A Bit Over The Top ?

Like everyone these days I now have too many things to push into the cigarette socket.   

So bought this.  I now have a realtime display of Tyre Pressure, Tyre temperature, Battery voltage, Cabin Temperature and FOUR USB Charging Points.    Bit too easy to steal so will have to remove it when I park the car up.

Indicators Again

Weather still not good enough to take her out so had to tinker.   Despite the industrial strength buzzer coupled to the indicators I still find I drive for miles with the indicator on if I am on a long journey and listening to a podcast on my headphones.  The basic problem is that the old-style warning lights just don't show up in bright sunlight.  

So as a temporary test I have added a strip of high power LEDs  that I had lying around.

I will also check out a single 'ultra bright' LED (£1.79 on E-Bay) and see if that works.  If the strip is better I'll get some nice green ones and do a better design, probably tucked up underneath the scuttle.      
Might even look at replacing ALL the warning lights with LEDs when I do the complete redesign of the dash (winter project).

Cooling System Complete

I think we can finally put the cooling system to bed.  Here is a plot of the trip up to GBS.

 

Once warmed up she sits beautifully in the low 90s for the whole trip.  The dip at the 20 min point is when I flicked on the fan at the Ancaster traffic lights and left it on right through the village and the dip at 42 mins was going round the Newark ring road when there was a fair amount of slow traffic so I put the fan on again.    And the peak at 50 minutes was when I pulled off the A1 through a village and didn't bother putting the fan on.   So I now have a perfectly predictable system. 

Job done !

GBS Open Day

Had a great run up to the Great British Sports Car factory.  

Went the back roads so it was an hour each way.    Lots of mates there and cars  there so had a happy 2 hours chatting, admiring cars, doing emergency repairs to one of the cars, drinking coffee and eating cake (lovely )   

 

This time I used the tyre sensors and pumped the tyres up to19psi.   During the trip I was interested to note that they fairly quickly warmed up and settled at 20 psi for the front and 22 psi for the back for the whole of the rest of the day.   It's very subjective, but I really did feel that the ride was a lot smoother and less shake, rattle and roll, but this was a different set of roads to my last trip so it may not be a valid comparison. 

However, it does show I have probably been driving around on under-inflated tyres for 3 years  because I believed the Halfords gauge.    

About half way there I flicked to the 'Tyre Temperature' display and found that the two front tyres and the offside rear had settled on 19C which is nice.  Unfortunately the rear nearside was 3C hotter than the others.  And this differential was maintained all the trip.   I was coming up with all sorts of reasons (rubbing brake, tight wheel bearing...) until one of the lads pointed out that the exhaust gases were coming out just in front of that wheel so the sensor was probably being warmed by that    I think I will file Tyre Temperature under 'things about the car I would rather not know).

Tire Pressures

I Initially thought these were going to be fitted 'just because I could', but actually they might turn out to be very useful.

First you replace the dust caps on the wheels with these:

Then plug this into the power socket

And there you have a reading of the tyre pressures (and the tyre temperatures if you press the button on the side to switch displays).

 
Interestingly I had checked the pressures 2 days ago and they were all reading 20 psi on my normal gauge which is just a bit above the recommended pressure.  As you can see, this system thinks they are 16 psi on the left and 15 psi on the right.   So tomorrow I will to blow them up a bit until I get 18 psi all round and see if it makes a difference on my trip to the Great British Sportscars Open Day (free coffee and cake ).