Let the games begin!
Injury or no injury, after forking out a small fortune on a motorhome, the Big Ireland Run is on
The mechanic stopped rolling his cigarette and looked up at me. “Basically,” he said. “You’d have to be an idiot to buy that van.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. After weeks of searching we’d finally found a motorhome that suited our needs, at a price we could afford. Yes, it was 20 years old, but it had just had £3,000 spent on it fixing all the advisories mentioned in its recent MOT. Except one. “General undercarriage corrosion due to age,” it said. That was still there. Unfixed.
I googled whether it was OK to buy a motorhome with ‘general corrosion due to age’ on the MOT, and the range of opinions it brought up was endless, from “you can easily just spray it”, to “it’s a death trap”. I rang up a few garages to ask what they thought and they said pretty much the same thing - it all depended on how bad the corrosion was, and where it was.
I’d taken some photos, so I went to see my regular mechanic, who said he didn’t know much about motorhome corrosion, and he sent me to a body-parts expert around the corner. He glanced at my blurry photos of the underside of the motorhome and said, “it looks like nothing”. But he told me to go around another corner - I had no idea there were so many extra hidden corners on the Totnes industrial estate - to another body-parts guy. One who did loads of stuff with camper vans, apparently.
This third guy, in the furthest away, most hidden garage, looked me up and down and straight away spotted himself a customer who clearly had no clue when it came to rusty old motorhomes. A customer to whom he could hold court. And hold court he did, telling me an endless line of horror stories about people who’d bought old vans and then got the shock of their lives when they’d brought them in to him. “Surface rust?” “Pah! The whole thing falls apart when you so much as breathe on it.”
He strode around like King Lear as he recounted rusty van tragedy after rusty van tragedy. And then, stopping mid roll-up for affect, he told me to do myself a favour, and don’t buy the van.
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