De-fixwinning Nick and Hillary's 606 G properly, our next project

Nick and Hilary have been long time members in the gwoa and certainly didn't deserve this treatment.

Hope that G gets them back on the road soon so they enjoy their passion for the G again.

Keep up the good work

How is this project going Gordon? Any more surprises? 

Nevermind the paint Gordon ! You'll want some Bolognese on that !!!

Gordon Got It Going.

Nick's voice:

Although she never saw it, in a roundabout way my lovely Godmother Auriol gave us our first G-Wagen “B380 MAO” in 1999 – a 230GE petrol, discovered with three flat tyres and rotten brake pipes somewhere near Carlisle. Once the tyres were pumped up and the brake pipes replaced it served us reliably well on tarmac, thick mud and fluffy snow for years and never let us down.

However, I wanted a diesel so MAO went and we got “A5 LBF” from a character near York. Apparently the registration was worth a small fortune - LBF being his wife’s initials. Hilary’s initials are HSH so the registration was up for sale as soon as we got home. Although LBF, a 300GD, was woefully underpowered that too served us reliably well and towed whatever we asked of it through any conditions for five years.

However, after much deliberating, we decided that a 606 engine was the way forward so LBF (no one ever did buy the valuable registration) had to go. By now we knew a few people in the G-Wagen world, made lots of enquiries and made lots of ‘phone calls. After months of extensive research we established contact and became friends with someone not far from Belfast. By great good fortune he had almost exactly what we were looking for: a 460 SWB with an OM606A engine coupled to an automatic ‘box. We weren’t particularly keen on an automatic, but reckoned that it might make for a reasonably effortless drive that we could grow used to. Furthermore, our expert fully understood that we simply wanted to use the vehicle as a daily driver and do no more to it than pour diesel in and service it annually. I cannot be sure of his name (with hindsight I can be sure of nothing about him) so let’s just call him Peter, for that is the name he gave us. Ever thoughtful and obliging Peter was selling the vehicle on behalf of Tom, a legendarily fastidious Mercedes mechanic who was married to a Cherokee and was on his way to the U.S.A. for life saving surgery.

So it was that on the 11^th of May 2013 we journeyed to Larne and bought SKZ 4130, a China Blue 460 SWB with winch, snorkel, bullbar and OM606A engine coupled to a four-speed auto ‘box. Eventually we got it home. The winch didn’t work and was not worth fixing. No matter, that went into the skip. We didn’t want the bullbar, so that was sold for not much via the GWOA. Despite Peter’s very best efforts ailing Tom, devoted husband to the exotic Cherokee, who was to forward the paperwork, could no longer be found and we still await the meticulous service records promised by our friend Peter.

A few weeks after paying for Tom’s life saving medical trip SKZ 4130 dumped its engine oil, engine coolant, diesel and gearbox oil on Tobermory Pier. You can still see the stains. One of the rubber hoses was no more than perished gunge, so I cut that short, wangled it back on and poured fresh water into the radiator. MacKay’s Garage is barely five hundred yards away from the pier and, knights in shining armour that they are, they took in the dripping behemoth. Those who know, know that the redoubtable OM606 engine requires a corner of the sump cutting off for it to clear the front diff. Fastidious Tom had indeed trimmed the sump... but not sufficiently. Every time the vehicle went over the slightest pebble the sump would hit the diff, ultimately splitting it. Stephen at MacKay’s removed the sump, dug out the body-filler that had been pressed into the split, re-welded the sump to the correct dimensions and we were back on the road. Very sensibly (they are a garage, not an old crocks restoration project service) MacKay’s left it at that and Stephen went to Mexico to sprinkle his magic dust on oil-rigs in the sunshine. I have seen him since when he has returned home for leave and he always asks wistfully after SKZ 4130 and reminds me that somewhere underneath lies a good solid reliable vehicle. Somewhere.

In March 2014, in a brief but fierce snowstorm, I ran out of fuel while the gauge showed a quarter full and blocked a car park. The glow plug light didn’t light and the four-speed automatic (car) gearbox was pathetic, confused and utterly mismatched.

