WHY you should MOT & service your classic car

Mark shows us what you need to check & look out for when preparing your classic VW for a MOT.

(00:00) So behind me on the ramp I've got John the architect's car, this is a 1970, 1600 Beetle. He uses his car on a daily basis and today I've got it in the shop and we're gonna go run through and do a full service on it and the idea of that is to show you guys at home what's entailed in doing a full service, so next time you can take your classic VW to your classic specialist you'll know what he's doing. So, the first part of any service is to drain the engine oil, it's the first thing we do and generally the last thing that we put back in after the service so,

(00:30) during the entirety of the whole service I will leave this drain in, so we get the maximum amount of dirty oil out, you can also use a bit of clean oil to go in through the top just to pull out that last bit of dirty oil so we'll probably do that as well as you can see I've got the drain bung out and the oil's drained the next thing is to actually take down our oil strainer which is here which is it held in with these nuts here, so that's our next job and then we can let the rest of that oil drain.

(01:02) So with the cover removed, I can now remove the actual oil strainer. We've got a gasket here, and I can tease it out with a screwdriver. I'll work my way around. We should take our oil strainer out. We can either clean these oil strainers out or just replace them and with a special hex tool, I can undo our gearbox drain and drain our gear oil. Now I can leave that draining while I carry on with the rest of the service. As you can see, I've got the front brake

(02:19) stripped out in fact, I've got all of the brakes stripped out all the way around, so going back to this front brake it wasn't working very well, so John was complaining of a pull to the right. We only had one brake shoe this side working because the wheel cylinder is seized apart from its bottom piston. Actually, works on the other side it's worse the wheel cylinder is seized on both Pistons, so that wasn't working at all. So out of the four brake shoes on the front John only had one working. The rear shoes have been doing over time

(02:48) to obviously compensate for the front brakes not working and I'll show you what's happened to those so when I got to this offside rear brake drum, and I went to remove it I couldn't actually get the hub nut undone so it just goes to show these brakes probably haven't been apart and looked at for some time hence them not working very well. I actually had to cut that hub nut off in the end, it was so tight that it snapped the knuckle on my breaker bar and even with our big knocker gun, it still wouldn't come off, so I had to use an angle

(03:16) grinder so it should have looked like this but by the time I finished it looked like this so this is our torque tool for undoing hub nuts, check this out, obviously we know the hub nut on a beetle on the rear is really tight, so I've got a ratchet goes into this part it's 11mm drive basically what we're doing is we're driving the force we put here is 10 times by the looks of it, and I can see the hub nut is starting to undo as we're walking around the tooth section well I'm quite impressed, that's really good I've never used one of these tools

(03:56) before, that works a treat, that's better than breaking your bar and that can actually undo that with my ratchet now, yeah so that's a really cool Tool uh to buy they're around about 130 pounds if you're doing a lot of these or if you own ones that you can take the drums on off plenty of times that is really easy so these are all our brake parts on the bench Now alarm Bells did ring when I took the drum off the front this side the reason being there was no brake dust inside the reason there is no brake dust inside

(04:28) because that's these wheels and all that and obviously the shoes haven't been doing anything for a long time so they're in the front brake shoes the rear brake shoes I've been doing all the work and as you can see they've overheated and actually cracked on both bits on both shoes same with the other side on the rear so these shoes are basically overheated and uh the lining is cracked so they're no good the rear drums were full of brake dust obviously because they were the only ones that were part working this side we only had one brake shoe

(05:05) working so again one brake shoe was cracked because it's overheated compensating to try and stop for the whole car so we're going to replace all the brake shoes and all the wheel cylinders also I noticed that the flexible brake hoses are fairly old too one was rubbed through on one side so we're going to change all four of those two so this part of the service our brake inspection so far we're about two and out of Two and a bit hours in I think just on the brakes I haven't touched the engine yet apart from drain the oil so this brake

(05:34) issue highlights why it's so important to have your car MOT’d even though your classic cars exempt from mot are a really good idea to get it tested and checked on a yearly basis so this side of the rear brakes is complete got a brand new flexi hose up there brand new set of brake shoes and obviously a brand new wheel cylinder so these are going to work really well now I've just got to go and do the other side  sponsor brakes we're all back together I was able to adjust them all and then bleed the system

(06:15) foreign the next stage was to remove that steering arm with the broken dust boots once the steering arm was on the bench it was really easy just to swap the boots over with a nice new fresh ones  the steering Armory fitted that was our steering completed next onto greasing the front beam which is very important a lot of people seem to forget that that front beam needs grease next was to fit a brand new oil strainer and I made sure the surfaces were absolutely as clean as I could make them before I refitted

