Well the windscreen guy has just been and gone. As the weather is so poor today – varying between heavy rain and mild drizzle, and there is nowhere under cover that I can put the car at the office, he can’t do the windscreen here. (Note the clear blue sky in the picture of the crack I took yesterday!)

The only option he could offer is to take the car down to their depot, which is in Portsmouth, but as everybody else will be doing that as well, he can’t say when it will be done. Even once it is complete, it will take several hours before the car can be moved to allow the windscreen sealant to dry. He has offered to rebook it for next week, when hopefully it won’t be raining, and he has also said that they will talk to Reading depot and see if it can be booked in there tomorrow. Of course although it would be tight, the other option might be to put the car into the garage at home and they could do the work there.

He did say that the windscreen was perfectly safe, as the problem is not with the glass. Although there is a small hole in the glass near the edge, the crack is not in either of the glass layers in the laminate, it is in the inner layer of plastic, so no danger of the windscreen falling out!

Oddly enough, it was also the same guy who came out earlier in the year, hence when he called, he’d already found the car in the car park, recognising it from last time! First thing he said when I came out was “You’re not having much luck with windscreens are you!”

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So windscreen number four is about to be replaced, taking the average windscreen life on the Focus down to about six months.

Much to my annoyance it happened on the same stretch of road as the previous impact – the B3349 between Alton and Odiham, and the same cause, loose chippings from the centre line. Hampshire County Council use a technique called ‘surface dressing’ to extend the life of their roads. In the past the technique would only be used on low speed side roads, but now Hampshire are using it even on national speed limit roads. They also try to minimise disruption by not closing the road when they do the work.

The general principle is that they lay a layer of tar, and then cover it in copious amounts of loose chippings; they then let normal traffic back onto the road, the idea being that the traffic embeds the chippings into the road surface. A few days later they then take a road sweeper truck out to clear the remains of the chippings.

The big problem with this particular stretch of road is that it is windy and fairly narrow, and most of the traffic is going at 60mph, as a result the sweeper truck has cleared loose chippings from either lane, but not from the centre, as with the road open it was never safe for the truck to drive down the middle of the road. As a result, whenever someone overtakes, as the Audi in front of me did this morning, there are still loose chippings down the middle of the road that lift. This morning it happened that one of the chippings lifted and hit the edge of the windscreen, and for the rest of the journey to work I could hear, and see a crack growing on the edge of the windscreen. Anyway, RAC Autowindscreens are coming out tomorrow morning to replace the glass. It will still cost me a £60 excess, but thankfully, as it is only a windscreen, my no claims bonus is in tact.

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To change a headlight bulb cost the grand total of £38.62 including VAT, from the official price list for servicing that Ford give them. The girl in the service department said that both the new Mondeo and the new Fiesta have similar problems.

Incidentally, my worry over cheap Ford plastics that led me not to want to force the grille seems well founded, as the front grille is noticeably not as secure as it once was. It seems to me that in an ideal world, the better way to do it would be to remove the battery and the tray and not the headlight (as that would probably have been how it was put together), however by doing that you run into all sorts of problems with the security systems and the Engine Management System, both of which would be affected by disconnecting the battery.

Why is it that Ford can’t make a car now that has a bulb that the owner can change?!?

Anyway, after about an hour sitting around at Reg Vardy having the bulb done, I went down to Basingstoke to test drive a new Skoda Octavia, an all together more pleasurable experience. I test drove both their 1.9TD, and the 140bhp 6-speed 2.0TD. I have to say that the 2.0TD has a pretty frightening amount of power, enough that I’d probably end up wrapped around a tree at some point. The 1.9TD seems perfectly adequate for the kind of mixed driving with occasional long motorway runs that I do.

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I don’t know, but it is going to cost me at least £30 on Saturday to find out!

I set off for work this morning to discover that the passenger side headlamp bulb on the Focus had blown. No problem I thought, when the drivers side had gone, I’d gone over to Halfords on my lunch break and they’d sold me a new bulb, and even fitted it in about 10 minutes.

Today, the guy at Halfords wouldn’t do it, and suggested I either do it myself, or take it to a Ford dealer, as he said it was too fiddly. (The point of the service I thought was to do a fiddly job for you).

I phoned the Ford dealer nearest to work, who was proposing to charge me £30 for the pleasure, but described how to do it over the phone (basically unscrew the bolts holding the light in place, and get the whole unit out) and suggested I should be able to do it, so tonight I thought I’d do it myself…

A lot of hassle later I still haven’t changed the bulb, mainly because I can’t get it out as the battery mounting blocks the back of the headlight cluster. I’ve tried removing the headlight to get at it that way, but it is blocked by a screw underneath somewhere that I can’t find (and the Ford dealer didn’t mention), and the front grille, that includes the locking mechanism for the bonnet. From previous experience with Ford plastics I’m loathed to force it as it will probably break. Much to my disgust it does look like I’m going to end up having to pay a Ford dealer to change the bulb for me.

