Zel's Motoring Adventures...Volvo, Renault, Rover, Trabant, Invacar & A Sinclair C5 - Updated 13/11.

[Broadsword]

It's rather enjoyable seeing all these details put right, there are so many of them!

[Zelandeth]

I'm still noticing things about it, some which are good, others make you wonder what the heck they were smoking.  It's obvious that stuff like the silver piping on the dash disappearing wasn't anything to do with style choice to me, but rather was a step they could skip on the assembly line...so save a few pence.  Feels to me that I'm fixing their penny pinching!

Something I've just noticed looking at that photo...the rear overhang on this thing is huge. 

I need to look at getting some period correct plates made up as these aren't great quality and the post 2001 typeface on cars from the 80s makes my teeth itch.  The rear one in particular bugs me as the letters aren't black, they're dark brown as the printing obviously wasn't sufficiently opaque.

What do folks reckon...standard pre-2001 typeface (the name of which has escaped me right now) or Serck?  Thinking standard for the Jag...hoping I might be able to replicate the original dealer plates with a bit of luck. 

The van will definitely be getting Serck ones though as especially with the colour scheme it looks so peak 80s.  It definitely needs a set though as the front one is delaminating and the rear has been painted over when the rear bumper was repainted at some point.  It still has the dealer plates on at least so it will be easy to replicate the correct border etc.

Will be Tipper's I'll be using as I'm really happy with the ones they made for TPA.

[SiC]

I'll just leave this here in case you feel like you want to save it:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/373030201482

[Broadsword]

I love a fresh pair of number plates on a car. My vote (not that I have one) is for standard typeface on the XJS.

[Zelandeth]

43 minutes ago, SiC said:

I'll just leave this here in case you feel like you want to save it:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/373030201482

Nice...That really does look like a clean one, even though it desperately needs a good polish...Seems pretty well priced based on what the last couple I did pay attention to went for...I really hope someone does save it from the suggested fate on that eBay listing.  Not the car for me though.  On a C plate that will be an early Mk II I'd think (squinting at the pictures it does appear to have the later dash), and for me it's got to be a Mk I.  The simplicity of the earlier cars inside especially is part of the charm for me.  It feels like the later ones are sort of diluted somehow.  Not even going into the Rover Metro/100 days...I like them too, but in my mind they're always filed as a completely different car as the character changed so much. 

My first one was a Mk II City, so I do have time for them...but it's the earlier cars which will always be the ones that I'd actually want to revisit.

 

39 minutes ago, Broadsword said:

I love a fresh pair of number plates on a car. My vote (not that I have one) is for standard typeface on the XJS.

It does always round things off nicely.  One of the reasons that all the cars we used to bring through the garage had our own plates fitted.  Serck plates with the highlight line in the middle of all the digits at that!  We spared no expense!  Admittedly these days I do feel bad for how many original dealer plates we binned over the years, though at least if it were the sort of car likely to have an enthusiast following we would generally retain the originals and tuck them away in the boot.  The Jag would have had its originals kept if it had come through our doors.

You might not have a specifically numerically represented vote, but I do appreciate any input folks have on things, I really do appreciate the feedback.

[somewhatfoolish]

Depending on how pliable the vacuum hose is clamping the loose bits onto the fittings with zip ties may work.

[PhilA]

The original width 1935-style Charles Wright (squared letters) would look correct with the C prefix. 

Can you still get away with/get that made with that or not?

[Zelandeth]

3 hours ago, somewhatfoolish said:

Depending on how pliable the vacuum hose is clamping the loose bits onto the fittings with zip ties may work.

Not a bad thought.  I need to get some small clips ordered in anyway though.  That's the cause of my brake fluid leak at the reservoir - the clips holding the hoses between the reservoir and master cylinder have lost their tension.  Imagine the hose itself is pretty shot anyway after 35 years in the inferno like temperatures of a V12 XJ-S engine bay though so will change it anyway. 

Once I pluck up enough courage to see off all the brake bleed nipples will move.  I fully know the world of pain I'm in for if the rear ones don't want to play ball.

