RichardW wrote: ↑31 Oct 2017, 16:20
Welcome to my world of 15k pa Scottish road induced maintenance!
Since I had the proper charge point installed in September which has a dedicated hard wired kWh meter I've decided to collect monthly statistics.
So for the month of October 1st to November 1st I've done 1078 miles in the Ion, of which 720 will be bare minimum daily commutes and the rest other running around or additional detours during the commute.
I did a total of 334.72kWh worth of charging at home, at 12.3 p/kWh that cost me £41.17 in charging on my power bill. This means an average consumption of 3.22 miles/kWh - down on my summer average of 4.2kWh due to heater use, and possibly wet weather since that increases drag. This gives me a charging cost of 3.8p/mile - up on the 3p/mile I was seeing in summer. I expect in the depths of winter I'll probably hit about 4.5p/mile.
The heater is certainly not on flat out but I'm using it a fair bit including on really cold mornings (only a few so far) manual "pre-heating" where I unplug the car, put the heater on full blast for 15 minutes to de-ice it then plug it back in for 45 minutes to top the battery up again before leaving. 15 minutes of full blast heater consumes about 1kWh while stationary, so while I leave the house fully charged again it counts against my charging.
Of course if I did any public charging this would not be recorded by my kWh meter and make my figures look artificially good, but I didn't actually do any public charging last month that I can remember, it was all charging at home.
If I was doing 1078 miles in the Xantia in stop start traffic I would be looking at about £301 in petrol and filling up 4-5 times a month - it doesn't really bear thinking about!
Let me know if you need to introduce it to Mr A Grinder to get them off
Don't worry, you're on speed dial!
I don't know when I will get a chance to tackle it. What I may do is try to slacken off both bolts on each drop-link, if they come willingly I'll proceed, if not I'll chicken out and tighten them back up and wait for a booking with Mr A Grinder.
In other news I got the front Quatrac 5's fitted today, so now I have a full set - all good, I think. I noticed something a bit strange though which I'd like peoples thoughts on.
Immediately after the fitting I went for a motorway run to check if the wheel balance had improved as there had still been a little bit of vibration - and it seemed pretty smooth and vibration free. Excellent I thought. I got home and found the tyre pressures of the new tyres a bit low at the front and bumped them up a bit. A bit later I was out on the motorway again and suddenly I was noticing quite a bit of vibration between 50-75 again. Bugger. If anything worse than before the tyres were changed
So when I got where I was going I let the pressure down a little bit on the tyres in case it was that - no improvement. Then I had to drive on a stretch of motorway that was stop start traffic and I discovered that at very slow speeds the car wasn't moving forward smoothly, as an electric motor should - it was actually lurching slightly in small lurches as if something was holding it back.

There was a noise that was also corresponding with the slight lurches and I suddenly had the idea that the rear brake shoes might be binding slightly at a particular part of the rotation?
The car has discs at the front but at the rear it is a combination of drum brakes and motor regeneration - with the motor doing most of the work and the drums only really kicking in when you brake harder.
On a hunch when I was stopped I tried pulling the handbrake on and off really hard a few times and touch wood I think that has sorted the vibration at speed for the moment, (or at least it was very minor afterwards) with the vibration not being a wheel imbalance but rather a cyclical "grabbing" of the rear drums possibly due to the handbrake not fully releasing the shoes ?
I'll admit up front I know very little about drum brakes other than that they can have issues with grabbing or not releasing properly, but I have no real experience of overhauling them or trying to troubleshoot a problem like this. Anyone have any suggestions ?
Does the handbrake usually share the same shoes as the foot brake ? Should there be a return spring that pulls the shoes away from the drum when the handbrake is released ? It's almost as if releasing the handbrake is not always fully pulling back the shoes so any imperfection of the roundness of the drum causes a slight drag at certain rotations ?
The hand brake is a conventional ratchet lever operated bowden cable to the rear - no fancy e-brake here...