In my youth we tinkered with cars. These days cars are so commonplace that many young people play around with electronic gadgets. This can easily lead to a rewarding career, but in the case of Sonny Gomez it also led to a mechanical disaster.
Sonny is the eldest son of our greengrocer, but he found electron flow more interesting than watching carrots grow, so when he matriculated he went straight to university and is now a third-year student in electronics engineering.
When his father’s Volkswagen Golf VR6 developed an intermittent fault that was diagnosed by the dealer as a problem that could only be cured by fitting a new ignition management control unit, Sonny stepped in to try and solve the problem and save his dad a big expense. Well…
He bought a new unit and fitted it, but then some gremlin interfered and he could not get the coils to fire correctly. He cranked the engine from time to time and at one point managed to get one of the coils to fire, but was instantly rewarded with an almighty bang.
After that the engine made a funny ticking noise whenever it was cranked. Eventually he got the engine going, but now the engine made a clanking noise.
We towed the car in and it didn’t take Syd long to discover that the timing chain had jumped two teeth on the front cam sprocket that served cylinders 2, 4 and 6. The cylinder heads were taken off and he found that some of the valves were bent, so an overhaul was on the cards.
The cure was expensive but Sonny learnt the hard way that unburnt fuel in an engine often finds a way of causing a great deal of damage. We consoled him with the thought that the damage could have been more extensive.
Even before the bang occurred the incompressible fuel could have caused some of the con-rods to bend.