One of my guiding stars for life is that you should learn something new every day or else the day has been wasted. So far in my life as a man in my prime age I have not yet wasted a day! One day my son and I realized we, or really me, are not very skilled in mechanics other than theoretically so we decided we need more practical experience. We started to browse the net for a “do it yourself car”. Budget was set to €1000 and soon we found it. A black Volkswagen Golf with 31000 kilometres on the display, a small car that does not use too much gas. After a short test drive and some bargaining we bought it for €700.

We soon realized that there was a large hole in the exhaust silencer and we hoped that is was not the first part with the catalyzer, it was! If you are not a garage owner and can lift up the car but are forced to rely on a jack and trestles you soon find out it is very tight under the car. Over one and half tonnes of car just 5 centimetres over your head makes you humble. We had very little clue on what to do so we had to go to YouTube for advise. Being a German built car the best instructions was in German, a language I struggle with a bit more than English. Thank you for the invention of video. We only had to use the angle grinder once but there was more use of the swearwords I must admit. No I will not teach you any Swedish swearwords here but leave a comment if you think I should write a piece on Swedish swearwords. To add more to this ordeal I had injured my back trying to salvage floating bridge that went A-wall in one of the winter storms. Stay tuned for that future blog.

Now the car was silent and driving it we soon realized it had a mind of its own, a soul or a ghost!? The door locks are really amusing. Most of the time the central locks works fine and locks all five doors but many times it only locks the drivers door. Drivers door is also the only keyhole that works with the only available key. Then you unlock and to try again to lock all doors except the drivers door locks, so you lock the drivers door and as you start to move away from the car all doors unlocks with a loud click. So you try again and the same thing all over again. Now we try to get in the car and start it up, get out and lock. Success! Okay, sort of. When you come out of the store you find that everything is unlocked except the drivers door. We are fortunate to live in a rural area with not much crime or car thefts. Put the key in the keyhole and everything locks. Finally you get in the car to drive away when the door locks only to unlock after a kilometre. A car with that much personality must have a name so he is now named Mulle Meck!

One of the previous owners spent lots of money to put in a high quality stereo of the well known brand Denver. Listening to the radio is very interesting as is changes station randomly. Luckily we live in thinly populated area so there are not very many stations to tune in to but Denver tries them all six. There are four public service stations in Sweden and we can also, if the weather is good tune in to two local commercial stations. Public service station one offers news, debate and politics. The station two offers classical music and Denver seems to like this the most. I do not know if it is the same in other countries but the radio hosts presenting classical music has a very special tone. After the very bombastic symphony the host comes in in a very low monotonous voice explaining “this was the third symphony, second set and forth to fifteenth line in B-flat of Wolfgang Amendment Mollberg played by the philharmonic orchestra in Worchester-upon-a-hill conducted by Someone Somewonsky”. After that Denver quickly changes over to one of the commercial stations where a female singer is wailing away with just electronic drums as a backup. After a few minutes we realize that it is now a commercial for a local shopping mall.

When we start the car, it starts real easy, it makes a squeaky noise like it is saying “why did you wake me up?” “I am tired and old, just let me stand here in the parking lot and rust away”! You need to be very tender with it driving as the clutch has a very, I mean a very, short span from neutral to drive. If you need to start in a small slope you start to sweat as soon as you realize that will be the case. To find the pull position you need to work with surgical precision, for all you brain surgeons out there saying it is difficult wait until you try this clutch. I guess we need to change the clutch and that blog post will probably be liked by all motor heads if we succeed. Hope you enjoyed this true story, like and subscribe.