The Tank Chronicles Chapter 8: More bits and bobs and some rust

One of the weirdest things to happen to me (besides the issue with the key switch not connecting up the aircon, wipers and horn properly) was an intermittent fault that affected the power windows and aircon.
As The Tank ran more and more, some strange issues started to come about. One of these was a clunking when I started up from a standstill very rapidly. A loud and brief clunking from the drivetrain and a sharp shudder through the car would accompany any rapid acceleration form a standing start. It got worse and worse.

Ch-ch-ch-changes. And some clunking.

By this time I had closed my cafe in Balik Pulau and so my daily commute was a bit different, carting staff to and from the canteen we were by now running at the Fairview International School just across the road from my place. Although the school was a mere 5 minute walk away, I had to drive about 60kms a day at least to ferry my staff about. So The Tank was still seeing very regular use.
A mechanic had also opened up just around the corner fro my place and so, rather than drive all the way to Balik Pulau and endure the tricky issue of having to occasionally leave the car there, I decided to give Eco Vehicle Auto Service a shot. Run by two young men who had set up on their own, San and Lai, it seemed like a good and decent setup.
The first time I dropped by was when The Tank suddenly started losing water at an alarming rate. I checked and discovered a leak around the water pump. The pump had recently been changed by Lee but I couldn’t risk bringing the old girl all the way to Balik Pulau so decided to try Eco. San came out and had a look at the car and when he saw that the water pump seemed quite new, I told him it had been changed a couple of months back. He immediately said he could of course change it for me, but suggested I check with the previous mechanic if it was under warranty so that I could save money.
I rang Lee who said it was and that I should be able to make it there if I carried a few litres of water to refill on the way. So one afternoon after work, I drove off with two bottles of water in the car. We actually didn’t need to stop until we’d almost reached Balik Pulau whereupon The Tank swallowed a litre and a half of water quite greedily. I left her at Lee’s and a day later picked her up good as new.
Impressed by San’s honesty I felt much more confident about his abilities and so consulted him on the issue of the carb and the high fuel consumption, as well as the clunking.

It's a matter of timing. And a diaphragm.

Of the former, he found a torn diaphragm in the carb and did a complete overhaul using some scavenged parts and some new ones. Immediately the power returned, the consumption dropped and The Tank felt a few years younger - much sprightlier and more responsive. Besides the carb woes, during this time the San also figured there were issues with the distributor. I tried to get a replacement from the Volvo guys on the net (Jim Sean Netto in Negeri Sembilan, mainly) but San did some bodging and it helped for a while until we realised the carb was the main culprit.

Rust at the head of the chassis rails.

There are a few models of distributors and I contemplated getting a replacement unit.

The carb finally gets taken apart.

A large tear in the diaphragm.

Bits and bobs.

She also stopped throwing up plumes of smoke under hard acceleration and I didn’t have to change down so frequently when going uphill.
The clunking was a weirder problem. We eventually worked out that the joints in the prop-shaft were seized and under hard acceleration, the shaft would be inflexible and all sorts of binging and banging would then occur.
Unfortunately the banging and shuddering would result in a fuse being lightly dislodged. That fuse was for the aircon and for the power windows. How did I find this out? Well, one of the first things to do when electrics fail is to check fuses and I always found no burnt ones, but the very act of checking itself would restore power. Eventually, after a few occurrences of the air con and windows dying after a bout of clunking, I put the two together and realised the problem. It’s a strange occurrence and I suspect it was a connector just behind the fuse rather than the seating of the fuse itself that was the problem. Eventually I drove with the fuse cover off so I could use some non-metallic object to just prod at the fuse whenever the aircon suddenly went off, and this worked 9 times out of 10.

The metalworm rears its head.

