Die Reise nach Wien – ii
July 18th, 2026
“I wouldn’t take that out if it was made of gold”
The evening of our arrival consisted of a welcome home for my girlfriend and a buffet. For me, meeting the family and at last a good night’s sleep – but the state of the car weighed heavily on my mind and the following days were devoted to its further repair.
My two week stay in Vienna involved spending the first few days underneath the car in a garage pit made available by a friend of the family. The missing fourth gear had become a priority being one of many items preventing any chance of a return to England in that vehicle, and I could not afford another.
With few instructions beyond the Haynes manual I removed the gearbox to try and gain some idea what was wrong with it. Removing a side panel revealed the stuck selector rod and the spring driven plunger holding it in place.
From memory I was able to move the third and fourth speed selector rod back into its original position before reassembling the gear box but then made a fundamental error by hitting the rod from the aft end driving it clean through the front gearbox cover, a fact whose results only became apparent when, having reassembled the vehicle, I was driving it across the garage on the way out as I thought, only to be stopped by shouting that there was oil pouring out on the floor. Back over the pit we went.
The problem was that I didn’t have a spare, it was a common car in England but not in Vienna, and old, so how to find a spare gearbox front cover?
Many frantic telephone calls were made by others in German to try and find an old Morris Minor in Vienna and one was located. The owner was somehow persuaded that we wanted to buy the whole gearbox but could only afford the front cover at this stage which by some diplomatic subterfuge was obtained.
I fitted the replacement cover without further damage and having restored the gear rods and detent pins to their respective positions while ensuring that the initial cause of the loss of fourth gear could not recur.
[Having given the matter some considerable additional thought I now believe that I removed the plunger pin from the forward end of the third and fourth speed selector rod in order that this could not happen again. Third gear would have been likely to drop out without a detent pin in place, but keeping my hand on the gear lever would have prevented this and likewise in fourth gear. I think owing to the age of the gearbox I kept my hand on the gear lever for most of the journey following what had happened.]
The entire exercise took at least two, if not three days of that first week. I have no diary of the period and so memory alone will have to suffice. The garage owner was in turn patient, amused, frustrated, and eventually relieved when I left the garage along with the offending vehicle.
The greatest problem being resolved we moved on to the minor (forgive the pun) ones. The water pump had been noisy all along, was easily extracted at least on this vehicle, being at the front of the engine and all that was required was to find another, in a country where as with the gearbox, the car was not common.
Once again my helpful friends located a source being a breakers yard called AutoMetzker (car butcher) who had a 1960s Mini, with a similar engine to our Morris Minor and we drove to the outskirts of the city to spend an exhausting afternoon trying to remove a water pump from this Mini.
“I wouldn’t take that out if it was made of gold”
At one stage the site owner shouted across the yard the above line and given how difficult the pump was to access in the Mini I can understand his feelings. Whereas on the Minor the pump was at the front of the engine on top, such was the design and transverse fitting of the Mini engine the pump was at the front close to the radiator but lower down necessitating removal of the radiator. Long story short we left with a silent pump.
There remained the problem of the low front suspension. I had exhausted my goodwill at the garage so couldn’t reasonably return there, and determined to alter the suspension in the courtyard of the apartment block we were staying in. This was a reputational risk since the yard was common to the other flats and home to the family of my girlfriend but it had to be done, and was at least a quiet process and not an oily one.
The Haynes manual suggested removing both front wheels and knocking the suspension arms forward off the splined torsion bars and replacing the arms at a different position on the splines to lower the position at which the wheels touched the road thus raising the car body. Given some experimentation (off, check, rotate, on, check) it worked. I even managed to get them level. Now at last the sump was clear of the ground even though the car looked a bit odd with its “nose in the air” something that was to lead us into trouble at Dover.
After a week in Vienna I had a functioning car again with a chance of getting back to London. Perhaps I took the air filter and a dynamo bracket off the Mini at AutoMetzker I really don’t remember, but I do hope so.
This left time for some recreation at last. Vineyard visits outside the city, seeing storks nesting on rooftops, rides on the S-Bahn, a concert in an open air venue (Schuman A minor piano concerto), a visit to the Hungarian border to see the watchtowers and barbed wire, (this being a decade before the Berlin Wall came down), and many family meals and gatherings. We paid a visit to the Prater, one of the film locations for the Third Man and the big wheel, the Riesenrad
Towards the end of my stay the brother of the car owner indicated his desire to travel back to London with me (despite knowing the story of our journey) and I agreed to take him, not least his being a native German speaker, and an additional pair of hands in case of further trouble.