Slowing down at Santa Luzia

 Tuesday 30/08/22

We rarely have clouds in the evening, but were treated to a fantastic
display as the wind whipped these ones into various shapes

We're just over six weeks into our sit and have finished up most of the work planned (and unplanned) for this trip, and are starting to think about moving on.  

In spite of thinking we were finished with the interior painting, Toni and I decided it was the perfect opportunity to do the cab ceiling as this now looked a bit off compared to all the areas we had painted.  We still had enough paint left and the weather is nice and dry here so we decided to tackle it now rather than wait until we were back in the UK or Brittany.  We're very pleased with the result.

Before (lower photo) and after of the ceiling which also holds Bokkie's bed

Toni doing her Michelangelo impression

Happy with the final result, the cab is much brighter

That left us with the limping problem still to be tackled and after much e-mailing and many phone calls to E-Bay and the Spanish courier company, I managed to finally get delivery of the diagnostic cables I had ordered.  This meant I could hook my laptop up to the engine management unit and read off the stored error codes - a game changer for me.

The result confirmed what I had suspected after all the research I had done; it seemed to be related to the throttle control.  I was then able to check the pedal assembly (which seemed to be fine) and then track down the six wires that feed the information from the pedal to the ECU in the engine bay.  I had read these sometimes deteriorate or are damaged and, even though you can't see anything wrong with them, their resistance increases to the point where the results from the pedal potentiometer fall outside the range the ECU is expecting, and it returns a fault and enters limp mode.

The suspect wires under the dash

Using a new red wire as a temporary bypass

When I tested the wires individually, the first three had around 30kΩ, a little higher than expected, the next two were around 2kΩ which is more normal and the third was 312kΩ.  At last I had a firm suspect!  I wired a new cable in for us to test if this resolves the issue - we won't know for certain until we've done some more driving, but I'm really hopeful I may have solved the problem.

To get away from the boring technical stuff, here are some animal videos!

The horses having a canter on a lovely morning.

Molly, the world's chattiest cat.