the full story, part 4
The drive over to the workshops had been interesting.
Followed by my daughter-in-law to give me a lift back and as contingency in
case of breakdown, for the first time in my life I drove a ten-ton,
36-foot-long, eight-foot-wide vehicle on a public road. I had never got her
above 30mph before.
It was a cold and windy day and thanks to a missing gaiter on the throttle pedal there was a vicious draft going straight up my right trouser-leg! By the time I was out on the M11 I was struggling with the steering, but just assumed this was de rigueur for a bus of this age. Another first – 50mph+ mixed in with heavy traffic…very scary. Probably the most alarming moment was judging the deceleration off the slip road and selecting the right position in the lane for the sharp bend at the exit.
But ‘Mary’ was now in the allegedly safe hands of a firm of professional commercial vehicle engineers who had greeted me with confidence. It was agreed they would do the necessary minimum to get through the MoT, then I would be off to Cyril Kenzie for an initial assessment of what would be required for the bodywork.
Retrospect is a wonderful thing. As I couldn’t take the vehicle anywhere without the MoT, naively I thought passing that test would cover all the mechanical side of things, leaving just the cosmetics.
Communications with the ‘professionals’ broke down very quickly. They were clearly up to their ears in fleet work and there was a different excuse every time I called. The fact that I was a customer paying the same rates as all the others cut no ice. What they had initially assessed as a quick and easy job may well have been easy (we’ll never know), but it certainly wasn’t quick.
I should explain that due to the particular equipment needed for buses and coaches, this firm didn’t carry out the MoT themselves; they prepared for testing by another local, very well known specialist firm.
Fortunately my day job is at its busiest in December and January so my frustration was suppressed. But come February 1st I got on the case to be given the slightly concerning news that after the initial expected MoT failure (which has the effect of creating a list of what needs to be done), the return match was also a failure. This can only mean that the examiner on the second test must have picked up issues that the first examiner missed, which has worrying implications for consistency of safety standards.
Finally I got the call. Two months and one day after taking my coach in for a ‘quick and easy’ MoT, I collected my bus and her new MoT certificate…only to be told by Bob that the alternator still needed attention. So the one thing that needed to be fixed above all else had not been touched in 63 days.
Bob assured me that she was starting and stopping just fine and, as I had booked to go and see Cyril Kenzie the next day (who has an on-call electrics specialist), I took delivery. It was heading towards dusk on a Friday.
The main thing was to get back in time to pop over to the post office and get the tax disc, which I did just before they closed. I was made up; I now had my very own bus complete with tax, insurance and MoT.
Of course I had to take her out for a spin with my wife Rosie, who has been very supportive of this project all along; but within 15 minutes of being out, the headlights were dimming so I had to get us home as soon as possible. I parked up outside our house and once again got that awful feeling as I turned the key…she wouldn’t stop! I switched everything off but still there was not enough power to operate the fuel shut-off. My head in a whirl, all I could think of was to get the same firm out on a breakdown but by the time Rosie had popped indoors to get their phone number, fortunately ‘Mary’ found enough power from somewhere to shut the engine down.
Two months and one day; and apart from two bits of official paper – MoT and Tax – essentially nothing had changed. When I did eventually get the bill (perhaps unsurprisingly over a month later), effectively by their own admission they had done very little; recut two tyres, replaced wiper blades, adjusted headlights. To this day I have had no evidence that they did anything mechanical, making the MoT fail-fail-pass business very worrying indeed. What did the third examiner NOT see that the first two had?
I closed the bus up for the night but did at least manage to get Bob to agree to come out the next day with two new batteries. Even that dragged on into the mid afternoon with Bob eventually refusing to answer my mobile and it was only a call to the MD, himself somewhere miles away, that resulted in action.
Nevertheless I was at least in possession of a vehicle that would start and stop so I could now get to Cyril’s to see what he thought of my beautiful bus…
It was a cold and windy day and thanks to a missing gaiter on the throttle pedal there was a vicious draft going straight up my right trouser-leg! By the time I was out on the M11 I was struggling with the steering, but just assumed this was de rigueur for a bus of this age. Another first – 50mph+ mixed in with heavy traffic…very scary. Probably the most alarming moment was judging the deceleration off the slip road and selecting the right position in the lane for the sharp bend at the exit.
But ‘Mary’ was now in the allegedly safe hands of a firm of professional commercial vehicle engineers who had greeted me with confidence. It was agreed they would do the necessary minimum to get through the MoT, then I would be off to Cyril Kenzie for an initial assessment of what would be required for the bodywork.
Retrospect is a wonderful thing. As I couldn’t take the vehicle anywhere without the MoT, naively I thought passing that test would cover all the mechanical side of things, leaving just the cosmetics.
Communications with the ‘professionals’ broke down very quickly. They were clearly up to their ears in fleet work and there was a different excuse every time I called. The fact that I was a customer paying the same rates as all the others cut no ice. What they had initially assessed as a quick and easy job may well have been easy (we’ll never know), but it certainly wasn’t quick.
I should explain that due to the particular equipment needed for buses and coaches, this firm didn’t carry out the MoT themselves; they prepared for testing by another local, very well known specialist firm.
Fortunately my day job is at its busiest in December and January so my frustration was suppressed. But come February 1st I got on the case to be given the slightly concerning news that after the initial expected MoT failure (which has the effect of creating a list of what needs to be done), the return match was also a failure. This can only mean that the examiner on the second test must have picked up issues that the first examiner missed, which has worrying implications for consistency of safety standards.
Finally I got the call. Two months and one day after taking my coach in for a ‘quick and easy’ MoT, I collected my bus and her new MoT certificate…only to be told by Bob that the alternator still needed attention. So the one thing that needed to be fixed above all else had not been touched in 63 days.
Bob assured me that she was starting and stopping just fine and, as I had booked to go and see Cyril Kenzie the next day (who has an on-call electrics specialist), I took delivery. It was heading towards dusk on a Friday.
The main thing was to get back in time to pop over to the post office and get the tax disc, which I did just before they closed. I was made up; I now had my very own bus complete with tax, insurance and MoT.
Of course I had to take her out for a spin with my wife Rosie, who has been very supportive of this project all along; but within 15 minutes of being out, the headlights were dimming so I had to get us home as soon as possible. I parked up outside our house and once again got that awful feeling as I turned the key…she wouldn’t stop! I switched everything off but still there was not enough power to operate the fuel shut-off. My head in a whirl, all I could think of was to get the same firm out on a breakdown but by the time Rosie had popped indoors to get their phone number, fortunately ‘Mary’ found enough power from somewhere to shut the engine down.
Two months and one day; and apart from two bits of official paper – MoT and Tax – essentially nothing had changed. When I did eventually get the bill (perhaps unsurprisingly over a month later), effectively by their own admission they had done very little; recut two tyres, replaced wiper blades, adjusted headlights. To this day I have had no evidence that they did anything mechanical, making the MoT fail-fail-pass business very worrying indeed. What did the third examiner NOT see that the first two had?
I closed the bus up for the night but did at least manage to get Bob to agree to come out the next day with two new batteries. Even that dragged on into the mid afternoon with Bob eventually refusing to answer my mobile and it was only a call to the MD, himself somewhere miles away, that resulted in action.
Nevertheless I was at least in possession of a vehicle that would start and stop so I could now get to Cyril’s to see what he thought of my beautiful bus…