Car Maintenance

Finally got around to stripping down the engine on the Matiz today to sort out the water leak. Turns out the inlet manifold gasket was kaput as I'd suspected, in fact it looks rather as though it has never been right since the car was built. Successive people have poured gallons of RadWeld into the system in an attempt to fix it until the other day it all suddenly let go at once.

The moral to this story? By all means use a temporary repair to fix something temporarily, but remember to do the permanent fix as soon as you can.

Or in other words, a stitch in time saves nine.

Incidentally, for a tiny car with an even tinier engine, the Matiz is weirdly tricky to work on. To remove this gasket I had to take of the air inlet, the fuel injectors, half the wiring harness, several miles of rubber tube, multiple brackets, and the throttle cable. Not helpful.