"Dylan Smith" wrote in message
...

You want to see unmaintainable?
Try a Jaguar XJ12 some time. Dragging things back towards an aviation
related theme, we're building a new winch for the glider club. Our old
one is a bit long in the tooth, and uses the (excellent) Jaguar XJ6 4.2
litre straight 6. A great engine that's virtually indestructable. But we
want to get a bit more power, so when an XJ12 showed up for scrap (a
garage had collapsed on it crushing the roof) we decided to go for a new
engine.

The V12 in the XJ12 is also a great engine. But in the process of
extracting it from the donor car, I had to wonder how routine services
were done. We'll have no problem maintaining it because we've got rid of
all the cruft (i.e. the car!) that surrounded the engine. But to get the
front two spark plugs out (a routine maintenance job), you have to take
the air conditioning compressor off! To get that off, in turn you have
to take off parts of the cruise control system. To get the AC compressor
off you would also have to discharge the AC system since the pipework
would all have to be disconnected - not flexible hoses. Changing the
spark plugs must have been an all day job - something on most other cars
would take fifteen minutes tops.


Why should routine maintenance require access to the spark plugs? The
maintenance schedule for my Toyota Corolla doesn't call for the spark plugs
to be changed until the 120,000 mile/96 month point. I don't know how long
it will take to change them, but even if it takes all day, one day every
eight years doesn't seem too bad to me.