Nicaragua with a sick car!

 

The day started with Nigel and Chris trying to mend the Lagonda once and for all. This time they tried the valve clearances and found one bent push rod and two closed valves. This sounded promising and by the time the police arrived to escort us to Esteli they had almost finished. Sadly it was to no avail, the Lagonda is still struggling with power and is getting increasingly hot.

 

 

 

 

We set off at around 11:00am, straight into the eye of the Saturday Managuan traffic storm! Without the help of Captain Larry and his team we would have taken hours to have exited the city but with his help and full blown “blues and twos” we zipped through the traffic like a Presidential cavalcade.

 

The road to Esteli is increasingly mountainous and as usual the police travelled too slow for our cars (not that they were to know). There were lots of long steady climbs through dry increasingly mountainous roads and to cap it all off we got stuck behind a slow moving truck just as we started our longest and final climb. Just what these old car don’t really like. We persevered as our police escort tagged about five times. Ham constantly jumping out of his car to check the temperature with his laser thermometer, having broken the thermocouple in Boquete. Nigel anxious about his lack of power and his car getting increasingly hot. The Rolls ploughing on remorselessly.

 

Finally we had Esteli in our sights and the more gentle run into the town was an considerable relief to all of us. Once there we put the cars into the dusty car park that the hotel uses and turned our attention to Nigel’s Lagonda once again.

 

The compression tester informed us that there a broken head gasket between cylinders 5 and 6, the thinnest part of the block. At last we know what Nigel’s problem is and we can get on and fix it.

 

First nut off at 16:00 and we finally drew stumps at about 20:00. We had removed the cylinder head, cleaned the block and cylinder head of all the old gasket (an incredibly long and tedious job, but like painting and decorating replacing a cylinder head gasket is all in the preparation!) and then replaced the blown head gasket, then the cylinder head itself and the rockers were put back in place. By this time it was pitch dark and we drew stumps for the night. We definitely knew what was wrong and we can now complete the repair. We will have to wait to finish the job tomorrow morning but I do believe that the solution to Nigel’s car is insight.

 

We will finish the job tomorrow and then off to another border crossing.