162: Wednesday 29th September 2010

Yesterday I did another range check run. I drove carefully home from work using the gears to try and keep the motor in its most efficient ranges. I got a phone call to pick up my daughter from school, then I dropped her off to her friends later. So I headed for the main road and had clocked 10 miles before I started my run. My objective was to achieve at least 36 miles so I could do the return journey to football training every Saturday and when we have a home match on Sundays. Our Jeep Cherokee is only returning 13mpg round the streets and not much better on a run, so this will save us another £60 per month by my reckoning. Anyway back to the range run, I hit some traffic and that slowed me down, but I managed to keep going at a steady rate and got home with 116v and 40miles on the clock, perfect. I am sure that starting from home and going to football that is a continuous run the whole time is easily possible and I shall do it first time this weekend. Today I was going along the very last stretch of road at work before the car park and I got a real bad squealing from the right rear wheel when braking. It was really loud. I had no choice but to drive home like this as it did not affect the driving. I got the car up on a jack and checked the wheel and found that the anti squeal bracket had somehow got pushed across and was causing the squeal by rubbing on the brake disc. For this to happen, the brake pads would need to have opened wide and then one of them got caught on the edge of the squeal plate to push it across when the brake was applied. I cannot figure out how this happened. I took 2 screwdrivers and manipulated the squeal plate back in position and all is well again. I also fitted some locking wheel nuts that I have had for some time now. I had one rusty plain wheel nut on each wheel as the last lot of locking nuts broke and rusted. So all nice shiny nuts now :-) and 40 miles range.