(06:49) the first thing I need to do is get our valve clearances done I've removed the spark plug so it's easier for me to turn the engine over the valve clearances weren't too far out it was definitely worth doing because some were a little bit out of Tolerance but it was also really worthwhile to clean those rocker covers up and fit brand new gaskets as the previous ones were leaking also I'm going to take a look inside our distributor and see if we need a cap and a rotor arm I think we probably do uh yeah we're gonna put a new cap on

(07:26) that you can see that it's quite corroded on the terminals rotor arm while we're here it makes no sense not to do it we're going to put a new set of points and condenser on foreign serviceable item to do it's not too bad but I think let's start with a fresh one we're going to get our air filter oil bath off too for a clean out  so this air filter is an oil style bath air filter and what that does is the oil that's inside in the bath actually traps all the dirt and prevents it from going inside the engine so it needs to be

(08:07) changed fairly regularly so let's have a look as you can see the oil is fairly dirty so the oil has done its job and tracked all that dirt and prevent it from going into the engine so we need to clean this out make it nice and lovely and clean and fill it with fresh oil so I oh bath is nice and clean I've given that a good clean round got rid of all our dirty old oil the ghouls part of the air filter which is in here I've given that a good wash through too with some Degreaser that's dry so we need now is just to fill with some fresh oil so

(08:35) I've got 400 mL of fresh oil so we can pop that straight in the oil bath so our old bath is all back on up here our next step is the ignition side of it so I'm going to go through our distributor do our points condenser distributor cap and rotor arm and a nice fresh set of spark plugs then we can put up a drop of oil in it and then I'm going to change this fan belt and then we're ready to go so the easiest way to do our points and condenser is I'm just going to take the distributor out and do it on the bench

(08:59) and then I can check that all of our four points of our cam are working greatly  the new set of points fitted to our distributor I'm just going to test them and make sure that they work because I have put points in before and we haven't had any continuity and then the car won't start so it's always good to test it on the bench before you put it back in so we're just going to test continuity between Earth and the points themselves and then I can turn off and you can hear the beep my meter so I should get four beeps that

(09:41) means that we've got four points of contact on our camshaft on the distributor camshaft sorry the cam lobe and that opens and closes our points  foreign   just remember spark plugs don't always come with the correct Gap so this should be checked and adjusted and nothing wrong with a little drop of anti-seize Grease  thank you so to summarize this full service and inspection that we've just carried out in this 1970 Beetle obviously I started by dropping the oil for First Service

(10:45) item to do and then stripped out all the brakes to take a look and we found that the brakes were absolutely shot so the brake components we've replaced with Flexi hoses wheel cylinders and brake shoes on the front and the rear all the way around it'll flush through with brand new brake fluid on the front end we had a couple of little issues we had a little bit of play on the steering and that was down to the steering box and the arm that the Pitman arm is actually attached to the steering box it wasn't shimmed there should be a shim between

(11:14) the two and that stops the Pitman arm rising, so I've re-shimmed that so that's controlled our movement side to side also I noticed that the actual dust and dirt boots on the tracker lens have all split so remove the arm and replace the boots and once the engine was Stone Cold I was able to carry out the valve clearances and then refit those Rocker Box covers with some fresh gaskets and to finish off the engine service item things we've replaced the spark plugs distributor cap rotor arm a fresh set of points and condenser In Here Also we

(11:44) gave the air filter all bar some fresh oil give that a good clean out and we fit in some nice new air hoses too finished off with a fresh belt and of course refilled our engine oil and gearbox oil so our final piece of this service is to get the beetle down the floor and give it a run down the road and get those new brakes bedded in so that was test drive done all went really well pedal fills the brake pedal feels really nice John's got some brakes now I just had to adjust the idle speed when I've come back just because it's

(12:30) warmed up and where I've readjusted the ignition time and so forth but now it's lovely and I think now definitely deserves a good wash  so I hope you can see from the amount of work that we've carried out on this 1970 Beetle how important it is to get the car service regularly but most importantly mot tested every year even though these classic cars are MOT exempt this is a prime example of why it's a good idea to get them tested for whatever it costs 50 pounds to get your mot tested and that would have

(13:00) highlighted our brake problem a lot earlier, so the message from this video is get your car serviced, get MOT’d every year, get out and enjoy that sunshine as the spring's just around the corner and thanks for watching.