Winter car repairs

December 19, 2022

Due to the weather, a couple of faults developed with the car, a Vauxhall Mokka. The first was a re-occurrence from the other year. When the temperature dropped to -7°C the handbrake locked on when starting off in the morning and rear wheel dragged rather than spun. I don’t know if there is anything we do to stop this from happening, but it seems to free itself. Perhaps should have paid attention when watching “ice road truckers”.

The second issue is that the boot (trunk) door switch stopped working. After removing the internal panelling, unplugging the switch and replugging it, it started working again. But only for one trip and then it stopped again.

My first thought was that it was getting loose so I taped up the connector. But that also didn’t last. So I took it to the garage who swapped us in a new switch. But after a few days that also failed.

So I took the panels off again and had another look. This time I took the whole switch out. That needs a long 10mm socket and also some small clips at the bottom of the switch need pushing in. Initially I thought access was restricted but it is possible to access these from the side. Once the switch was out, I realised there was some movement in the 2 parts so I took that apart with a cross headed screwdriver. There were thin foam gaskets around the switch parts and around the seal to the outside and there was already a ton of dirt on the switch so these were obviously not sealing it to the outside world.

So I cleaned up the switch and used some Sugru to make a new seal for each of the 2 joints. It was then bolted back in place and plugged in. Testing it as I went. Hopefully this will solve the issue, given the Scottish weather, I don’t think we’ll need to wait long to have some wet roads to test it on.

My final issue was one of the washer nozzles wasn’t spraying correctly. After the problems with the Ford Fiesta, I wanted to fix that ASAP. On inspection there was a small strand of some kind of plastic stuck in the nozzle. Not sure what that was or how it got there. One speculation was it was part of the brush from the carwash. I removed it with some fine pliers and the nozzles squirted just fine. The nozzles on the Mokka are tucked away so it seems unlikely, so a bit of a mystery.

By Andy from Workshopshed 2 Comments

  Posted in: Repairs