UK to Slovakia

Thanks to an email from scorpion42 in which he asks me about the Pajero’s MOT and what the winters are like here, I have a good enough excuse to write another post - thanks JP.

My wife drove the bus on it’s 2 day (each way) round trip to from Slovakia to the UK on her own this year. Apart from some personal things she needed to attend to, she taught in a Summer School in the UK for 6 weeks to supplement our income (or lack of it as her boss had not paid her for 4 months).

The bus passed it’s MOT with flying colours, not a single bit of work needed doing, not even a blown bulb. I suspect it might be a slightly different story next year as the Yokohama All-Terrain tyres are starting to show signs of wear. They would be good for several years in the UK but the Police are more than a bit keen here on ‘winter tyres’ and they like them with plenty of tread. We only get away with not having to use winter tyres because the tread looks so meaty.
I know what your thinking and no, it’s not a con. Winter tyres have a much softer rubber compound, so much so, the cars pretty much fly around in the snow as fast as they do on normal tyres in the rain, in summer.

I don’t really do anything special to prepare for winter. The locks do have a squirt of WD40 but thats really just as a lubricant more than anything else. I haven’t used the door locks, except for checking they still work, for over two years as I much prefer the remote central locking. At -20C and below, even WD40 will freeze so the lock slot and the lock mechanism itself gets an annual, pre-winter splatt of petroleum jelly. Most greases I experimented with will freeze well before petroleum jelly.
When I say freeze, I’m talking about grease having the consistency of toffee and thats not something you really want near moving parts.

Believe it or not, the most annoying problem in these sub zero temperatures is the door seal itself icing up.
You trudge through the snow to the car, drive down the road with the heater on that causes the snow to melt and be suspended as moisture in the air. When you park up for the night, the moisture in the air sticks like shit to a blanket, to the door seal and freezes solid. Luckily I haven’t managed to rip any of the door seals to shreds yet but it has been close a few times and it wouldn’t be the first time I have had to prise the door open gently with a very large flat headed screw driver.
I have tried ‘oiling’ the door seals with WD40 but it’s a waste of time, the stuff just evaporates. The best results I have had were with silicon sprays designed for shining dashboard plastic etc. That seems to work really, really well on door seals.

I have no idea what the anti-freeze mix is as it was done for ‘mates rates’ in Poland but I would guess it’s a 50/50 mix as that seems to be the norm here. I cannot account for wind-chill but at a recorded outside temperature of -35C there is no sign of problems with the coolant and no signs of seepage on the rubber hoses. I will have to renew it next year, I don’t want to risk bad anti-freeze at these silly temperatures and let’s be honest, the stuff costs peanuts compared to replacing engine parts.

I do have some sheets of polystyrene I use to help insulate the battery - I don’t honestly know if it makes any difference but it’s a water, lead and sulphuric acid battery not a solid or gel battery so to my way of thinking, at minus (insert any two numbers here) Celcius it’s way too cold for water.

The sat-nav, rear view camera and DVD player stops working at about -15 to -20, or more precisely, the LCD screens don’t work at those temperatures until the cabin has warmed up a bit.

De-icer
Forget it!! 99.9% of all de-icer sprays actually contain some water. Usually the cheaper they are, the more water they have. So don’t waste the money. Halfords do an expensive de-icer in a plastic squirty bottle, thats the best stuff you can get but as I haven’t found a Halfords here, I use the more traditional method; a yard brush to get rid of most of the snow and knock all the icicles off and thats it. Trying to scrape the ice off the screen is a none starter - trying to scrape off inch thick ice with anything other than a hammer and very substantial chisel is going to take forever and windscreens don’t kindly to being pummeled by a 5lb lump hammer. The screen usually clears in about 15 minutes any way with the fast scrren clear turned on and the heater on.