Ka Diary
– 64,377 – 29 March 2005 – Pre Italian Job
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K |
ermit
is just about set for our Italian Job
Road Trip. I’ve cleaned his K & N air filter and checked all
his underbonnet fluids. Actually I
typically his underbonnet fluids twice a week so there’s nothing unusual in
this statement. Eyres changed his oil
and filter slightly early (a few miles before he reached the 64,000 mile
marker) because he’ll cover the 65,000 point during the drive to
Italy. Although the trip to and from
Italy shouldn’t be hard on the engine oil (cruising at moderate Calculated Load is very kind to
the donk). Eyres also replaced our
faulty reversing lamp switch, which was making reversing in the dark a bit
difficult.
When we adopted Kermit,
he came with a standard Ford remote central locking system. Between the last Ka Diary entry and this one, it’s stopped working as well
as it should so I replaced the battery.
Four years of use isn’t bad from the one little power cell!
I’ve
been getting used to his cruise control
system, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing.
We’d had the system for eight days when the customised gear knob came
off in my hand, breaking the wires.
This means I have to take Kermit back to Conrad Anderson in Birmingham
for the repair. So between updating
this diary entry and us departing for Italy, he’s going back in.
It
is difficult to get excited about cruise
control because it’s designed to maintain a nice steady speed. The Conrad Anderson system we have manages
to maintain a near constant speed over undulating roads, is usefully smooth and
under ideal conditions, of my thirty mile commute to the office I can spend
just four miles of is on manual and the rest using the cruise control. Conrad Anderson did a great job of fitting
the necessary hardware under the bonnet, especially given how cramped access to
the speed sensor was, and I’m using the system for the bulk of my drive to and
from the office every working day. The
command module itself is encompassed in the alloy gear knob, which feels great
in the hand. The one aspect that
doesn’t look as perfect as the rest is the memory module, which because of the
curvy nature of the Ka’s dashboard and steering column, is attached to the side
using adhesive. You can see the wire at
the top of the module.
Over the Easter break we travelled about the United
Kingdom to visit family. We combined
Kermit’s appointment with Bert Eyre & Sons with a visit in Lincolnshire,
then continued south to the far side of London for a night stop, then back home
on the Sunday. I’ve been experimenting
with running Kermit on higher than normal tyre
pressures (up to 37 PSI front and rear). Generally speaking, the higher the tyre pressure the lower the
rolling resistance, the lower the fuel
consumption but the lower the available grip. The best compromise is close to 34 PSI at the front and 32 PSI at
the back. The handbook recommends 31 or
32 PSI at the front (depending on the wheel and tyre) and 26 PSI at the
back, but it doesn’t cover the XR2i wheels
of course!
Whilst
experimenting with the tyre pressures, I decided to try some driving over one
of my commuter routes, a route with more fast sweeping bends than proper twisty
material. That would be the A162,
however if you divert towards Selby you come across some proper twisty
material. These are ideal roads to test
the tyre pressures on, but you know, with all four tyres at 37 PSI he is
“slightly anxious” at the back under braking.
He tips into oversteer comparatively easily with the Ka unladen and the
rear tyres at this high pressure. The
trick is to keep the pressure at or below 34 PSI.
The
GPS satellite navigation system is doing
exactly what it needs to do.
Admittedly, I did have to fiddle with the settings to stop it from
taking me down the narrowest of roads it could find just to save a couple of
minutes and there is no “via” or “avoid area” function within the software, but
thanks to the moving map display I’m able to manually avoid areas. The best example so far was when I left
Birmingham after having the cruise control system installed and received
several warnings about heavy traffic on the M42. As I approached the motorway, my TrafficMaster gadget also went
berserk - so I diverted by heading East towards Coventry and catching the M1
this way. After two or three 
attempts to get me to
turn around, the navigation software then re-routed via the Coventry bypass and
all was well once more. The navigation
system makes light work of changing the route, taking just a handful of seconds
for a recalculation.
Recent
fuel consumption figures seem
to illustrate that the Ecotek valve
does nothing for fuel consumption but that using cruise control does.
Rather, the Ecotek did nothing for Kermit’s fuel consumption since we
had it removed at the last service and a replacement vacuum pipe put in
place. If I take the Ka to the drag strip again, I’ll see if it
makes a difference to his quarter mile time but I’m not of a mind to reuse the
device and I have reservations about their claims that it’ll improve
performance. In my experience, it
doesn’t take the ECU long to figure out that something is amiss and correct (indeed
from Ecotek’s website, the Ford ECU is already adjusting the fuelling and
there’s a material difference between the two acceleration times post-Ecotek
modification).
I’ll
discuss the Ecotek valve elsewhere in the website but for now, I’m signing
off. We’ve a handful of very busy days
before we depart for Italy. The next
time I update my website, we’ll have returned from our Italian Job Road Trip
and it’ll be mid-April. So look out for
a Ka Diary Special feature then, where I’ll be writing up the adventures we had
with Kermit on our Italian Job Road Trip.