Honda-SOHC

Perhaps it's not just VW who are pulling the wool?


Christine and I have just returned from a great trip from Orkney to the Netherlands, Germany and Austria - not with the Daimler or the GoldWing, but with our Peugeot Partner Tepee.  I decided before this trip that I would do a bit of testing of various parameters which come up on the display and in particular the overall MPG figure.
We have been using a Garmin 60 csx GPS unit successfully for a few years now, so I thought I would use this to accurately log the distance travelled.  We fuelled up to the brim before we left and disregarded that fuel quantity. We kept all of the till receipts and filled up finally when we returned home and included that in the total.
On such a long trip with many visits to the fuel stations, any small discrepancy in total volume would be insignificant.
We travelled a total of 2960 miles according to the 12 channel GPS and we used 55 gallons of fuel, or 230 litres

This works out at 52.44 mpg, yet the digital display on the dash of the Peugeot read 55.3mpg.  That might not sound much of a discrepancy, but it's close to a 6% error. 

Is this just down to the difficulty in accurately measuring fuel flow and therefore specific fuel consumption, or are the dark forces at work here as well as at VW?

You (and they) can come up with all kinds of reasons, such as odometer error, tyre wear (incidentally ours were almost new before the trip) but the error is always in the same direction. Food for thought!
Ian

Just thought I would update any 350/4 owners about the problem I've been having with the leaking fuel tap.  I thought I'd tried everything - except for find a NOS tap, which are unavailable from the normal sources both here and abroad.  I had obviously replaced the lever seal and even refaced the lever, plus added a thin shim under the clamp plate - it still dribbled fuel - enough to compromise the float needle valves (all new Keyster items) and pee fuel all over the floor of the workshop overnight.  Enough was enough the other day after a lovely ride out, I turned off the fuel about half a mile from home and the following day it had filled up the chambers (with the tap still turned off) and then dumped a good pint or two out through the overflow pipes.
I realise that I still have issues with the float needle valves, but I needed to sort the tap pronto.
I drained the remaining fuel and removed the tank.  On removing the tap from the tank (it's different from the 400/4 tap) I checked the washers under the screw heads and found one was swelled and split.  These were new when I restored the bike but I think this bio-shite fuel might have taken its toll on them. 
It's a peculiar set up, so the screws holding the tap to the tank were passing fuel into the small filter bowl and then straight along the pipe to the carbs. There were no external leaks around the tap.
I was loathe to just replace the washers with originals, so I annealed a couple of new copper washers and put those under the heads of the screws with a blob of Hylomar as insurance.
Reassembled and filled with fuel - hey presto, no dribbles!
Strangely enough the carb floats have also settled down as mentioned by Ash in another post.  Even with the tap on and left standing - no problems.
I think draining the bowls allows so much angle on the floats that they might leak a time or two as there is a lot of sideways force as they come up to position, but at least that appears to settle down eventually.