X-1R to the rescue

It’s not the first and won’t be the last time that we write about the importance of regularly servicing your car and changing your oil. The truth that we don’t want to hear is that manufacturers’ recommended service intervals are often too long, especially when we who live in the city drive in ‘abnormal’ driving conditions more often than not; stop-start traffic, extreme hot or cold weather, frequent short trips…sound familiar?

Let’s admit it. Most of us find sending our cars for servicing, even at the recommended 5,000 or 10,000km intervals, a tedious chore. David Smith, an expatriate living in Myanmar, recently wrote in about his experience with his rental:

“I admit I had not been paying much attention recently to my rental car, a 2-year-old 2.0-litre Toyota Allion. It’s on a long-term lease and has now been with me for close to 18 months.

In the past two weeks, I noticed a bit of a rattle and thought it was something loose and ignored it. It got a little worse and I realized I had not had it serviced since the first week I got it, when I had also added a bottle of X-1R (Engine Treatment).”

Uh-oh. Sounds like trouble, but fortunately he had used one of X-1R’s leading products. Read on…

“The first thing my mechanic did when I delivered the car to him to check the rattle and give the old girl a service was of course take a look at the oil. When they opened her up, it was bone dry and they got a shoebox full of dust out of it.”

The horror! This is the sort of thing our nightmares are made of.

“I already had my suspicions that the rattle was the timing chain, which he confirmed, but I also now feared I had really buggered the engine. Thinking back to when the rattle started, I realized I had been driving around in 40-degree heat, sitting in endless traffic and in the worst conditions, but it never once overheated. I mean, not once did I ever see the temperature gauge go over normal and the mechanic confirmed it was working properly. There was no heat damage to the cylinder head or gaskets.”

David has been driving around in what manufacturers would describe as ‘severe driving conditions’. It’s almost a miracle that the engine did not break down.

“The timing chain was replaced, new filters and engine bolted back together, oiled and serviced, and the car is running like new, with its respectable 160,000km showing on the odometer…wow.

I may be a plonker but definitely a lucky one - lucky that I used X-1R a year and a half ago. I cannot put it down to anything else.”

Well, David, we wouldn’t call you a plonker because you did have the smarts to use the X-1R Engine Treatment. Not that we advocate that you can use X-1R’s products and then skip servicing your car until the absolute last minute, but if X-1R could keep David’s Allion from irreparable damage, imagine what it can do for your car.