Because I absolutely must have reliable transport to get me to work I bought an ex Shetland Post Office van - unseen and unresearched - to get me about (it has never let us down) and got Peter’s G-Wagen to DJ of Chisholm’s Recovery, Ballachulish.

A Landover Discovery kindly towed me off the Corran ferry when the G-Wagen failed to start. Oh, how we all laughed.

DJ’s daytime job is hauling HGVs out of ditches, which he does on a shift pattern. When on call with time available he set to on SKZ 4130. Five of the six injector pipes were squirting diesel. He tightened them up. The oil-pressure gauge sender was squirting oil. He re-machined it. The main propshaft had ground itself into the gear casing. DJ sorted a narrower diameter/thicker walled propshaft to clear it and welded a patch onto the porous gear case. The transfer box propshaft had been whacked with hefty hammer blows to force it into place. He re-machined it. The draglink assembly was an MoT failure. DJ replaced it and got it through the MoT, tidying up the brakes and much more besides along the way. The man is a good humoured genius.

By now it was September 2014 and I began to use it tentatively but we could not bond. I considered selling it and cutting my not inconsiderable losses. At least it worked so that I would not have deceived anyone the way that I had been deceived by my erstwhile friend in May 2013.

Despite my trusted friend Peter’s assurances that he had found us the right reliable vehicle it had taken two years, we had managed fewer than five hundred miles and spent colossal amounts of time, effort and money we didn’t have to get it working... more or less.

But things were still not right.

Although I had reworked the snorkel so that it cleared the bodywork and bonnet it still looked ridiculous and the engine still had no air filter. The alternator was still on the wrong side of the engine, mounted on a feeble wonky misaligned bracket so that at every turn the pulley shaved off a sliver of drive belt resulting in an engine still coated in sticky black shreds of rubber. I am no auto-electrician but even I could see that the tag ends of insulating tape on dangly wires, some of them with no endings, were not worthy of a Mercedes badge.

It was time for further research.

In November 2014, with some nervous trepidation (remembering how my trusted friend Peter and his meticulous Mercedes engineer Tom had scorched my fingers two years previously) I ‘phoned Gordon “G-Restorations” Osgerby.

Gordon had never heard of me and he had nothing to make from me yet he gave me his full attention while I gave him a thumbnail sketch of the pickle we were in, explaining along the way how it had drained us of both effort and cash. From 333 miles away I could see him sucking his teeth before suggesting that he reckoned he could sort things out.

We tend to overbook ourselves; I suspect that Gordon does the same. Eventually, after endless calendar juggling, we stole some time, grabbed our AA card and drove down to Poulton-le-Fylde. It was a looong 333 miles. Within 40 miles we had lost top gear but pressed on at a steady 50mph and 4500 rpm. By that late afternoon in June we finally bowled up to Gordon’s set up and went for a run out in his LWB 606. It was not like ours. However, he seemed confident that ours could be like his and, after a bit more prodding and sucking of teeth he ran us back to our digs in Blackpool.

Blackpool has some fine pubs, plenty of rock, excellent fish’n’chips and – on a Saturday night – hordes of bronze painted girls wielding inflatable penises in company with nylon bearded boys dressed as cave-men. I doubt we’ll haste us back. Meanwhile Gordon had pondered and declared that he would get the job done “within a couple of weeks”. We begged him to keep it for as long as it took but he was adamant that a fortnight would see it sorted.

Nine and a half weeks is what it took.

Gordon was even more astonished than we were at what a desperate fankle the thing was. We caught the ‘bus back home. He removed the front grille and the twin electric cooling fans with it. The snorkel came off. The engine came out and the gearbox with it. Various dangly wires dangled. What did they do? We will never know. Perhaps one of them had been responsible for fourth gear. The wrong gearbox had dictated the wrong engine mounts. The engine was so far forward that there had been no room for the fan, so twin electric fans had been almost squeezed in so that they only occasionally scraped against the grille.  The rat’s nest of wiring was a total confusion. The burglar alarm ended nowhere. The cockeyed engine had left no room for the alternator which had been bodge wangled onto the opposite side. A bizarre modified snorkel (ex Land Rover?) stood in for an air filter.