Raising The Tank onto a car lift revealed that the chassis rail ends were starting to rust severely at the front. Not dangerous yet but would require attention within a year or so.
So all in all, the old girl was starting to show her age…
At this point, the list of issues were:
1. Rust at the chassis rails - can be fixed as was not yet extreme
2. Clunking in the propshaft - new set of joints and mounts needed
3. Gearbox - after a long outstation drive and then some rest, the gearbox would be reluctant to change up from 1st until it was warmed up or
4. Bodywork - the scratches from the encounter with the rock and some bodywork rust starting to appear around the rear hatch frame and rear quarter windows.
5. Wiring - the brake lights and rear indicator wiring needs tidying up as the brake lights deactivate the rear small light.
I reckoned that it would be good to get everything done up over a period of a year or two and I would end up with a restored Tank, but then…
My wife, Mei, moved to Penang at the end of 2016. Finally retired, our two years of living in separate countries and seeing each other only every 6 weeks or so finally came to an end and she joined me in Penang. By this time my staff were also in an apartment I rented specially for them so I didn’t need to drive quite so much every day. Mei and I did like to travel about a bit though so we decided just before Chinese New Year 2017 to find a new car.
And we did - a 1998 Honda CRV with 197,000 on the clock (very low mileage or a clocked car) with suspension noises but a very good engine and interior. We splashed out on it and got her just before Chinese New Year, at the end of January 2017.
There are a few more thoughts to compile on my time with The Tank and then it’s time to start The CRV Chronicles…

One of the things I miss most is the enormous load area, even though it is a tad low in height.

The Tank being driven off to the new owner.

The Tank Chronicles Chapter 7: Keeping Cool

The second of my belated posts from 2016...

I endured a few months of so-so air-conditioning when I first got The Tank. Ah Guan reckoned the air-con would never get very cold and needed some modification. I was reluctant to spend the money so put up with the occasional tepid flow for some time.
Then one day, not long after I’d begun to bring The Tank to Lee, tepid turned to hot. Lee spent an afternoon looking at the car and worked out that one of the pipes was full of gunk and needed replacing. He cleaned out the system while at it and suddenly the air-con was cold as anything.

The cold only lasted two weeks.

This lasted two wonderful weeks then suddenly all was warm once again. I brought her back to Lee who said one of the joints at the compressor was a little worn and the seal had been compromised, letting out all the gas. He made some adjustments, refilled the gas and all was well again though he cautioned me that that joint was not very strong and may leak again, whereupon a new compressor would be needed. Well, she lasted a good half year more until earlier this year (2016) when on the morning I was departing for KL, the aircon failed to work.
A few days before, one of the regulars at the cafe had opined that I was taking a risk subjecting The Tank to the KL drive for Chinese New Year. I told him he shouldn’t jinx the journey like this but as it turned out, his words rang true.
I started the car that morning and drove off to the petrol station. I noted there was no click from the compressor and true enough, the compressor simply refused to come on. I discovered a burnt fuse (only 8A!) and substituted it only to see the replacement burn too. Just to test the system, I plonked in a 16A fuse instead and watched it for a few seconds only to see a wisp of smoke curl up form the fuse box. I quickly yanked out the 16A fuse and figured this was beyond my fixit-skills.
Trying to find a mechanic two days before Chinese New Year who could do the job proved ultimately futile so I drove a sweaty, sleepy drive down to KL.

A call to a friend and at least I had a BMW 3-series to drive around in

A call to my friend Sunil who was also in KL for the holidays didn’t yield a mechanic open to help, but he did offer the use of his father’s BMW 3 for the few days we’d be there so at least I had wheels to cart Mei, the kids and I around.
Back in Penang a few days later, I found an air-con guy open for business and Chiew turned out to be marvellous at his job. Just down the road from me, he worked alone and pronounced the compressor dead through an electrical fault. He swapped it, a process that required some modification due to different pulley sizes and so on, but The Tank has remained pretty cool ever since. All his effort cost me only RM900 which I still think is a good deal.

Oh, except for one little glitch when the compressor stopped again. I brought The Tank in to Chiew again and with the help of his friend he worked out it was a wiring fault and they spent an hour finding it and then fixing it. Best thing was, he refused to accept any form of payment from me for this! What a wonderful chap! Highly recommended so if you’re in Penang and looking for a friendly and reliable air-con guy, look for Chiew in Relau.

