starter motor. With a shock I realized that I might have torn some cable loose which would now be inaccessible and might make it necessary to take everything out again. I lay down on my back and had a look under the car. Thank God, a loose cable, that had to be it! But where was it supposed to go? The alternator? I couldn't find a connection point. I borrowed a small make-up mirror of my mother's to be able to have a look at the top of the alternator and indeed there I could connect the loose cable. There were some oil stains on the make-up mirror, however.
Relieved I sat down behind the wheel again and turned the ignition key.
Click.
Oh no, not again. I started to feel very uneasy in my stomach, something was still wrong. What on earth could this be? I hadn't touched anything that could even remotely have anything to do with this problem. If I really had to dismount everything again the Road Leading Towards The Ultimate Goal would become very, very long. The hell with those Bhuddists.
I really couldn't think of anything else that I could have done wrong, so I got out of the car, locked the garage and walked into the house as a beaten man. How would my father have dealt with this? I didn't know. In any case my mother, who knows my melancholic moods, has taught me not to think too much of problems at night because they only tend to look blacker and blacker then. Tomorrow would be a new day. So I poured myself a large glass of wine and soon visions of loose contacts and inaccessible starter engines dissolved into an alcoholic haze.
I had to be at the office next afternoon so there wasn't much I could do that next day. Nevertheless I took a last glance under the hood, having that silly hope that there might be a very obvious loose contact.
There was one.
For the first time in my life there was The Obvious Loose Contact. A grey cable that was supposed to be connected to a grey switch box on the inside of the right fender was dangling loose. I hadn't noticed that in the dusk of the previous afternoon.
I connected the cable, sat down behind the wheel in confidence, turned the key and there it was: the full sound of a 2.2 liter combustion engine, resonating in the stainless steel exhaust pipe, amplified by the acoustics of the garage.
I drove the car outside, concluded that indeed there were no leaks in the exhaust system anymore and made a short test drive that was satisfactory.
After I returned from the test drive I kissed my mother goodbye and drove down the street in a sedate manner, with a restrained note from the exhaust pipe like it should be with an English quality car.
I turned onto the expressway, where I had to restrain my right foot for a while because I happened to be behind a car which had been designed by some unimaginative engineer who apparently saw cars as a necessary evil and this particular car was mainly meant for transporting depressing groceries and being driven by someone who felt it was his duty to punish all other motorists for their pagan pleasures in the meantime by driving at least five miles an hour slower than the maximum speed allowed. However, this punitive expedition missed its effect completely this time because in my totally renewed state of being, after a minor relapse, it only made me look forward more and more to the devastating acceleration that was at hand, which would reduce this motorized shopping cart to an insignificant dot in my rearview mirror.
Instead of switching on the radio I listened to the pleasant humming of the engine, which was not unlike the "oooooohhmmm" chants of those monks in Tibet. From time to time this trance was broken in a pleasant way by those souped-up hatchback cars that were getting stuck behind trucks when they tried to overtake me on the right lane, because their drivers hadn't expected that the old Englishman, which especially from behind looks quite stately, would accelerate so easily.
"Eindhoven 73" I read on a traffic sign. Good, it was still a long way to go.
No, the ultimate goal was indeed less important than the road leading towards it.

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