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Old Aug 5th, 2006, 01:54   #8
peteS40
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Any of the possible things that are wrong with it, well certainly I would imagine it could get a lot nosier! I would start to worry when you get the vibration, certainly any of the possible things could cause quite a bit of vibration in time, felt through the whole car or the steering wheel.

I'm a bit like I'm guessing you are, which is that if there is anything wrong I want to get it sorted. But if you can tolerate the noise - and obviously it is not going to make the problem get better, it will just mean it is getting worse - then most probably you can run it for some time, at least until the MOT is needed. Alright, some people are going to come along and start talking about safety issues and obviously it is impossible for me to know just from reading what you put about what the problem is and how bad it is, but all I will say is that a lot of these sort of things can make so much noise they seem worse than they are.

I remember we used to have an old Fiesta and it needed a n/s/f wheel bearing for ages, you'd drive it and it would rumble like crazy and I swear it used to feel like the wheel was literally about to drop off. Of course it wasn't, and if you checked it for play it never really felt very bad at all. In time the job got done and then it was fine.

Another example was my old Renault, which one day suddenly started making a right racket from the diff which was just not worth fixing as integral to the tranmission - an auto! In those days my step-dad ran his garage out of a unit and he had ramps in there, we put it on one of those to check it out and you could quite clearly see the play in one driveshaft, by hand you could lever it back and forth. But you never felt it vibrate in the car, and my step-dad said he'd seen loads of old escorts get much worse than that. I still drove it around for about another 3 months until the MOT expired, but as there were about a million other things wrong with it as well I then scrapped it. Well, tell a lie, I actually shoved it in the garage for ages and declared it SORN and then finally took action and got round to scrapping it. That car was a money pit too, it didn't cost much to buy but things went wrong with it one after another and it got to the point where I had to keep fixing it because I'd put so much money into it, you see I know where it can go when it gets like this. In the end I ran it into the ground though... I think it did about 170,000 miles nearly in the end: I say "think", because the speedo stopped working at 137,800 odd (I used to get quite good at converting engine revs into mph to avoid getting done on gatsos!! - BTW it was an internal fault in the transmission so no point in trying to fix with e.g new speedo cable).

Pete
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