This is also dependant on me being able to figure out where the heck in my diaster of a garage I put the box with the brake fluid compatible hose in...and whether I have the right diameter in it.  Ordering new would probably be quicker!

[Zelandeth]

Not been much going on car-wise today.

I was going to wash the van however the moment I turned the hose on the end immediately snapped off the union on the pressure washer (the plastic fitting on the washer has cracked).  The hose of course then took on a life of its own, skittered off across the garden, soaked me, then had a go at the postie who was walking down the path at the time (thankfully he thought it was hilarious), then drowned the extension cord...and tripped out the RCD.  This went down well with the rest of the household who were all on conference calls for work at the time. 

Fine...I'll come back to that tomorrow.  At least I hadn't got as far as setting the long ladder up yet.

Annoyingly while checking the tyre pressures I've noticed that the rear tyres are starting to perish.

Not bad bad yet, but I'll definitely need to be keeping an eye on them.

The front ones look fine, but given the weight on the back it's not surprising they're showing their age first. I did want to check if the exhaust being ahead of the nearside rear had caused that one to perish first as I know that's an issue that's been mentioned as an issue (Cobblers I think), no visible difference between them.

Dated 2014, so they're pretty much due a change on age grounds anyway, even though they only have a few thousand miles on them.  Anyone got any good experience with van tyres?  If there's no huge preference I'll probably just aim for Uniroyal as I've never had any complaints about them before.

Since early in 2017 I've had a little cluster of computers running a distributed computing client which split its time between SETI and Rosetta (they do protein folding type science).  SETI have suspended their home based program as of the end of March, so everything has now been redirected to Rosetta.  I shut down most of the systems a couple of months ago to save power as our bills seemed to have been creeping up a bit.  However as Rosetta are directing most of their efforts to COVID19 work at the moment I figured this was a good reason to get everything back up and running.

Any sysadmin will tell you that computers tend to be surprisingly reliable, even if worked hard, if they're left in a steady state.  However if you go switching things off that is tempting fate.

Two dead CPU fans, one dead power supply, one dead hard drive and one mystery motherboard failure which appears to be a corrupt BIOS or something.  At least that's only an old Celeron so no huge loss!

Power supply and hard drive were both sorted last week, however I'd been waiting for the CPU fans to arrive for the two laptops.  They arrived this morning.

First up was the Lenovo.  It's based on an i7-3612QM, and has suffered very much from the "high powered laptop problem" in that the heat has turned a huge amount of the case brittle, it was retired from daily use when something went awry with the memory controller so it will only properly address one RAM slot.

It's a fiddly machine to get into and back together, but it was back up in less than an hour.  Obviously took the opportunity to clean the heatsink out (even though it was pretty clean) and change the thermal compound.

The next one up was an old Compaq.  That one's only an Athlon II-300M, but it's generally been a consistent and reliable old slogger.

This is an easy one to get apart and by laptop standards is pretty easy.

This one definitely *did* need the heatsink cleaning!

The thermal paste was...toast.

It's never good when it needs to be chipped rather than wiped off!

With a bit of effort though it was cleaned up and was soon back up and running.

Imagine these would have been written off by most folks for the sake of less than £20.

Suffice to say the second system is running far cooler with a clean heatsink and thermal paste rather than chalk.

 

[Zelandeth]

Well this was a moderately frustrating afternoon.

Didn't have a huge amount of time to play with so decided to go for a quick and easy option for stuff to tick off the to do list. 

Some...it feels like considerable...time ago some of you may recall me picking these up at an autojumble.

Intention being to use windscreen demister switch to switch the heater blower and the other to be wired in as a brake fluid level indicator.  Figured this afternoon would be a good opportunity to get them actually installed.  The general public agreement for placement was for it to go where I had suggested, to the right of the speedometer, mirroring the headlight/wiper switches on the other side of the dash.  I wanted to align things such that I had room to install a total of three switches there for potential future upgrades (I've a half developed idea to get me working forced cool air ventilation in the cabin which would want an additional one).  While the brake light/switch doesn't quite match visually it's the same width as the Invacar (etc!) ones so I can reuse the cutout for it in future.  I know BMC had a thing for using switch-based brake fluid warning lights for many years, did they ever do one that used this type of footprint?

