Monday, February 16, 2009

Free Lunch (Read before ‘The wonderful mechanic’ - above)

The van is not happy again – it started making a rather worrying noise after climbing for 10 mins up a steep hill. The scraping noise was very noticeable and didn’t sound good. We spent some time looking under the bonnet and could not pinpoint the noise – our only guess being a belt or pully…?

We took the van to VW and tried to explain the problem. Unfortunately, they did not speak English but we managed to explain with a friend translating via a telephone. VW made us wait many hours and gave us countless cups of teas. They even invited us for a free, but very bad, canteen lunch. We could see the van during the entire four hour wait and only noted one mechanic peeking at the engine for five minutes. They eventually informed us that they thought the fault was in the engine and they would have to strip the engine to pinpoint it! They then said that it would take 20-25 days to get any replacement parts! Our hearts sank… we couldn’t afford an engine rebuild or the associated wait, but nor could we get ourselves and our kit back to the UK very easily…

We decided that VW were either wrong or trying to con us out of lots of money. We know the engine very well and it sounded fine to us; there was just an additional noise external to the engine. We left VW without paying anything and drove back up to Geyekbayiri. The noise persisted, but the already poor performance seemed unaffected!

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