Faulty Towers

It's that time of year again, when the Mustang goes for the MoT test. I did all the preparation work - I checked that all the lights work, counted the wheels, made sure that the registration plate on the front matched the one on the back* etc - and went through all the usual procedure at the test centre - crossing my fingers, praying to any deity I could think of for leniency, shouting "My God, isn't that Linzi Dawn Mackenzie?!" and pointing across the yard whenever the tester got near a bit I knew to be marginal. It didn't work.

The tester was a friendly and very reasonable chap. There were a few minor faults; for instance, one of the two bulbs in the third-eye brake light was bust, which apparently should be a fail. He told me that the car was old enough not to require a third-eye, so if I disconnected the light it would pass, but if only one of the two bulbs lights it should be a fail. Go figure. There was a clunk from the offside front wheel, but as three of us spent 15 minutes trying to figure out what was causing it and failed, I got an advisory for a wheel bearing. One of the plastic headlamp lenses had gone all cloudy and wasn't casting the proper pattern. The hydrocarbons at idle were outrageous to begin with... 2000ppm, that shouldn't happen, but it cleared later.

Then he looked underneath. 

It was all going okay, he pointed out a patch under the back seat that would need addressing sooner rather than later, but when he looked under the front and went "Oh, dear Christ," I started sweating like Abu Qatada's Jordanian defence lawyer. Then when he looked under the other side and said, "For fuck's sake, Dave, have you seen this?!" I knew things weren't going terribly well. 

This was the nearside problem. Well, this was it later, down at the workshop, when I'd removed the master cylinder and balance block from in front of it, and poked at it with a screwdriver. Okay, maybe the tester had a point. This is the base of the front shock turret, around the area where the subframe bolts on, so I suppose you could call it structural.... 

Some of the metal in this area is quadruple skinned, and it's also the nearest point to the exhaust headers, so it's a common rot-spot. The rusty metal had gone like chunks of slate, that you could just break into pieces. James came over, and we started cutting plates, and hopefully we'll be welding tomorrow... Wish us luck.

* - I remember the works truck when I worked in Manchester actually failing an MoT for this....

Eugene