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So, I am now officially carless. On the way to work a couple of weeks ago my car began to feel like the engine was missing – it was stuttering and feeling a bit lethargic. A few miles down the road it began to make a squealing noise, like there was someone on my backseat with long nails and a blackboard. As I neared work, with less than a mile to go, the engine really began to tighten up and I was having to toe-heel to keep the car going. I pulled over not wanting to destroy the engine thinking it might be an oil problem as I had once before.

Dad kindly drove the 30 miles to see if he could fix it at the road-side. He had an idea what it was and didn’t look happy. He suggested the best route would be to get some benefit from the bags of cash I’d pushed at the AA and get them to recuse me. In 20 minutes a (very nice) man arrived and started the car. He got out.

“Next stop for this is the scrapyard,” he said.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“The big-end’s gone.” he shrugged.

‘The big-end’s gone’? Sounds like a comedy sketch and the sort of thing your dodgy garage mechanic might say.

(Science bit): Every piston in the car has a rod connecting it to the crank shaft (the bit that makes the wheels turn) and at the connection to the crank-shaft there’s a bearing called the big-end. Most cars have at least 4 of these, so it’s a bit of bad grammar when they say the big-end’s gone; they mean one of the big-ends has gone. When they say gone, they don’t mean it’s packed up and taken a holiday in Barbados, they mean it’s knackered.

This is apparently a big job to fix, mostly because a knackered big-end knackers up the crank-shaft for you, and that’s a really expensive bit of metal.

So, after a great deal of consideration, last week my poor old car went up on eBay for spares or repair. I said in my listing I was hoping someone could take it and re-use bits of it. The reduce, re-use, recycle mantra still wafts around my empty head from time-to-time. Anyway, seems like the guy who’s bought it (for £74 no less) is simply going to scrap it. Seems a lot of money and effort to simply scrap it, but scrap yards pay money for scrap metal, which is usually sent to steel processing plants to be recycled into more cars, or whatever. So, at least it’s being recycled, but recycling is expensive (environmentally) compared to re-use, so I’m rather upset that the buyer is doing this. After all, I could’ve just taken it down the scrap-yard and grabbed the money if I didn’t give a shit about where it went.

Oh well. So long, old car.