Quite a nice day with us today, Not all that bright early on but the sun came out towards mid afternoon. With Twinkle - the Ibiza - due her MOT on Wednesday and not having driven her much for the last month really I took her round the seafront roads for a half hour or so to clean up the discs and just loosen things generally. returning home I decided to give her a comprehensive clean up and check over. Started by vacuuming the carpets and dusting the dash etc. Then taking the wheels off and washing them inside and out. Couple more of the black plastic wheel nut caps have absconded since the last time I had the wheels off. Can't make my mind up whether to buy another set (at a no doubt silly cost) or simply take the remaining ones off and not refit them. Ah well, no hurry with that one.
The way she's parked her driver's side is protected from the weather by Becky being parked alongside her and the discs on that side looked good but the ones on the other side still showed some surface rust on their wheel sides, so I used the same, well worn abrasive disc I used on Becky a couple of years ago to just lift the remaining surface rust from them and then remounted the wheels, swapping fronts to rears and vice versa. I'm quite pleased with the wheels, they've come up quite well but there are slight signs of bubbling just starting on all of them, although not on the visible front faces. They're now 5 years old. While I had them off I had a good look at the pads, ball joints, CV boots, etc, etc, and all looking good. With just over 20,000 miles on her the front pads are about half way through their life with the rears looking only about a quarter worn. Experience with other VAG rear disc brakes would indicate the discs will probably rust out before the pads wear down enough to need replacing. Tyres (that's the Bridgestones which I don't like) are all, gratifyingly, wearing nice and evenly with no signs of "strange wear" - like feathering etc which would point to something being worn or damaged. I'm quite puzzled to find all four tyres measuring approximately 5mm. So, if they had 8 mm on them when new and I'll be changing them at around 2 to 2.5 mm they would seem to be roughly half way through their lives. However there are signs of small surface cracks developing in the depths of the tread grooves - which I'll be keeping an eagle eye on - Not really a problem at this time but may give me cause to renew them before the tread wears to near the legal limit. I'm puzzled by all four tyres being similarly worn though because, being FWD and a turboe'd engine, I would have expected the fronts to wear considerably faster than the rears?
Anyway she's all washed, tyre pressures reset after the swap round of the wheels, hoovered out and generally spruced up ready to go down to Kenny's Garage first thing Wednesday morning. I think she's looking quite smart?
As I had my compressor up to pressure I went round Becky's tyres too - O/S/R down by 5 psi, I'll need to keep an eye on that - and as I still had most of my second bucket of car wash unused I thought it would be mean not to give Becky a wash too. She's come up really nicely too don't you think?
As I was putting the Ibiza's wheel locking key away in it's dedicated place in the boot and generally tidying up I remembered I'd been meaning to look for the boot light which, to my knowledge, hasn't worked ever. In fact I think I'd assumed she didn't have one. So, after crawling around for I while I found it! only taken me nearly 5 years! It wasn't working as I knew and it was an real sod to lever out of the hole it lives in because the little spring clip thingy had got it's "foot" on the wrong side of the edge of the hole. Quite surprisingly I did eventually get it out without breaking the plastic and rebent the clip - wonder if it'll come out again next time? The bulb was blown -12 volt 10 Watt festoon - and luckily I had one in my odds and sods box. Put it in and it works fine, hurrah! I'm very puzzled though by the light unit itself which, at a glance, looks like many I've seen but on closer examination it has a small resistor in series with the power supply. I've never come across this before and can't reason out why it's needed. Here's a couple of pictures.
The current comes in at the other end through the 2 pin plug on the bright coloured metal which also acts as a reflector, it then flows through the resistor to the coppery coloured metal bulb holder, then through the filament and out the other end to the second pin on the plug. You can see the resistor is in series with the bulb filament, but why?