I've just got back from 2 weeks in France - in the car!
Considering I had only done about 150-200 test miles before setting off, it wasn't all that bad really...well...kind of... lol.
I had fitted new tyres to the rear (ones i had on some spare wheels) and they went up from 205/40/17 to 215/45's so I expected some rubbing. I trimed off a load of inner arch before fitting them and clearance was fine however over bigger bumps I hadn't anticipated the wheel to move forwards aswell (following the radius of the trailing arm) which i hadn't trimmed so it scrubbed - quick fix was to lever the lip back out the way.
2nd day of travel the drivers side speaker was being intermittant so after a lunch stop i decided to quickly pull out the headunit and sort it out... After the slightest tug something strange happened - Vems LCD lit up...keys in hand...wtf! Shortly followed by billowing smoke from behind the dash..... Quickly ripped out the centre console to see a nice electrical fire melting various looms!!! Disconnected all power and put out the fires - I had an extinguisher on hand but thankfully didn't need to use it. Spent the next hour and a half sepearting lumps of rubber/plastic/bare copper wire and insulating them. Had a heart stopping moment when i powered up Vems to see the LCD displaying nothing
Thought that was it... Then the Mrs noticed in my haste to rip out the console I had broken some of the LCD wires - Pluged in the laptop and powered up vems to see everything was in fact all ok!! Fired the car up first time
Next day I just went over all the nuts and bolts in the engine bay to find a few manifold bolts were only finger tight....
Next thing was the live feed to vems for some reason cutting out - cause was a bad battery connection.
A week later the powersteering was feeling notchy and belt was slipping - The PAS pump bracket had snapped off one end and was only just hanging on - not far off falling into the cambelt! Promptly removed and taken to a local garage to weld up using my fluent Fren-grish (english in a french accent). Ended up cracking again so resorted to bolting spanners to it to brace it up!
On the way home noticed a bit of a grinding noise coming from the pass front wheel when turing right. Thought it was just arch liner rubbing and "fixed" that. Turned out it was still doing it and I noticed a small score mark on the outer edge of the disc - a small stone in the caliper perhaps? I'll investigate the next morning. Next day I whip off the front wheel and caliper - no stone but the hub nut was loose!! Found a garage in the middle of nowhere called "Super Penus" that eventualy found a 36mm socket from the agricultural part of the garage - nothing in the car section big enough!
Finally the circlip holding the wastegate arm popped off resulting in no turbo and the vibrations eventually caused the Rod end to fall off on the motorway!!
So, rater uneventful trip!!!
On a better note I managed to get about 500 miles to a 60 litre tank (using 55 litres of that works out at 41mpg!!!)
Clocked the trip home from Pepignan to be 880miles - I had planned to clock the whole trip but several battery resets ended that plan. I guess I covered about 3000 miles in the 2 weeks.
Oh the holiday was good
Andy P
