Misc

Winter Wash Part 2

It was almost sunny. Well, the sun appeared twice in the afternoon so that was good enough to finish the job off.

Dried the car, Meguiars quick detailer’d all the panels, rain-x’d all the looking through glass, cleaned the inside of the windows with AutoSmart glass cleaner and hit the wheels with some AutoSmart tyre dressing.

Also gave the reverse camera a dose of rain-x so will be interesting to see how that holds up, whether it helps keep it clear at all.

Winter Wash

I really do detest this time of year. Being a skier, it’s not really winter that does it, it’s winter in central Scotland. Cold, windy, wet and dark. Frosty, no problem. Snowing, sweet. Wet, windy and dull all the time, someone kill me.

Also, it’s a nightmare keeping the car clean. The roads are just grim; salt, grit, grime and all manner of other crap constantly being mixed with the rain and splattered all over the car. I’m coming to accept weekly washes are pretty much going to be required until, oh, June.

I don’t pretend to be a detailer, in fact, I’m only really just getting back in to washing my car after my E46. Towards the end, the cleaner it was the more you saw the rust creeping in and all the scars from the general public being clowns in car parks. So I largely didn’t bother, but I’m back to making an effort with the F32.

So here is today’s assembled arsenal:

Didn’t end up using half of it owing to the weather being true to form and having to alternate washing with hiding in the garage trying not to get washed away in the rain.

Car was last washed a couple of weeks ago so actually hasn’t faired too badly given the state of the roads.

Gave it an all over blast with the jet wash to start.

Just bought some Auto Finesse Iron Out to use on the wheels and decided to give the sides a dusting as well to see how much debris had landed on the sides. Also used Auto Finesse’s Citrus Power on the sides, front end and mirror caps since they pick up the most grime.

New Halfords special wheelbrush (lower) was really good, there’s not a lot of clearance between the MSport Plus callipers and the wheels but it got in there. Old Halfords wheel brush (top) really is crap, the wire bends with the faintest hint of pressure, only use it for the lip of the rim and the face of the spokes and it’ll be getting replaced for even those duties.

The Iron Out works brilliantly, the trigger bottle is terrible. It may sound daft but I genuinely don’t get how they expect you to use it. If you have the top of the bottle in the pad of your hand allowing 2 fingers on the trigger, you end up dousing your fingers. If you move your hand further down and use just the one, it rotates around as you squirt making it really awkward to control where the spray is going. It also really needs a fast finger on the trigger to get it to spray rather than squirt.

Pretty horrific amount of grime from just 2 wheels, change of rinse water for the other 2!

Slightly surprised at the debris on the sides, really didn’t think it would show up much. Still, blasted that and the Citrus Power off (also, great product but also a great spray bottle on that one) then rain stopped play for a bit.

Didn’t get any pics of the rest of the wash really due to having to dart about getting it done when weather permitted. The Karcher do-hicky isn’t bad for what it is (a tenner out of B&Q a while back) but it’s not really anything like a proper snow foam. The rain was kind enough to assist rinsing it off. Then it got a 2 bucket wash, I must invest in bigger buckets with grit guards.

Again, pretty horrific amount of muck despite the car not looking that bad from 10ft away

Rain and light conspired to bring things to an end at that point so hopefully the weather is half decent tomorrow morning for cleaning the windows inside, Rain-Xing the windows outside and giving the door shuts a once over.

I also need to invest some time in the tailpipes

Brace yourselves…

…the snow-pocalypse posts are coming!

Yup, winter is pretty much in full swing here, so I went and bought myself a set of winters.

Well, I went and bought stage 1. Spotted a set of wheels with tyres for sale on the F3X UK Facebook group, sadly I was about to go on honeymoon so left it. When I got back, they were re-advertised, now £500 cheaper than 3 weeks ago. Done!

My car came with the MSport Plus spec 704M wheels but they’d been kerbed by previous owners. These were refurbished and painted anthracite prior to me buying the car. With the painted finish, they would be the ideal candidates for winter wheels where I wouldn’t need to worry about the salt getting in about the OEM diamond cut finish.

So I actually bought a new set of summer wheels, 704Ms with anthracite insert, wrapped in barely used OEM spec Bridgestones. They were fitted to a brand new car that the buyer decided to upgrade to 20in MPerformance alloys, they’ve barely lost the mould hairs!

Now I just need to source a set of winter rubber for my current wheels. Having these is making me debate lobbing one in the boot for winter, allowing me to go for non-runflat winter tyres which could save around £400

Going the distance!

With the tail end of a hurricane coming in hard, what better weekend to bust out an 860 mile road trip?

Heading from West Lothian to Enfield and back, with a detour on the return leg to collect the dog from my parents.

Saturday morning was horrific, it wasn’t until we were nearly off the M6 on to the M1 that it finally stopped raining. Massive headwind all the way down and loads of standing water and incidents to contend with.

Return journey was pretty much as bad, the whole M1 section was sketchy, loads of standing water and puddles across the inner and outer lanes. M6 finally cleared as we approached Wigan so the last leg of the journey was quite relaxing.

Conclusions & lessons from the trip:

Camera system seems unable to handle heavy spray, it gave out warnings multiple times in the wet conditions about malfunctioning, it’s done this once around my normal commute also, in all cases when it’s been in heavy rain & spray.

Trip computer is about as accurate as a bent sniper rifle. Kinda annoying given my e46’s one was always under real world by 1.5-2mpg, the F32 is anywhere from +4 to -4.

These cars are brilliant for this type of work, 7+ hours in the seat and you step out at the other end with no aches, feeling pretty fresh. Only stopped twice on each journey, roughly ten minutes a go, just enough for a pee and to buy some drinks.

Decent width spaces in the hotel car park for a change even with the 4’s loooooong doors

Sadly the crap weather stopped me achieving what I’d really wanted to with a VPower diesel comparison against normal use Tesco diesel, so I’ll have to do that through a week of commuting.