TPA has been pretty busy today.
Looks much better with the repainted wheels. Here's a better closeup in actual sunlight.
That looks "right" to my eye.
Had a bunch of errands to run today all over town...and decided that the best thing for TPA at the moment really is to get some miles under her wheels...so took a brave pill and took her out. 26 miles covered today once I got back.
This included some trundling around residential areas, some dodging trucks in busy Industrial estates and a fair amount of high speed dual carriageway work. Gremlin count at the end of the day? Nil.
In fact aside from a bit of grumbling from the CVT (belt flapping about a bit because the pulley surfaces still aren't perfect), she was running well and felt well...happy. Not sure how else to describe it. She's far less of a liability on high speed roads than you would expect, the sheer lack of vibration etc through the car at speed is surprising. Honestly she feels less stressed at speed than the Metro I used to own. The ride is also far better than it has any right to be in such a small lightweight car. Even if the slightly odd way the whole car wobbles over some types of road surface simply by virtue of having only three wheels takes a little getting used to. It actually feels like my country wide tour next year might be less of a mental idea than it originally seemed.
Having got a got a few miles of sustained high speed running done today it seemed a good time to check the plugs. When I first started out I had a bit of a recurring issue with the offside plug fouling up with only deposits. My guess was that this was down to a sticky piston ring due to disuse. The oil consumption seemed to have ceased after the first couple of road tests so I was hopeful that the plugs would be looking more healthy now.
Nearside:
Offside (the one which used to suffer from oil fouling):
Those look reasonably healthy to me. No signs of oil anyway, which ties in with no oil being used any more and smoke being limited to a brief puff when the engine is started from cold.
Given I'm going to be wanting to drive out of town to a car show in a couple of weeks it's nice to have got some decent testing undertaken without incident.
Tomorrow I'll hopefully get the cover out and have a close examination of the CVT belt and see how it's holding up. Before I did the work cleaning up the pulleys the belt had been getting well shredded and started to slip after less than ten miles, so will be curious to take a look to see how it's holding up.
Saw a lot of puzzled looking drivers today!