Jacqueline's 3rd routine service

Date : September 30th 2006
Time : 9:30am

It's been long since I bring my Charade for service, poor old Jacquline, after the previous hard run in the SSO, there hasn't been any real maintenance work done on her. So now that my pay is in, I decided to bring her to her doctor for a routine check up, also to ask for diagnostic for the recent clutch slipping which occured on every gear during high acceleration (Wide Open Throttle-WOT).
So in this bright saturday, my gal is working, technically I'm free in the morning, lazily driving Jacq to Butterworth, then I relay the problem to my old trusted mechanic and he put things in motion.

Itenary :

1. Change black oil + oil filter
2. Clutch slippin for no apparent reason
3. Strange sound coming out from the air cond belt area
4. Minor improvement for my car?

So for item 1, after draining all the old engine oil out, I noticed the black heavy sludge from my oil sump area, immediately I know I have tortured Jacqueline far beyond normal torment. Then I check back my service slip.... found out that I have over-run 2000km on her, on semi-synth (7000km limit)!!! How can someone who is so fond of cars missed out this point? What am I thinking? Trying for the Guiness World of Record for the longest journey on Semi-Synth?! OK, my fault, promise won't happen again coz I will use the service sticker from now on. (Note : The bubble from the oil indicates the viscousity is critical)

Item 2 is very stupid, all the mechanic do was adjust the manual clutch cable length and end of story! This is because my manual transmission car was running on clutch plate and not pressure plate, hence there is no automated system to re-compensate during clutch expanding -.-" This is the reason I lost to that stupid BMW the other day during full acceleration...

Item 3 solved after 2 hours of replacing the power steering belt and some modification on the 'tapak' of the compressor (due to the unit has a slight bent which cause the belt to came out from the supposed area).

Item 4 was a recommendation of a better spark plug for my car. True enough to the kaki mod spirit, I went ahead and installed Golden Lodge spark plug (the type without spark plating) as my old spark plug had deteriorated into a state of dismal (blowback current and non-equal plate area). Many people do not believe how this spark works, so it's normal when I explain this methodolgy to people out there and they dismiss this as hoax or marketing gimmick.

Technically the spark plug operate by shooting lighting into air (without electro plate), cool if you watch the demo unit.

Just as my luck wasn't bad enough, I saw every car owner's nightmare... The destruction of the perfectly threaded tyre...

Saw anything different ?

Yup, a small crap had punctured my cute Yokohama Advan Neova AD07 in the middle. And additional RM5 gone because of this 3cm small piece of crap!

All in all it's a good thing that it doesn't incur thousands on my clutch slippage, and also less problem from the engine. This way I can have more money for other beneficial things instead of Jacqueline all by herself :P

So who's wanna get smoke by me?