ChiewAircon

The Tank Chronicles Chapter 6: Bits and Bobs

Distracted by a few things, I never finished a couple of posts and now The Tank has gone on to a new home. Still, I think it’d be nice to finish up so here’s the first of the two posts I started in July 2016, but now with an update.

She's 32, for heaven's sake...

I have to constantly remind myself that The Tank is 32 years old and that perhaps, short of a rebuild, 30000+km-a-year mileage may not be the best for the old girl. Still, she’s been plugging along reasonably well except for bits and bobs that require attention every now and then.
The brakes, I’ve mentioned. The suspension too has needed some looking at at one point. Some waywardness in the steering revealed that the track rod ends and tie rods needed replacement. This was around the same time the brakes gave trouble in KL and both Lee and the KL mechanic warned me to take it easy so rather than have a blast down the highway, on both the southbound and northward journeys I gave The Tank the run of the trunk roads. This way, I figured, she wouldn’t put me at risk of a high-speed suspension failure, and if things got a bit dicey, I was more likely to find a mechanic in a small town than on the highway.
The suspension lasted both journeys and when I got back to Penang The Tank got new bits put on and she’s been fine ever since.

One day, while reversing in a quiet lane near my favourite hardware store, I got the rear bumper hooked on a boulder hidden under a termite mound. I had done my three-point-turn in this driveway a few times before but the mirrors on The Tank don’t show too wide an angle and on this occasion I missed the earth-coloured mound set against the earthen driveway. Wth help from my hardware-shop friend whose establishment I’d patronised just minutes before, and the crowbar I’d bought then, we jacked up the rear, used the crowbar to pull the lip of the bumper over the edge of the rock and then lowered the car and drove off.

It was while doing this that I realised the rear spring popped out of the top guide when the rear was jacked up. Seems the previous owner had had the springs cut to lower the car. This made the job of extricating The Tank a bit trickier as not only did I have to hang on to the crowbar as we lowered the car on the jack, but my friend had to use a steel pipe to keep the top of the coil spring aligned so it would match up with the mount when the car was lowered to ride height.
All done, but the rear bumper now has a slight kink in it and the rubber end-cap is damaged.

She's a tough old girl

At this point too I appreciated how tough the old girl is. The bumper is mounted to the car with two thick metal rods. They’re an inch or more in diameter and account for why the bumper didn’t simply get torn off as I tried to drive The Tank off the boulder.
I’ve recently noticed The Tank is getting crashier over the bumps - and there are so many of those in Penang - so at some point in the future she’ll probably need new shocks and maybe even bushes and mounts. For the time being though, she soldiers on.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that she’s running a bit too rich. I’ve asked Lee to have a look but he seems reluctant to give her a tune up, for whatever reason. She’s due in for a service soon so I’ll get them to have a look at the carb then. Perhaps it needs a strip-down and service. I’ve also bookmarked a webpage for tuning the carb on my own so I might just have a go at it myself one day.

Beautiful Boy: My son's turned 25

This is a picture of me and my elder son, Mark Benedict Cheong. He’s just turned 25 today so humour me as I take a meandering path through reminisce and memories and on through to what lies ahead.

“Close your eyes,
Have no fear,
The monster's gone,
He's on the run
And your daddy's here,”

When his mother and I separated in 2000, Mark was only 8. His mother and I may have had our differences (and still do) but we did agree that the separation should impact Mark, Megan and Michael as little as was humanly possible.

In order to ensure they had as much of a normal upbringing as possible, we balanced the time they had at their home with time spent staying over with me. Mark had two weeknights a week with me on his own as well as alternate weekends along with Megan and Michael so we could all do the 'family' things, and this worked quite nicely indeed.

In the early part of 2000, Mark was in Primary 2 and we had a weird trial thing when his mother was living away while I stayed with the kids. I would wake up early and help Mark get ready for school then we'd sit outside on the concrete wall of the culvert, waiting for his bus.

We'd talk about stuff, and sometimes I'd point out some of the stars and planets still visible in the brightening sky. I don't know that many but can point out one or two constellations - ‘Look there’s Orion the Hunter and you can see Orion’s belt and the bow’ - and the brighter objects in the sky.

