Car Update

It's not that I am having a huge number of troubles with the car, it just the way I use it, the damage catches up. I've been having a great time pulling it to bits to learn how everything works. I had the starter motor last week to try and find why it would only spin the starter occasionally. You could just hit the key a few times and it would start, but I can't see that being ideal when waiting at a border crossing, or if we have to get moving in a hurry. I have a new starter motor coming tomorrow hopefully so I can install it on the weekend.

Last weekend we tried to repair a tiny coolant leak. First you must drain all existing coolant and fill with clean fresh water...to the untrained person, it's surprisingly difficult. The thermostat only opens as the engine gets hot, so you think you've drained everything until it gets hot and you find an exploding mess of coolant that you were sure you drained.

Afterward I was confident it was drained, I ran a radiator flush, then drove around for 20 minutes while it did it's job. Then repeat the flushing process again.

Then, the ran some some seal-up which looks like nail polish suspended in clear oil. Then run for 30 minutes. Oh and of course flush again and replace with new coolant. All the other products said you needed to overheat but not boil the cooling system by means of blocking the air through the radiator. That didn't sit well with me - so this product got my vote.
So far a week on, and no leak! I'm very impressed and it will certainly be featuring in our toolkit.

All this learning time is so valuable. Like I was continually monitoring the temperature gauge and cabin heater and it was amazing how easy an airlock in the heater core develops. I can't help but obsess as to where and when this knowledge may be used again. Perhaps beside a track in Mongolia, with no one for miles? Oh well, I'm excited - either way, the knowledge isn't heavy to carry.

I've started another interesting (to me) experiment do determine the linearity of the fuel gauge. I often find the half to quarter fall in the gauge to be surprisingly fast. I'm glad I started this experiment because I am surprised to see interesting results already. I consumed all of the fuel till the gauge was exactly on the empty marking. Filled the car, but it only took 72L when the tank is 92L. After reading the manual, it mentions when the 'low fuel indicator' illuminates, there is approximately 11L in the tank. Ok well I didn't see the light so that could explain 9L. The tank does have a large dent in it, but I wouldn't imagine would be more than 5L large. I'm going to refill at different intervals on the gauge to determine if the gauge is linear. I also intend to run it till stall to really get a worst case scenario figure. This is for two reasons.

Firstly, most fuel stations in the parts of the world we will be visiting are prepaid. And not prepaid where you imagine they give you some change when you are full, but more like the pump keeps pumping until your credit is used. This means we need to know quite accurately how much fuel we can purchase without overfilling based on the gauge reading. Another traveler has a trick to deal with this. He estimates but has jerrycans on the ground when filling so that if he over estimates his requirements, he can fill these rather than spill.

The second but perhaps more obvious reason for knowing is so we can more accurately predict our range based on gauge (in addition to calculated ranges). We need to be able to know if we can make it to the next fuel stop, or if has a problem, to the next fuel stop after that.

I feel that managing our fuel and water requirements is going to be difficult. We are limited to around 90L plus 20L in jerrycans. On my 15L/100 estimates we could cover 700KM max safely. Currently I'm only getting 400KM for 70 litres (Which is more like 17.5L/100) but alot of that was spent driving recklessly in snow and mud and a good hour of running the motor to clear coolant.

Further thinking reveals that my speedometer is out by 5-10 kph, which could account for some innacuracy in the L/100 figure.