FORD-er love of God!

For a very long time, maybe 15 years or so, I’ve been of the opinion that Citroen are [one of] the worlds best at making components in their cars ridiculously difficult to access, and certainly the worst that I’ve worked on. I came to this conclusion through abnormally high rates of skin loss, scuffing, and cussing whilst removing yet another irrelevant part out of an engine bay, just to get access to some other part that should have been easy.

However, this weekend I’ve been working on a car that is so badly designed that it beggars belief. The amazing thing about this car is that it’s a very very common car in Australia, and it’s a Ford.

The first time I discussed the ignition problem that this car has with Andrew (it’s Andrew’s), I asked him if he’d checked the distributor. He said he didn’t think it had one. I thought that unlikely, even ones with electronic ignition seem to have a distributor. But on first examination, it appeared he was right. Then I recognised it from a head gasket job that I’d done on an earlier model of this car for Auntie Sandra, and sure enough when I looked under the inlet manifold, there it was!

So answer me this: Why would you consider putting a part like a distributor underneath an inlet manifold, especially an inlet manifold that is peppered with injectors, pipes and cables, so that it is barely possible to even touch the thing, let alone get the top off to have a look at it. The coil… well you can’t even see that! It’s behind the distributor under the manifold at the very back of the engine!

And you have to take the top off the manifold, before you can access the bolts that hold it on to the head…and even then it’s a question on one bolt of using an open ended spanner with an offset head, and alternating the way round you hold it so that you have to take the spanner off and put it back on again 12 times to get one revolution of the bolt.

So the award for gits of the decade in terms of car maintenance has been taken by Ford – congratulations to the designers. I wonder if any of them ever do their own car maintenance?