I recall we also did talk about the separation and impending divorce and what life would be like after.

I also remember little things. Things that seem meaningless and even insignificant to others, and sometimes I do think they are indeed inconsequential in the greater scheme of things. Things like the little snack cakes he liked which I always bought for him to take to school. I don’t even remember the name of it now, but I do remember he liked them. So I bought them.

Those were very nice times which I missed terribly when I eventually traded places with his mother and I moved out instead.

“Before you go to sleep,
Say a little prayer,
Every day
In every way,
It's getting better and better,”

It wasn't a conventional father-son relationship but we managed. And through the years of playing computer games together, teaching him to cycle, scolding him for not doing his homework (I once threw his homework out the door, I really did!), bringing him in to my classroom when I was lecturing in Design and Communications one night a week, and talking about a whole heap of stuff, we somehow managed to maintain our own version of a father-son relationship.

I wasn’t always there, of course, and sometimes when I was there, I wasn’t maybe wholly there too. And of course there were many things I think I could have done better. But we managed, I think.

“Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful boy,
Out on the ocean sailing away,
I can hardly wait
To see you to come of age,
But I guess we'll both
Just have to be patient,”

There was a period when he kinda drifted away. Late teenage years. I did too, in my own way, with my parents when I was his age. And though I wished it wasn’t that way, I accepted that I wouldn’t be able to see him as often when he was 18 as when he was 8. And I wished I could be there to ease him through any bumps and potholes like the ones I crashed through when I was in my late teens. But I accepted too that this is not something one pushes.

I wasn't around when he went off to the army (I was overseas working on a project) but I wished I was there and I wrote about it here.

I was glad to be around for one or two other significant moments though, like the day he moved into his hall at the University. Or when he decided to go to East Timor on a short charity trip and I arranged it with my East Timor-based brother and a friend who had ties to the country.

And I was also glad that when Mei and I got married, we merged all our lives seamlessly.

When he’d finished with the army, we managed to cobble together a short father-son roadtrip and though it was not as encompassing as I would have liked, it was still rather fun. The poor young man wanted to save me money and used his own towel in our hotel in Melaka as he mistook the sign on the back of the door to list usage costs rather than what they were - replacement costs for lost items. Like towels.

Except for a short while went things went quite well, I’ve never been very well off and the kids all know that so we’ve always tempered our expectations of what we can do or where we can go together. So I was very touched by this little gesture of his then. Again, not very significant in some ways, but it sure meant a lot to me.

“'Cause it's a long way to go,
A hard row to hoe
Yes, it's a long way to go
But in the meantime,

Before you cross the street,
Take my hand,
Life is what happens to you,
While you're busy making other plans,”

So now, my elder boy has turned 25. At this point in my own life, I had moved to another country to live (my second foreign-land-become-home), worked for someone then came out and started a business on my own, and a few months after turning 25 I got married to Mark’s mother.

Mark’s certainly not on the cusp of a mirroring life and for that I am really rather grateful. He’s taking things in his own time and that’s how it should be.

He isn’t standing still though - he’s lived overseas while doing an exchange programme, he’s travelled extensively through Europe, he’s acted in plays and now has his own theatre company! OK he’s got partners, but still. His own theatre company! How cool is that!

So the little 8-year-old looking along my pointing arm up towards the constellation of The Hunter has begun to hunt down his own dream. No need for anyone to point out the stars for him, for he’s well capable of searching them out himself. And he’s proven it time and time again.

I’ve told him many times of how proud I am of him, but this is probably the first time I’ve written it in print.
So, Mark, yes, I’m proud of who you are. Of your intelligence, your conscience, your sense of right and wrong, your ability to speak up when things aren’t quite right. I admire your talents and am proud of how you’ve put them to use. I respect that you understand your limitations and I respect too how you try to push some of those boundaries out.

So on your 25th birthday (still a few minutes of that left as I type this) let me wish you once again wisdom and strength. And I’ll throw in happiness and fulfilment too cos I think that covers just about everything.

And remember, as you add on the years, you’ll never stop being my…

“Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful boy,”


with thanks to John Lennon for the beautiful lyric.