Thinking of purchasing a classic car or modern sport car?

No matter how careful a person you’re, at some stage in your driving life you are likely to be involved in any sort of accident of some kind, whether caused by you or perhaps a third party. Following the initial shock has worn out you start to evaluate the damage and choose whether or not to claim on your insurance. Sometimes another party may suggest a cash payment to work through the harm. It’s never a good idea to accept this because the damage can be worse than you believe.

Recently one of our fleet of classic cars was out on hire and also the customer had any sort of accident. No other vehicles were involved and also the accident was caused by a momentary error of judgement – easily done. Fortunately neither the motive force nor his passenger were injured.

There was some obvious damage to the leading end of the Austin Healey which didn’t look disastrous. The engine would not restart therefore the car was pushed right into a nearby car park. I was already in order to collect the Healey so was on the scene in about Fifteen minutes.

The engine wouldn’t start as the impact had broken a plastic bracket around the engine which held the throttle linkage. The motive force and passenger were safely seen on their way and also the RAC called. After a short wait an orange van arrived and the RAC man jury rigged up a brief throttle bracket so I could drive the vehicle to base. While working underneath the bonnet we noticed that the radiator fan (engine mounted and never electric) had jammed in the side from the radiator bracket.

Throughout the accident the engine had obviously shifted forwards on its mountings coupled with hit the radiator. Unsurprising really as it is a 3 litre, 6 cylinder, cast iron engine which may have had considerable momentum of their own. The fan pulley had dented the radiator in addition to imbedding the fan in the bracket and the end from the crankshaft had hit the chassis cross member before bouncing back. Just as well the engine hadn’t restarted because it probably would have shredded the radiator.

The RAC man freed in the fan making sure the blades were free from the radiator which did not appear to be leaking, before we restarted the engine.

The vehicle ran OK and was driven the 25 miles back to base and seemed OK although the engine sounded noisier than usual, the steering was stiff and also the speedo seemed to have eliminate.

The following day it was time to evaluate the harm in daylight, starting with an entire photo record from the state of the car.

The primary damage ended up being to the leading panel round the radiator and also to the valance underneath the front bumper. Amazingly the bumper was not bent even though bumper brackets were. These were removed for access. The aluminium front valance was badly bent and the metal had ripped where it was bolted to the chassis members. The Healey have been fitted having a sump guard after a previous customer had holed the sump, so this was removed. The front part of this had bent around the anti-roll bar, which was itself bent. The steering arm was also bent.

Clearly the front valance would need re-shaping or cutting out and a repair panel welding in. Aluminium isn’t easiest of metals to weld.

The Austin Healey ended up being taken into my local garage for a full inspection on the ramps.

Once up in the air, more damage came to light.

Among the engine mountings had broken, hence the engine moving forwards and the noisier engine around the return trip.
The engine was rubbing around the steering shaft, hence the stiffened steering.
The harm to the radiator meant this needed replacing.
The chrome grille surround was in poor condition and then any attempt to re-shape it would probably damage it much more, necessitating replacement.
The steering wheel was bent in the effect of the driver hanging on, on impact.

The labour to repair the leading panel alone involved three times my primary guesstimate, to which needs to be added the price of parts

Front repair panel
Steering arm
Grille chrome surround
Radiator
Speedo
Throttle bracket
Engine mounting
Bumper brackets

We’d an identical situation with hidden damage almost ten years ago when a customer damaged our Triumph Stag. Again this was a front end impact and the front valance and wings were repaired. But after the crash we found there was oil leaking from the rear axle, which in fact had not been the case beforehand. The impact from the accident had travelled down the engine, the gearbox, across the prop shaft coupled with cracked a plate on the front of the rear axle.

In one respect it is lucky the Austin Healey is really a classic with a heavy steel chassis. OK the front of the body and radiator were damaged but the steel chassis wasn’t. Had this been a contemporary car constructed with crumple zones within the structure, the impact would have collapsed the entire front-end from the car, crushing the radiator and engine also it could possibly happen to be a complete discount.

