On a lovely, sunny and warm Wednesday evening I decided to take 16606 out for a test drive following the last few pieces of work done on her, as documented in previous posts. I did my usual route of about 35 miles around London's North Circular to the M11, M11 to M25, M25 to Junction 24 and then home. I waited until 7pm for rush hour traffic to die down. It all started so well.
Firstly, it started! This was proving my fix to the idle speed regulator valve motor seems to have permanently worked. The drive went well, up until the M25 where suddenly near junction 26 the traffic stopped. There had been an accident and the motorway was closed.
This accident resulted in me being almost stationary, just an occasional crawl, for the best part of 40 minutes. I started to get nervous since it has historically been in these situations that 16606 has overheated. My eyes were transfixed on the temperature gauge. Thankfully it hovered consistently around the first quarter mark on the dial (I think this is about 160 degrees Fahrenheit). I've never seen this before as usually it would creep up the scale and into the red zone. It was a relief to hear and observe the effect of the fans kicking in as they should. As they periodically kicked in I saw the volts dip a little and my idle speed fluctuate somewhat = which I'm presuming is an expected consequence of the fans coming on. All in all I was very happy that everything was as I believe it should be, despite being stuck in the traffic.
As the evening sun radiated into the cabin I dared to durn on the Air Conditioning to cool down but also to check the re-gassing done last year was still good. Again, thankfully it kicked in straight away and cooled the cabin, and me, down nicely.
Of course it wouldn't be right if there wasn't one problem encountered. I plugged in my cigar lighter power bank in to the lighter socket in the console to power my phone charger cable and dashcams but received no power. I'm aware that whilst fitting my fan override switch I had to disturb the wires of the cigar lighter, so maybe I've somehow affected the power supply. This will now be the next job to check.
All in all, I'm very happy with how 16606 performed and consider her ready for a trip to Wivenhoe, Essex in the next couple of weeks, and also to Belfast for the DeLorean Revival trip at the start of June.
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