Day 1 part 2 - Setting the speedo

By now we were bombing down France and with little else to do on the motorway we decided to try to correct the speedo. This involves setting a number which tells the speedo how many miles you travel in 1000 revolution of the wheel.

Without wishing to stop and measure anything we decided to come up with another plan.

Plan 1: Load up the satnav Gilly had borrowed and get that to tell us the speed then correct the speedo to suit.

Problem 1: The satnav refused to work in France as it didn't have the correct maps. Why on earth it doesn't tell you your position and speed anyway I have no clue.

Plan 2: We realised Gilly has a GPS on her fancy new phone. Out came the phone, with user manual and 30 mins later we (Gilly) figured it out. Some quick maths was done and it was esimated to be about 120% out. We made the alterations at the next services and were on our way again.

Problem 2: Somewhere the maths went wrong but on the second attempt it was spot on! :-)

Day 1 finished driving through the lovely French countryside on N roads to Vittel. On arrival we checked the oil and bled the brakes (they felt a bit squishy and tomorrow we were in the Alps).

Day 1 on the BIG adventure

Day 1 of our road trip to Italy!

Woke up early at my parents in Kent, there were still a couple of things I wanted to have a look at before we got going. Got the car up on the ramps and found that there was still oil in the differential. Good News! That had been playing on my mind.

The next task was to look into why the speedo was not working. I thought this could be quite useful on the trip. It appeared that 3 out of 4 of the magnets I had glued onto the propshaft had fallen off. Rummeging through an old tool box I found one of those magnets you screw to window frames for the alarm system. Ripping the plastic box of the outside of it revealed a nice looking magnet. Last time I used epoxy which didn't seem to work so this time I used super glue and whist that was setting I went and had breakfast.

Next stage was the euro-tunnel which went well. The car has been playing up when starting recently and I was nervous it was going to refuse in the train. Luckly the old girl came through for me and we disembarked in France ready and raring!

Stupid Sodding Wheel Studs

What a rubbish morning!

I got round to doing the other wheel studs the other day and then went to Halfords to get locking wheel nuts they turned out to be too short and ruined the ends of the studs!!!!!!!!

I then ordered new wheel nuts as per the ones I already had but some of the threads were too far gone. Not lower down only the first couple of threads.


Two wheels were fine the other two had at least one bad stud. I managed to save the front drivers wheel stud by cleaning up the first couple of threads but the back one was knackered. In addition as it was the first wheel I put the locking wheel nut on I had tried it on a couple of studs to check why is felt odd. This meant that two of the studs were knackered. I fixed one but not the other. Finally I thought I had got the both to work and tried to refit the wheel. Having refitted the wheel I tightened the nut and it stopped........

I tried to get it off. ........

nope it was not moving at all.....

I then got the big tyre wrench thingy and leant on it until I snapped the stud. At least now I had the wheel off again. At this stage in the game out trip to Italy in the gt6 in only 10 days time is looking unlikely :-(

A trip to the Landrover garage in Christchurch and the scrapyard followed in order to get new studs and nuts. The next thing I was worried about was taking the hub off again as it was of course the hub with the hub nut that was about to give up and die.


At about 15:00 my luck finally changed and the hub went back together including the nut taking 100 lb ft. It says 100-110 and I didn't want to push it any more than it had to.

So all in all not a great morning/early afternoon.