The morals from the both the Austin Healey and Stag incidents are listed below:

1) Never guess at repair costs based on a preliminary superficial examination,
2) Always have the vehicle examined by a competent garage or crash repair shop.
3) If another vehicle is involved never pay a cash settlement as possible virtually guarantee it’ll never be enough.

Most classic car owners cover relatively few miles within their cars both since they’re owned as hobby cars but additionally since they’re generally covered by limited mileage insurance plans. Mileage might be anywhere from a few hundred to about 3,000 miles each year. If a problem starts to manifest itself, the dog owner normally gets plenty of notice and it has plenty of time to fix the issue. And unless there is a specific classic run or rally planned then there is no urgency.

Renting out a number of classic cars brings us some different problems. Firstly the mileage is a lot higher. Some of our cars covers 10,000 miles per year and 6,000 to 8,000 is quite normal. This means that issues that may creep up on the average classic new driver fairly slowly appear a little quicker on our number of classic cars. Add to that the fact that through the nature of our business, we have cars hired out on definite dates, we have created a culture targeted at avoiding problems instead of waiting for these phones happen after which fixing them.

When we add a new car to our fleet we provide a comprehensive service including replacing all hoses, whether they need it or not, replacing the flexible brakes hoses with Aeroquip ones which don’t degrade, and fitting electronic ignition to prevent the slow degradation that happens with good old contact breaker points.

We drive our very own hire cars regularly as our customers won’t always report anything unusual as they will not know how the cars drive normally. In this way we are able to usually get symptoms because they begin to develop and have them fixed before they become a problem to either us or the customers.

This is illustrated by a piece of work that we are currently having carried out on our 1970 Jaguar E-Type Roadster. In addition to hiring this out, we use it quite a lot ourselves and drove it across Europe towards the Czech Republic and in September 2010. The MSA Euroclassic isn’t a normal road run and is set to take probably the most scenic routes possible, including in cases like this crossing the Alps via the famous Stelvio and St Gothard passes.

The Stelvio continues to be featured around the BBC Top gear programme as one of the best drives in the world and having completed it twice we can verify this accolade. This season on a few of the 49 hairpin bends, when turning in tightly under load, there is a slight knock, knock coming from the right rear. We have a team of mobile mechanics around around the Euroclassic so I asked these phones have a look plus they said hello was a small amount of play in one of the four universal joints on the rear drive shafts. They pumped inside a load of fresh grease, towards the offending UJ and the other three for good measure, and also the problem disappeared.

The E-Type has gone set for it’s annual pre hire-season service and I asked our garage to check it out. They confirmed the mobile mechanic’s diagnosis that there’s a little bit of play in only among the four UJs. If the would be a normal classic car their prognosis would be that the UJ could be fine for between five to ten thousand miles which for most classic drivers could be between 3 to 10 years motoring.

But also for The Open Road this could be done in just one year. There aren’t any tight, Stelvio type, hairpin bends for a lot of miles which is unlikely that the customer would hear a lot as a slight clunk during the coming year. However do not want a person to become either concerned when they would hear such a noise or, even worse, to become inconvenienced if it were to fail.

I gave the garage instructions to replace the offending UJ. Based on the assumption the other three UJs in the drive shafts are of the same age, and have been subject to exactly the same driving stresses it’s reasonable to assume they might be starting to deteriorate. I therefore instructed them to replace another three UJs simultaneously to get rid of any chance of premature failure.

About annually, a customer will state that charging over 300 for a day’s hire to have an E-Type seems a bit expensive. This is one of the reasons why. I’d rather spend money ahead of time on preventive maintenance that a normal classic car owner would not think was strictly necessary.

At the end of the service our E-Type will be setup and ready for what I am expecting to be considered a very busy year. The E-type was launched in 1961 which means this year celebrates its 50th birthday. It has already been featured in many the classic car magazines and I expect it to get immeasureable coverage with the coming year that ought to generate lots of requests to hire this icon of the British automotive art.