I've seen vertically oriented warning lights of about this size on some Man buses from the 80s, but without access to a boneyard to go digging through never likely to find any.  A part of me still really wants to get access to a dead late 90s Man 18.220 as they had literally a few dozen discrete warning lights on the dash, and my box of random panel indicators etc needs those...They match the footprint of those in the van too so would be nice for status indicators in the living area too.  Kind of kick myself for not seeing if I could make that happen (and get hold of a flipdot destination blind & controller) back when I still had contacts in the industry.

Anyhow...back on topic.

This started poorly in that I couldn't even find the brake one.

A bit of measurement and marking out with scribbles on masking tape was done before I set about cutting the hole for the heater switch, which in an almost unheard of turn of events actually didn't go horribly.  Not the tidiest cut in the world but the couple of wobbles are small enough to be well behind the switch bezel.

This is where things came unravelled.

The action of the switch was a bit "crunchy" for want of a better word, and the meter showed it to be slightly erratic in terms of contact.  I've already had both of the ones in the car apart to be cleaned and regreased so figured I'd do the same here.  They're not difficult switches to service and it makes a huge difference.

However somewhere between me taking it apart and getting back into the car to reassemble it, the little spring which sits between the contact plate and the switch shuttle assembly vanished.  I have no idea where...it was there when I took it apart, it wasn't when I went to reassemble it.  I don't know if I dropped it, though I know it just sits in there and is loose so I don't think I'd have just walked outside with it sitting on top of the switch...or if I've set it aside somewhere "safe" and forgotten where...or if I've set it somewhere safe and it's rolled  away.

Either way...I spent the best part of an hour and a half searching for the blasted thing, then another 45 minutes digging through my various boxes of miscellaneous parts to see if I could find a suitable replacement.  That would be a no.

Don't suppose anyone has one of these switches floating around I could buy do they?  Doesn't need to be an illuminated one as I just want to nick the spring out of it!

I'll have another rummage around tomorrow.  Might need to back the car out as at least that will let me see clearly underneath where it's parked and give me a bit more room...

[Zelandeth]

Back out this afternoon to see if I could find that blasted spring.  After about an hour of digging through the garage I finally relented and shuffled all the stuff out of the way, moved the Jag onto the street and backed the van up so I could get TPA out of the garage.  Here she is blinking in the sunlight for the first time since September.

Could I find it even having got myself some room to move?  Not a chance.

Had a last bash at things by sweeping the garage out then going through the resulting pile of dust with a magnet.  Result?

Found ya, you little sod!

Ten minutes later I actually got the switch cleaned up, back together and was able to get it installed.

Doesn't look out of place I reckon.

Could have been straighter, but I'll take it.  There's a bit of wiggle room there so I can look to fine tune it later.  Obviously needs wiring attached at some point.  Plus at some point I'll be swapping the dash out for the spare I have which doesn't have a stinking great hole in the top anyway.  I need to pull it to tidy some of the existing wiring up anyway (the main ignition feed passing through a rusty screw terminal block doesn't instill confidence!), so may as well take the opportunity to fit the better dash while it's out.

Speaking of wiring I want to see if I can make a few improvements anyway...a relay or two to take the load off the ignition switch for one as it gets warmer than I'd like.

 

Wouldn't be a bad idea to tackle that job now while the car's otherwise off the road now I think of it...

[LightBulbFun]

yay happy to see some more Model 70 progress and work and that you found the spring  

and very cool to see TPA out in the sunlight after so long!

