A sticky ending

How many of you know what sparkplugs do? How to change an oil filter? What to do if your wheels fall off? Not many, I'm guessing. Nothing to be ashamed of, mind.

Most modern cars are so technologically advanced you need a degree in computer programming to open the bonnet. They're designed to be inaccessible so normal folk can't fix them without owning their own labs and cranes and lasers. Not in a dastardly plan to keep mechanics in business, but to stop have-a-go cretins like me ruining them.

Until recently, I knew about as much about the inner machinations of a car as I do about the Mongolian taxation regime. I used to think a manifold was a type of table napkin. I'd look under the bonnet and where mechanics would see carburettors and alternators, I'd see thingummybobs and yokiemajokes. Which is risky for the owner of a 31-year-old car requiring as much attention as a high-maintenance mistress. Albeit at considerably greater cost.

I'm not a complete eejit, I went into classic car ownership with my eyes - and wallet - open. I knew the Duchess would let me down some day, leave me stranded under a motorway overpass, fending off feral kids with a tyre brace as I waited for the AA man to come and laugh at my naivety.

But I also knew I had a parachute in the form of the active group of Beemer nuts operating around Dublin who've proven only too happy to help me when I was flummoxed. A decent shower, they didn't even chortle any louder than strictly necessary at my wide-eyed incompetence when I once turned up at a meet with lugnuts so loose I narrowly avoided arriving on three wheels.

Useful as they are, I needed to be able to stand on my own two feet to avoid having to stand on my own two feet too often, if you get my drift. So, off to Tom Curley's barn in Kildare for an edification in the art of basic maintenance.

Luckily the BMW 2002 - for that is the Duchess' species - is stuck together like Lego. Even bumbling neophytes like myself can learn basic tasks.

My primary motivation was a leaking brake master cylinder. I was greeted with a puddle of brake fluid in the driver's footwell whenever I got in the car. The man who diagnosed it ruefully told me of a chap who had the same problem, left it too long and ended up with dissolved shoes. Something a man like myself who only owns two pairs can't afford. We changed the oil and oil filter first. This, mechanics will tell you, is a difficult job well worth the several hundred euro they'll charge. They are lying. Anyone with axle stands, a wrench and a bucket can do it. Even me.

Next, the brakes. Nightmare. Brake fluid is caustic stuff. It will eat through your paintwork like a pitbull through a ham.

We replaced the cylinder with one that was, unbeknownst to us, knackered, having to cannibalise another from one of Tom's herd of rusting 02s to finish the job, spilling enough toxic gloop in the process to warrant a visit from the EPA. Maybe this mechanics lark isn't so easy after all, I reckoned as I watched my shoes dissolve. Still, we did it. (OK, so Tom did it.)

I left feeling I'd achieved something, that I was no longer a complete buffoon. While I don't think I'll be removing the AA from speed dial just yet, at least I know what all the thingummybobs and yokiemajokes are now.

I'm painfully aware a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. My plan to install an anti-roll bar myself could be a disaster. Being flattened under an elderly German is not quite how I envisaged meeting my end. Even if I do manage it, there's no guarantee I won't botch it, leaving the Duchess handling like an octopus on ice skates.

Wish me luck. I may need it.