Are your rubbers in date?

Us classic nuts spend hours pouring over paintwork, surveying steel and caressing chrome, which is all well and good, but it overlooks the material that, in many cases, is sandwiched between adjoining components.

That material goes by the name of rubber and it is often this that prevents water ingress where it is not wanted, water egress when it should be safe inside and, most importantly, vehicles trundling safely down the highways and byways of the world.

Rubber provides connection between components, evens out gaps, insulating noise and electrical components, as well as transiting coolant and other fluids across chasms, twixt variable points such engine and saloon, body and axle.

Yet we pay little attention to it, until that is it fails.

Rusting ‘A’ posts from peaking windscreen seals, hot coolant spurting about an engine bay, a pool of oil on a newly laid driveway, pressurised petrol spraying onto a hot exhaust manifold or cherished classic stuffed into the Armco on a motorway. They are all avoidable situations.

If any rubber item on your car is more than 10 years from its date of manufacture, replace it. If that rubber item is a petrol hose, ensure that it is ethanol safe and, preferably, new. Tyres; check the four digit manufacturing date on the tyre wall. It reads as the the week of the year followed by the last two digits of the year of manufacture, for example 3216.

Over and out.

- Fuzz t