My gorgeous Swedish model

I thought about Ulrika, but Ulrika is too skinny. She's a lovely looking girl but she doesn't strike me as rugged and powerful. I kind of thought Sonjia, as in Red Sonya. Pretty, but fearsome. Apparently the name means 'wise', so I'm not so sure there. Agnetha means 'pure'. I like that, but it reminds me of a very famous Agnetha who was also a gorgeous Swede, but blonde and quite different. Gotilda means 'strong, energetic, rebellious'. The first two bits sound right, but she doesn't seem rebellious. So far she has impressed me by always doing as she's told (an important characteristic of a car).

 

Oh I'm sure she'll take the huff at some point. Cars always do. Dear old Helga once decided to cut off all engine power, on the M1, at night, just because she got sick of my singing. It took me a good 10 minutes to persuade to start up again and I had to promise not to sing.

 

Having just calculated how many miles per gallon she is doing, a figure which I'm too embarrassed to declare, I have now settled on a name.

She is now, Gotilda.

 

I calculated mine at 21. I posted about it on the forum where I found the car, not accusing the seller, just enquiring if there is anything I should be checking. The chap who sold me replied, saying he used to get 27mpg easily, and I have no reason to doubt his word.

Then it dawned on me. I currently can't know the actual mpg I'm getting because my test was flawed in the most fundamental way. I filled up at one petrol station until the pump wouldn't pump any more. I then clocked up 99 miles on a range of road types. I then went to another petrol station to top the tank up, which gave me a figure for how much fuel I'd used (ie the number of litres from the second pump).

It may be that I'm getting 21mpg. It could also be more or less, so my test is invalid. I know from experience that different pumps are more sensitive than others and cut off at different points. In fact on other cars I've known it happen where I've come away with just 3/4 of a tank of fuel when I thought I'd filled right up, because the pump was too sensitive and switched off before it was full. It just so happens that that's been at the petrol station I used for the first fill-up, and the second top-up happened at a petrol station I rarely use. So it is quite possible that after the top-up, I ended up with more fuel in the tank than I started with.

 

I'm afraid my miles per gallon calculation, even if it does turn out to have been accurate, was skewed by a major blunder on my part.

Considering I pride myself on attitude to maintaining a car's roadworthiness, and keeping on top of routine checks etc, I feel like such a plonker that it took until today before I got round to checking the tyre pressures

All four tyres were under-inflated by a substantial margin. Two of them were as much as 10 psi lower than they should have been.

How could I have missed something that obvious I wonder. All the signs were there. High fuel consumption, often the automatic gearbox was choosing a lower gear than I thought necessary, noticeable drag, steering heavier than on my previous Volvo. If someone had described those symptoms to me, the very first thing I'd have said was 'check your tyre pressures'.

Anyway, since putting the correct amount of air in there, the steering is now as light as I remember on my previous Volvo, she now runs even more smooth and quiet, and whereas before she would choose the wrong gear at 50mph resulting in the engine revving at around 4000rpm, now she chooses the gear that I would choose if she'd been manual, at revs at just over 2000rpm at 50mph.

I'm going to disregard my calculation result of 21mpg now in light of so many factors. If she's not doing closer to 30 mpg now I'll be surprised.

 

Me and Gotilda/Sonjia/Agnetha have had a bit of a fall out. While there is plenty of evidence that the previous owner thought he'd kept up to date with maintenance, there have been some fundamental bits missed.

I've had to spend some money for stuff I'd been led to believe had been done, but there we go. I did get the car for a very good price.

A combination of intermittent ABS problems and abnormally high fuel use prompted me to take more than a cursory glance under the bonnet, which in turn prompted me to search the many pages of service record I have for the car. Nobody has ever looked after the electrics on the car. And the high fuel consumption wont be helped by the fact that the one HT lead is chaffed so badly that you can see the copper strands where rubber insulation should be, and the terminals on many ignition components are green and crusty with copper oxidation.

So, I've ordered new spark plugs and HT leads and a can of electrical contact cleaner, and next weekend I will fit the replacement parts, and set about every contact I can see with sandpaper (on the chunkier contacts) and contact cleaner on the more sensitive ones, and see what that does. I know that just jiggling a couple of connectors under the bonnet yesterday magical restored a failed bulb in the dash, so that tells me that there are bad contacts under there.

Still, if there's one thing about these simple old cars, is at least you can see where everything is.

 

Agnetha!
The other names are so...teutonian
What a catch!
Solid, steadfast,the one you trust to bring your kids home safe
Yet a killer to look at and much perk underneath the hood. A man's dream
So they do require a little more effort ( and change).......but worth every penny

 

I tried the air conditioning for the first time today. I pressed the button and nothing happened. But then since doing so I could hear the faint sound of what sounded like a compressor, whether the button was on or off. Now I'm wondering if aircon is stuck on, which combined with bad ignition electrics, would contribute to high fuel consumption.