I agree the switch fits in quite nicely with the rest  

I wonder what plastic the dashboard is made out of why it warps like it does, the one in REV has slightly sunk where it meets the front bulkhead/windscreen but its not too bad thankfully

(but I do wonder if theres any preventive measures that can be taken or if its one of those inevitable things, im guessing sunlight/UV probably has something to do with it)

 

 

on slightly related side note, if it wasn't part of REV's history etc (and the fact her clock really does match up well with the rest of the gauges), id be quite tempted to swap her clock out for some sort of Nixie tube based multiple use display unit for displaying various numerical values/bits of data like the time  the rev count or the oil temperature etc ya get the idea  as I love nixie tubes and love the idea of having them in my car LOL

(I do  have a small USB port and voltmeter meter thingy im hoping ill be able to just zip tie or such under the dash board or such without having to make any permanent modifications as I don't want to go cutting holes in my dashboard given how they dont exactly grow on trees sadly,)

[Zelandeth]

The dashboards were renowned for being quite brittle and prone to warping even back in the day.  There's no decent support underneath it so it tends to say between the two mounting points.  I'll probably be bonding a metal plate to the underside of my replacement so that that it's properly supported.

I'll be attaching the instrument pod to the metal rail under the dash rather than the plastic itself.

 

[Christine]

Ermmm. I was just reading an xjs roadtest....

 

 

 

Spoiled by silver edging.....ha ha 

 

[Christine]

[Zelandeth]

Each to their own I guess!  The world would be boring if everyone liked the same things though.

[Christine]

Dont get me wrong ,i too like the edging !

[Zelandeth]

Gardening ate up most of this afternoon but managed to grab an hour in the garage just before dinner.

First task was to get a new set of taps ordered to try to get the hub sorted, hopefully the new set won't be made of cheese like the original set. 

Bit of general box ticking was then done.

[] Sealed off the air outlet on the engine cowling for the heater which is now unused.  I figure reserving as much air for engine cooling can't be a bad thing.

Just went for a bit of duct tape which is clamped down by a hose clip.  Crude but it should do the job.

I will pull the tubing that runs between the two halves of the cowling off as well next time the transmission cover is out. 

[] I've pulled the current shunt off the negative battery terminal as I've decided that the digital ammeter that goes with it isn't staying with the car.  It was handy when I was initially checking out whether the charging system was behaving though.

[] Nearside door tie fixing.  This issue goes all the way back to when I first got KPL, in that the threads were so mangled in the door tie that I couldn't get the retaining nut on.  As a result the tie rod was held onto the dash support bar with a bunch of cable ties.

Not pretty.  It also made the door sticky to close sometimes.

Today I finally got around to pulling it apart, cleaning the threads up (I didn't have a tap and die set when I originally put this together), cleaning and re-greasing the assembly itself, and then bolted it in place properly.

Much better.

While I was working on the door in general I took the opportunity to also dig all the old grease out of the whole lower door runner and regrease it.  What was in there had basically taken on the consistency of toffee.  Chipping it all out took a good twenty minutes or so, but was worth it as the door now slides almost acceptably.  Greasing the latches has resulted in being able to actually close the door with the handle rather than having to open the window and grab the top of the door.  Still needs a good slam, but it's a definite improvement.  I think "passable" is about the best you can hope for with Invacar doors!

[Yoss]

I was going to say your wiper switch is upside down as the pictogram shows the wiper coming down from the top. That would be an easy fix. I realise you've got bigger problems but that would be (is) bugging me. But then I noticed what looks like a choke knob next to it also a wiper logo on it (and that one is the right way round!). 

So how does that work, ones the on/off and ones a speed control? But I doubt they have a two speed wiper. 

Actually, it's just occurred to me as I was typing this the left one is probably a plunger for windscreen washer. I like those, I have one in the Triumph and you can adjust where it hits the screen by how hard you push it. If you push it really hard it goes right over the screen and comes in the sunroof. 

Anyway, I'm just rambling now but that switch needs turning round. 

[Zelandeth]

The wiper switches are all like that, likely a case of what was cheaply available out the parts bin.  If you were to turn it around it would sit in the wrong position when off (the stop which sets which way the switch moves is moulded into the switch cap, so it's no a simple matter of flipping it round).  The knob next to the wiper switch is as you correctly identified a mechanical windscreen washer pump.  The choke is up above the windscreen on the offside with the heater/demister air distribution controls.

The only car I've seen with a switch on the dash to do with intermittent wipe was the Skoda Rapid/130GL (the 130GL was an Estelle which got all the Rapid interior bits, so different dash, centre console, better door trims etc).

