Shady tree mechanics

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My 2001 Skoda Fabia workhorse started acting up today.  It is a very reliable wee car with 155,000 miles on the clock now.  The engine is the simple and tough 1.9 SDI diesel so there are few things to go wrong with it and the same engine in the Octavia is much sought after by taxi companies where the cars go on to 300,000 miles in some cases.  Anyway, it was doing the kangaroo diesel routine again and the usual suspect for this is the exhaust gas recirculation valve (EGR) which becomes clogged up with soot especially if there is poor fuel or crud in the tank.  It's a 30-minute job to clean it out with some carb cleaner, but you need a 6mm hex bit to get it off and when I went looking for mine I realised I had lost it down in the engine the last time I did the same job.  Clever.

Anyway, after some standard swearing at self and some pondering it dawned on me that I have a wee box full of Allen keys that I have kept from flat-pack furniture jobs and the like and there were a few 6mm keys in there.  5 minutes with the grinder almost setting myself on fire in a shower of sparks (health and safety?) and I had a neat little 6mm hex bit and Robert est son oncle (as Albert Camus said accepting a lift from his publisher).

I dedicate this post to my late father who never bought a tool if he could bodge a good one up instead.

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