My car crossed the 296000 kms milestone 2 days ago. Given the pandemic, working from home and my recently retirement, I estimate crossing the 300,000 milestone in June of 2022. My original estimate of crossing 300,000 was for January 2021. I've never gotten this far on any car I have ever owned or driven before. So with some diligent maintenance ,the R53 has been quite reliable. Most reliable car I've ever owned in my 45 years of driving.
Getting ready for winter. Swapped out the carpet floor mats for the rubber mats, vacuumed and cleaned the interior. Checked my wiper blades, Checked my oil and topped up 1/2 litre. Put the conditioning charger on and topping up the battery. I'll wait a week or two for temps to drop a bit more before putting on the snow boots.
Halfway through a DIY walnut carbon blast with a machine I built ten years ago.... Man am I sore from all the bending over the engine... turning the engine over by hand to close the valves.... Most of my time was spent removing all the hoses and electrical plugs to be able to remove the intake manifold..... I'll be back at it tomorrow to finish the job.... I'm happy to report my throttle body is completely dry with no oil coating... Long live my turbo...
2009 JCW Pretty much only used Shell V-Power NITRO 93.... If you go to their website it shows a picture of prestine clean valve.... Well, I don't know where they got that picture from, but it isn't from a direct injection engine... But anyway, I finished up with my carbon / walnut blast today... I decided I would do it over a two day period so I could focus on getting it right. Here's my DIY setup... Look down in cylinder #1 with my borescope (a must have tool that plays nice with WIFI and my iphone.. The nasty carbon mushrooms.... Cleaned... Had no extra parts after "reassemble in reverse order" You don't realize the loss of power over time as the carbon restriction continues to build... It's back now... Whoo Boy, it's back... The problem manifested itself as a random ignition misfire and stumble with a cold engine start that tended to disappear after the engine reaches operating temperature.. It runs now like the day I bought it...
I drove the Helmet quite a bit last week. So it got a good wash and has been sitting in the garage airing out. I left a damp car cover in the boot so I had to get the stink out. I know I am an idiot! Anyway it’s going to rain tonight so I had to park it in the driveway and put the Lotus in the garage, it leaks like a British car! The Helmet is under two car covers so it should stay clean and dry.
Yes, the vac attachment works well, but as a safety precaution, I still plugged any opening where I removed hose connections and stuffed clean rags down the intakes in the head. I pretested the gun without the vac attachment and it shot a pretty good stream of walnut grains all over my shop floor, so I'll be sweeping up this mess this morning... Next up will be an oil and filter change...
FYI, my haha was the fact you shot walnut grains all over the floor, after cleaning is it ready for paint or epoxy coating? Good work, I could never have the patience to do this myself. Don
I was amazed at how well the walnut blasted the carbon buildup off the valves. (fine grain walnut from Harbor Freight)
Put winter tires on yesterday. It seems really early to do that compared to most years, but there are low temps forecast this week (31-35 every am Tuesday through Saturday) with some precipitation a couple of those days.
It's the time of year when my sweetie calls me & says the !!##% tire light is on. So I got to air up the tires on Skooby & reset the tire nanny light. Snow tires will go on in a few weeks.
Welp this morning I put a nice shiny new AGM battery in Skooby the clubster. The old battery was 11 years old so this was a preventative replacement. Can't have Lady Babs out somewhere with a dead MINI. She'd kill me & I'd be dead too.
To celebrate Skooby's new battery I took her to the drive trough car spa. A nice touchless sudsing & man does that hot chocolate shine ever so sweetly.