That gave you three different delay settings when the wipers were set to intermittent.  They were spaced such that it was actually genuinely useful.

A lot of what I'm doing now to be fair is detail stuff.  The bodywork is scruffy but it's not a problem really for now.  Once the hub is sorted she should be back in service, I'm just trying to tick off a lot of the stuff I threw together originally, but doing it right this time.  To be honest a lot of it is detail stuff like "cable tie that bit of loom" or "install foam pad to stop that rattling" and the like.

[LightBulbFun]

5 hours ago, Yoss said:

I was going to say your wiper switch is upside down as the pictogram shows the wiper coming down from the top.

Anyway, I'm just rambling now but that switch needs turning round. 

this really is as @dollywobbler puts it is the "did you know princess Anne" of Model 70 owners  

the switch is the correct way up even if the pictogram is "upside down" 

they were all like that from the factory including the User trial BPE-H prototype Model 70's!

 

rather annoyingly someone has actually turned the switch in REV upside down, which bugs me because it looks wrong, but also confused me a little and I wasn't sure which position was on or off!

(someone's also fiddled with my warning lights in the past as you can also see, but I think ill leave those be as they make more sense!)

as such I unknowingly left it in the on position, and when the windscreen wiper decided it wanted to work mid drive it scared the crap out of me LOL

 

[Yoss]

See that looks much better to me though I'll agree if you just turn the whole switch round that will also look wrong as the off position will have it sticking out at the top. I doubt it's that hard to take the cover off and turn it round though I can't remember to be honest. They are standard British Leyland switches, I had them in my Landcrabs but it's been a long time. 

I realise none of this is important in the grand scheme of things. 

[Zelandeth]

25 minutes ago, Yoss said:

See that looks much better to me though I'll agree if you just turn the whole switch round that will also look wrong as the off position will have it sticking out at the top. I doubt it's that hard to take the cover off and turn it round though I can't remember to be honest. They are standard British Leyland switches, I had them in my Landcrabs but it's been a long time. 

I realise none of this is important in the grand scheme of things. 

You can't turn the cap around (I've already tried!) as there's a stop moulded into the cap which is which defines which direction the switch can move in.  The ones designed to be fitted the other way up have a tab on the back of the switch cap moulded into the opposite end.

I've had all the switches apart to clean and grease them, so did look to see if I could flip the symbol the right way up at that point.

This layout being largely obsolete aside from a few commercial vehicles by the time the Model 70 went into production probably meant they were able to buy them in cheaper.

[Yoss]

Not worth £18.50 but I'm glad you've looked into it. ?

[Zelandeth]

Nothing done with the cars today, though when we had to pop out to pick up some prescriptions and groceries, so took a nice compact sensible vehicle.

To be honest I don't really want to take the Jag out in the wet until I've sorted the rust on the nearside wing on the Jag and refitted the wheel arch liner, so it was the logical choice.

Now a brief Segway into tech as happens now and then in this thread.

The next few evening's worth of entertainment picked out.  Next up in Zel's Hospital for Sick Technology:

It's been waiting patiently since it was kindly passed my way at FotU last year.  Most folks who know me know that I've an unhealthy fondness for computing equipment from the 90s.  I was a very late mover to Windows, having grown up as a big fan of Amiga and Acorn machines.  I had an Amiga 1200 which over the years I have spent far more money than I care to think about on, and inherited an Archimedes A3000 from my secondary school during an upgrade (me and a friend were basically honorary technical staff and did a lot of legwork keeping the network going).  This was upgraded to an A5000 just before I left school.  Windows 9x always felt horrifically clunky to me, so it wasn't really until XP came along and I found a modern Windows installation I was actually able to make do what it do something useful without driving me mad.  The fact that I'd managed to make 3.11 do all manner of things for which it was never really designed probably helped delay that too.  I didn't get to play around with Windows 2000 until quite a lot later on, though that tends to be my go to OS for machines from the Pentium 2-4 era (and a VM I run for a few productivity programs which don't play nicely with Wine on my main workstation).