That much was apparent.

There was a secondary amateur bodgit wiring loom, which went some way to explaining the absence of any glow plug or fuel warning lights. Gordon ripped out and threw away swathes of the one and a half wiring looms to leave one correct one. The burglar alarm went into the same skip along with the ridiculous snorkel. I don’t know what happened to the twin electric cooling fans. Perhaps they went into a pile for another project. What I do know is that, well past the estimated two week turnaround, Gordon was wading in deep by now. Anyone more sensible would have put sticky plaster over the more obvious mess and left it at that.

Gordon didn’t.

He put on a six-speed manual gearbox which is a thing of slick joy. Gordon reinstated reversing lights. He put on the correct engine mounts so that the engine and gearbox lay as they should. He put the alternator where it was meant to go and put in the appropriate air cleaner. The drive shafts no longer fouled. The glow plugs work. The fuel warning light illuminates. The throttle assembly works.

Gordon got it going. 

At last, in late August, he trailered the newly resurrected SKZ 4130 up to Oban where we drove it round and round, bought him a bacon roll and cup of tea; he absolutely did not want us to pay the full whack until we were happy. He trusted us that we would pay him the balance as soon as we could perform the necessary banking logistics – which we happily did a fortnight later. This was a novel way of doing business, far removed from the jiggery-pokery of the initial purchase almost two and a half years earlier.

Throughout the job Gordon faced innumerable cack handed bodges from (presumably) Tom and his foolery. Gordon never gave up. He delivered what he said he would and somehow managed to do it with patient good humour.

Gordon is worthy of respect.

A thousand miles later and we have not yet been towed off a ferry or pushed away from a car park entrance. Although there remains a lot yet to be done we can at last begin to use our 1988 SWB 460 with its splendid 606 engine and slick 6-speed gearbox. We can start to form some sort of a bond. So many who earn a living knowing about these things keep telling us that yes, we do now have a decent vehicle worth keeping and looking after.

What have we learned?

I was fooled by one man. It is the one time in forty years of motoring that I have been duped. On the other hand dozens of folk have helped us since. Almost everyone anywhere is a decent person. From the posh Volvo lady in Oban who gave filthy oily me a lift to get a can of fuel to the ex REME courier who got the thing started in the snow, to Steve in Tobermory who scratched his head and reworked the sump to Gav on a mobile ‘phone somewhere who understood and found parts to the man driving the shiny Discovery who towed us off the ferry at Corran to DJ in Ballachulish who sleuthed and spannered to staunch the leaks and to Gordon in Poulton-le-Fylde who bit off more than he had bargained for but never gave up.

Thank you all, with the biggest thanks due to my lovely Hilary who stood by, supported and encouraged through the whole insane enterprise.

We have met some wonderful characters along the way – many of them strangers in the passing - and learned a lot about G-Wagens, but even more about people.

Thank you.

Hilary’s voice:

So much of this saga has been negative. We embarked upon this experience with optimism and innocent trust. Now, two and a half years later, I would like to say all manner of things about this long and costly journey that I have travelled hand in hand with Nick but my overriding thought is that, once we were past the bad bits at the beginning, the good bits happened because people trusted us to trust them and that trust was never abused.

Gordon understood the almost unbelievable problems and found ways of overcoming them.

Thank you, Gordon, for knowing what needed to be done to transform the vehicle into what we originally wanted and what we originally thought we were getting.

Thank you, Gordon, for restoring Nick’s in the G-Waggeners and putting SKZ 4130 back on the road.

Nick and Hilary Heasman Norris, Morvern, Argyll.

All good things come to those that wait...

You will be glad you waited in the end...

Well Done Gordon and all

Gav

Hi Gordon you done a good job there to sort that mess out.Oh by  the way thanks for

the front brake caliper, g passed M.O.T on the road again 

Tony