As mentioned in my last post, I can’t forget the word that the mechanic said.
“Sir, Singam Siluthukinu Enthiduchi. The literal meaning of it is that “A Lion Woke up” and he continued to say “Kavalaya vidunga ottikinu ponga” means, “Don’t worry, Drive it and Go”.
It was like a Rajinikanth introduction song in a Tamil movie, my mind was full of butterflies flying here and there and very special feeling that I had… that was the day I first drove a Classic and also as an Owner of the great machine.cheers:
A week passed, I didn’t touch the jeep, as I wanted to really collect more info about availability of spare parts and mechanics etc. One thought I had in my mind was that, I would never go for used / second hand stuffs for my Jeep in this time. Also collected little bit of information about cosmetics on the Classic. I had noticed that the previous owner had done few of modifications to the Classic; I wished to restore it to the original shape without hurting my pocket.
Anyway it was time to understand the body and mechanical condition of the Jeep, so in the subsequent week I took the Jeep to another mechanic whom I got introduced through the auto consultant to help me doing up the initial cleaning of the jeep. We did a clear water wash; application of grease, oil change and few parts for breaks were changed. Also I bought a new battery, unfortunately not a company one, as I knew the Jeep restoration was going to take a long time. I didn’t like to invest heavily on putting a branded one when the Jeep may be stationed in a garage most of the time.
So after doing the above, the Jeep was taken only for highway ride upto 200kms in 3 days. Slowly, I started getting to know the condition of steering (hell of wobbling), non-working 4WD levers, lots of rattling sound and so on.
I started to keep a notebook dedicated to note down all the known issues without fixing a single one. One weekend early morning I took my Jeep to ECR (East Cost Road) and drove it towards my house in a connection road that runs between ECR and OMR (Old Mahabalipuram Road), It was really a deadly ride as the Jeep was totally on wobble mode like no control and I was hitting 60+ kmph. The body tub of my Jeep was in totally worn out condition, one could break any part of the body just with a simple kick. So I decided to run the Jeep in a gutter to see if any rattling parts were falling apart.
The Jeep was speeding up to hit the gutter and I prepared myself to accept any major damages to the Jeep. I hit the gutter with an explosive sound from the rear side of the Jeep and following this the Jeep jumped out of the gutter and stalled. Woah… It was actually more than what I expected, as the whole rear body tub was broken apart from the chassis and sat on the tyres.
I was not really worried about it; I had some good amount of rope and wooden pieces etc as I was expecting to break something on the Jeep. So managed to bring up the Jeep’s body tub with the help of some local people and put it on the chassis with bit of rope knots.
With this exercise, I found almost all the issues that needed to be attended. I had 4 pages of the notebook filled with issues found on my Classic.
I started collecting all possible cosmetic fitments for my Jeep that are either worn out or damaged due to prolonged exposure to open sky.
Mahindra Dealerships in Chennai are pro Scorpio or Bolero people, I was in a doubt if they could take my jeep restoration at this condition. I was not sure of which mechanic would be doing my Jeep work.
Hence I was searching for a good garage to host my project Mahindra Classic restoration. I didn’t want to go to Pudupet since I was not confident because of the suspected involvement of used spare parts and disorganized service charges.
Although I made up my mind not to go to Pudupet for my project, I went there to take quotation of the total work, so as to compare my future negotiations and benchmarking of garages.
Finally I took a weird decision of doing the Mahindra Classic restoration project…
to be continued...