I can't pick between Acorn and Amiga.  They're very different machines, though from a purely technical perspective Acorn probably gets my vote.  They were so, so far ahead of their time architecturally.  While I enjoy using Workbench on the Amiga, 3.0 is what I really made my first *real* steps into computing with, I can't deny it's quite clunky in a lot of ways.  RiscOS on the other hand still feels slick now...while it might lack modern visual sparkle in some ways, it still works well.  It was very much its own thing in the time and to this day nothing has behaved in quite the same way.  I think it's the massively efficient use of screen space in RiscOS which makes me want to bash my head against a brick wall when using Windows 10.

Anyway...While I've had an A3000, A3020, A4000, A5000 and quite recently got an A7000 (which I've just realised that I have no idea of the current location of), a RiscPC was something I'd always dearly wanted since using one once back in one of the technical offices at school.  It felt like the future!  Until last year though it was a machine which had eluded me.  So when this one came along I grabbed it the second I found out about it.  A lot of Acorn gear is pretty easy to get hold of at a reasonable price, the two notable exceptions being the original BBC Micro and the RiscPC range.  Hopefully a Micro will turn up one day too.

Unsurprisingly this machine needs a bit of TLC.

While I didn't have time to give it too much attention when it initially arrived, I did give it a quick once over.  This immediately revealed that the RTC/CMOS battery had been leaking, a common issue on Acorn gear, which can do quite a lot of damage if left unchecked

So the battery was snipped off the board, the alkaline gunk neutralised and then the motherboard cleaned before it was put into storage to wait its turn in the queue.

So it's now getting some attention.

We appear to have the 2Mb VIDC Memory upgrade, a StrongARM CPU upgrade board (not sure exactly which one yet), 32Mb of RAM and the 80486 expansion board (which makes me happy as the idea of being able to run DOS/Windows software in a window on a RiscOS desktop appeals to my sense of ridiculous).

Also enjoyed seeing a TI branded 80486 rather than an Intel one, don't think I've come across that before.

Current status: Dead.  Well not entirely.  On powering on there's a click from the speaker, the hard drive spins up (with that unmistakable "Nnnn-Wrrrriiimmmm...tick-tick-tick-clack" anyone into computers from this era can ID as a Connor hard disc), the power and hard disc LEDs light as expected (disc activity light goes out once the hard disc has spun up), the network adaptor status LED lights, and the keyboard LEDs blink showing me it's getting power, but that's it.

No soft synthesized "Boooop" sound effect, no seek of the floppy drive, no screen output, nothing.  These machines are able to output quite a few POST error codes via flashing the activity light on the floppy drive, however nothing showing here.

If the CMOS data has become corrupted or left in a state which could prevent the system booting, it's possible to do a factory reset by holding down delete when powering it up.  Didn't make any difference.

One of the best things about these machines is that you can get down to the motherboard (and even get that out) without needing any tools.  The "slice" based case really is a clever idea.  So far I've stripped it down to just the motherboard and hard drive, and tried known good memory...still the same.

Next step: Check the voltage rails are present at the motherboard.  Then pull the motherboard out and carefully examine it to see if we've any broken tracks from the battery leakage.  I didn't immediately see any when I looked last year, didn't look that closely though.  Will clean up the sockets of every socketed item on the board too.

Should keep me quiet for a bit.

[Zelandeth]

New set of taps arrived today.  This one did not immediately strip itself when screwed into the hole in the hub.

I had my doubts from the feel of it whether I was going to get good purchase as it felt like the hole was still slightly oval - sure enough the bolt was a slightly loose fit and wouldn't tighten fully.

I was honestly expecting that.  One last option to try before drilling it out quite a lot larger and getting a helicoil involved.  Not a massive jump from where we are now to M12X1.5 which is common on caravan/trailers and as such wheel bolts are readily and cheaply available in that size.  Given the axle loadings on a caravan, I've no hesitation to use them on here.  It's either that or M12X1.25 (Xantia uses that and I've got a set of wheel bolts spare for that though the head profile is wrong). 