Apparently the new Mondeo and Fiesta just tell you to remove the headlamp, and then say that you should have the headlight alignment checked by a dealer. Certainly when I phoned Reg Vardy to book it in for Saturday morning, the person making the booking didn’t seem surprised.

A definite Ford money making scheme methinks…

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I think I’m getting obsessed by the handling of the Focus. I managed to kerb the car in the car park last week, and after having done it the drive felt significantly more floaty than it had been since I’d had the replacement tyre put on. Since we were going to go on the M25 to David’s wedding I thought I’d take it and have the wheel allignment checked. I used the Fleet branch of RoadWheel whose Portsmouth branch had rebalanced all the wheels after the new tyre had been put on, who put it up on the machine and discovered that all the settings were out, in some cases by about 100% looking at the printout. They duly alligned the wheels for me.

One thing about RoadWheel is they allow you to watch as they do the balancing. At Micheldever, where I’ve had the allignment done before, they take the car into another part of the building which you can’t see from the waiting area. The interesting thing I noticed when the car was up on the platform was that the brand new tyre, despite being a Goodyear Eagle NCT5 just like the rest had a different tread pattern.

Anyway, having got the wheels alligned I headed for home, and the car felt a lot better. However on the way down to Leatherhead, when I took it up to motorway speeds there was a definite shimmer through the steering, and after I eneded up going round the roundabout coming off the motorway twice, the steering felt very weird.

On the way back from the wedding I took it steady, and didn’t go above 60mph on the motorway. The next morning I took it down to Reg Vardy and asked them to drive it to see what was wrong.

As is usual with car problems and garages, they said that the car was driving as they would expect for one with this mileage (52,000), and that he “had driven worse”. He then proceeded to demonstrate that the steering, suspension and road holding was absolutely fine by going considerably faster than I would up the A33 to Risely and back down the old road. Suffice to say that I don’t think the wheels will be falling off any time soon! He said that the cause of the noise and vibration is the tyres, and that Ford almost never supply a Focus fitted with NCT5′s. He said that it would be a waste of money to replace the existing tyres until they were worn out, but when they came due for renewal recommended getting a different brand. As a side note, he also said that the engine was misfiring, something which I’ve mentioned I thought was a problem in earlier postings, and for which I’d had the car back into Reg Vardy to sort out a couple of weeks after I took delivery, but was told there wasn’t anything wrong. I’ve been running the car on Shell Optimax and lately on BP Ultimate which has largely eliminated the problem, so it was pure fluke that it misfired, and I think only becuase he was putting the car under heavy acceleration. Suffice to say that he said that unless the car was consistently misfiring it would be difficult to find unless it did it more frequently. The only way to get it to do that would be to switch back to normal unleaded, and with the mileage I’m doing that would be a general nightmare.

Back to the tyre saga, he said as far as he was concerned it was absolutely fine, and indeed when I drove it back home, it did feel pretty good, certainly a lot better than it has been.

Three days later I’ve driven to work and back three times, and also gone out to get a paper when I got home tonight. I also checked the tyre pressures properly today, and although there was some variation in how much, it was only by 0.5psi. To me the car still feels like it is moving around, moreso on rough surfaces, and the tyres are especially noisy on the various bits of road that Hampshire County Council has “surface dressed” over the past couple of years. Having said that, as Beth points out I’ve never been totally happy with the way the car has driven, it’s just that I’ve been more focused on the misfiring and “moods” that the engine goes through. (Incidentally it had another mood tonight, going to get the paper. The steering felt decidedly heavy on starting up in the car park outside the shop. I think was down to having stopped and restarted it twice in quick succession).

With regards to the ride, in contrast to the endless rave reviews of the drivability of the Focus, I have read a number of comments saying that the feedback through the chassis borders on the hyperactive at times, and may not be what some drivers would like. With the rough B-Roads that a large part of my regualr commute is on, I guess I fall into that category! Whilst I used to quite regularly go out driving for fun, since taking a job 44 miles down rough B-Roads from home, extra driving is not something I particularly relish. The problem is not really going to be solved until I either change jobs to one with a different commute, or replace the car. I guess I might be able to improve things by replcaing the tyres, but as I’ve only had 10,000 miles out of this set, and the other set lasted over 40,000, that may be some time! Anyway, whatever happens I am fast reaching the end of the 60,000 mile/3 year warranty, after 2 years use, so I guess I’ll stump up to extend to the 100,000 mile/6 year extension, which on current form will last for four years, but I think it’s probably necesary if, as with my previous Fiesta, the misfire is a symptom of an engine problem. Having said that, like the Fiesta, although the Focus has more noticable moods, it has not actually broken down on me. The Fiesta, even when the misfire was continuous, still never actually stopped running.

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