Blog

Christmas has been and gone and I am now back in the office.

We had a great time away, mostly excellent weather, and spent a lot of timing sitting and reading, or walking on beaches.

Yesterday I worked a short day and in the afternoon picked up a couple of lengths of timber, mahogany and kauri, to laminate up for a new tiller for Dovekie - a high priority now to get the wood sliced and a template made up something like this

Time has been slipping by. I found I was unable to log on here and have just reinstalled Serendipity. Fortunately I didn't need my backup as it just used the existing database, except for replacing the admin user rows in the authors table. There is still some tidying up to do though - plugins to re-enable etc.

I haven't done as much sailing as I had hoped in Dovekie as I keep finding little areas of rot. 3 of the 4 corners of the cockpit were rotted from seat top to floor and I have cut out and repaired two of those. The other will keep until the soft area of paint covered wood annoys me too much. And there is an area of the coaming inside the port side spinnaker sheet winch that is rotten. When they fitted the roller furler they removed the spinnaker halliard block so I can't raise the spinnaker anyway - the sheet winches are not useful.

The is a little area of rot inside the stern locker in one corner of the cockpit. It is on the underside of a deck beam and the top of a post. I have cut out the worst of it and will paint on rot killer, saturate with Everdure and patch it up. I'll bolt in a couple of strong pieces of tanalised pine I think to brace up the beam. I have found a couple of small leaks around staunchion bolts so I'll need to pull those and reseat with new bedding compound.

On Sunday while contemplating how to rig reefing tackle at the mast I found that the bottom 200mm of sail track has pulled off. The screws/nail have just pulled out so I need to remove the mainsail and sort that before I head out again.

Once the immediate problems are solved to the point I feel happy taking her out into Cook Strait again I'll start stripping paint from the cabin top down the sides and across the decks to get that back in good shape.

10 days ago Jo's Holden Barina became undrivable as we headed home on a beautiful Sunday evening after meeting friends for coffee and then walking around Evan's Bay, seeing Orca and generally enjoying ourselves in a relaxing way.

Half way home the clutch started getting sticky and not disengaging properly. Then it wouldn't disengage at all. Stopped on the side of the road in Houghton Bay unable to drive - no cell reception - so walked around the bay a bit and I managed to make a call to the AA, and to our friends we had been meeting with who were not far away. Friends turned up in a few minutes and took Jo home to pick up our other car. An hour or so later the man from the AA turned up, did an investigation and said that he couldn't fix it. We'd need to get towed to a garage. Three hours after coming to a stop we made it home.

Two day later the garage said we needed a new clutch master cylinder - price $400 - which seems outrageous but so did the possible cost of repairing the old one once they factored in unknown costs of sending it out to be machined or whatever else it might need, plus their costs to disassemble, reassemble etc. So overnight the new cylinder came down. Then we hear it will need a new hydraulic hose plus clips at $200. I assume all these prices exclude GST so really the cylinder is $460 and the hose $230.

A day later we hear that now there is a leak from the slave cylinder and that the gearbox would have to come out to investigate! I checked with the AA help line to see if that made sense - and it did to them.....

The slave cylinder is inside the bell-housing. Talk about designed for maintenance (not). Add on the cost of the new slave cylinder and 5+ hours to remove, replace, reinstall and there is no change out of $1200 (presumably +GST as we haven't got the car back yet).

Called last evening to find out what was taking so long to find that the replacement "new" slave cylinder was faulty. Another day or so we'll find out what the total damage is but I am expecting it to be $2000+

Not at all impressed with the Holden Barina - it should never have been allowed to leave the factory.

At 28000km it had a new top end on the motor as one cylinder was badly worn and it was going through oil at a great rate - warranty repair fortunately.

At 32000km it the clutch started slipping - I reckon they got oil or something on it while doing the motor but it was repaired under warranty again.

At 45000km we had a service check just before the warranty expired and found a stuffed wheel bearing - repaired under warranty.

The car has now done 78000km and the clutch hydraulics are totally stuffed.

Of the 10+ cars I have owned and I don't know how many thousand KM of driving over 40 years, I have never had problems with hydraulics before even in old cars. I have never had engines wear out in under 200000km, let alone 28000, I have replaced clutches - with something well over 100000kms on the clock - not 32000. Wheel bearings do wear out - but not at 45000km.

Modern cars are reputably a lot more reliable than older ones. They are plainly not designed to be serviced. This Holden Barina, (designed and/or manufactured in Europe by Opel I believe), is one that would not have had acceptable reliability 40 years ago, let alone in the 21st century.

Holden may have upped their game with newer models. They are designed and manufactured by Daewoo in Korea. Would I go to Daewoo to improve my product's image? Maybe that is all Holden can manage.