Downward spiral

Walking the path of the serial tinkerer isn’t all roses.  Quite often what you think should be a simple job goes pear-shaped quickly.  For me it’s often caused by the line between this bolt will move if I just get a bit more leverage on it and bol***ks, that’s the head rounded off.  Simple job gone bad.

I like doing the basic servicing of the Tinker and Fix cars myself - oil change, air and fuel filters, that sort of thing.  It's a combination of actually enjoying it, and being tight (service costs at a garage add up when you have four cars to take care of). We’ve got a 2005 Mini Cooper which the dealer we bought it from gave us 3 years free servicing on.  That’s recently come to an end, so it was time to do it myself for the first time.

Find the sump plug - get out a decent quality 13mm spanner and promptly round of the head.  The downward spiral begins.

What followed was several hours of swearing, spread over two days so I got to fester on the issue overnight,  and the use of virtually every bodge method I know -  apart welding another bolt to the head. 

Then all of a sudden it turns and you have several seconds of dread as you see whether the thread has stripped.

There should be a word to describe that relief when you find it hasn’t.