M12X1.5 calls for a 10.5mm drill however which I don't have.  M12X1.25 requires 10.8mm, which likewise I don't have.  Also don't have a wheel bolt on hand...

So M12X1.5 requires me to get a drill and bolt.

M12X1.25 I have the bolt, but will need a drill, conical washer and a tap (I've got M12 in 1.5 and 1.75mm variants, but not 1.25mm). 

Think I'm just going to go with 1.5mm as the bolts there at least have the correct profile.

So looks like I'm waiting for yet another order of stuff to drive from online.  Annoying when going out to grab stuff in person would take me all of twenty minutes...know lockdown is sensible and all that, but I dislike inefficiency so having to wait says for stuff to turn up still irks me.

Think tomorrow I might attack the offside door, sort the weatherproofing there the same as I did on the nearside a while ago.  Suffice to say the thing at the moment is noisy, draughty and leaks like a sieve.

Properly clamping it together with a foam weatherstrip between the door and window frame and half a dozen bolts vastly improved the structural strength of the door on the other side too.

Horrible fiddly task though which will leave me picking bits of fibreglass out the back of my hands for weeks most likely.  I did try wearing gloves last time but wasn't able to manipulate things accurately enough (working entirely by touch using two fingertips trying to get washers and nuts onto the bolts in the top of the door cavity) with them on.  Not expecting it to be any easier this time round.

...Not convinced I have any weatherstripping in stock either now I think about it.

[LightBulbFun]

22 hours ago, Zelandeth said:

The next few evening's worth of entertainment picked out.  Next up in Zel's Hospital for Sick Technology:

have to admit when I saw this pop up again my first thought was

"Oh fuck yeah!"  

properly looking forward to its resurrection 

 

BTW I was looking at some photos of under TPAs front service hatch and noticed that TPA's front mudguard looks a bit mangled/bent in places? I wonder if TPA had a small front ender at some point in time, and had a new front end put on as a result?

it would finally explain the difference in fibreglass construction/layup of the front and rear  

(also reminds me I need to grab some photos of under REV's service hatch I realised I dont have any!)

 

as a side fun fact, the front mudguard was actually designed to be collapsible on later Model 70's which technically meant the Model 70 did have a front crumple zone I think!

worth noting is its late TSD (technical service drawing aka blueprint) number of 7146 indicating it was drawn/put into place pretty well into the Model 70's production (around about early 1975 i think)

but interesting to note the fact its not listed as being for any specific mark or chassis range of Model 70

indicating it would have been sent out and fitted to any and all Model 70's that needed a new front mudguard for whatever reason

[Zelandeth]

So it looks like I'll be waiting the best part of a week for the bits I need to move on with the Invacar to arrive.  Annoying, but that's what we've got to work with.

Before I shut up shop I finally got around to putting some proper fasteners on the front number plate.  When the new plates arrived the front one way just thrown on using a couple of random bolts I found rattling around in the toolbox.

Five minutes later we've got a stainless screw, stainless washers and a little embellisher to hide the screw heads.

They're actually less intrusive in person, the garage light is directly overhead so it's highlighting them quite strongly in the photo.  Next task for the face of the car will be replacing the seals on the indicators so the black border around them isn't missing, that should improve things a lot.  I just painted over them as they're horribly perished so want changing anyway.  I couldn't get masking tape to stick to them either as I recall.

I also attacked the dashboard with some more plastic treatment.  It was looking really dull again, and that seems to really drag down the perception of the interior...and I was getting hacked off trying to order a drill bit from Amazon and getting two and a half pages into the search results before it would actually show me what I had searched for, so needed to do something to lower my blood pressure again!

It does look so much better when the dash is clean.  Shiny plastics look wrong in a lot of cars, but this isn't one of them. 

I know some people will laugh at me doing stuff like that on such a scruffy car, but I fully intend the interior to not be scruffy once I'm done with it.  I've little interest in getting the exterior into a spotless state, but I fully intend to have the interior in a properly tidy condition eventually.  I want it to be a pleasant place to be, even if that means a few deviations from the factory spec.  I've said it before I think, but I'm kind of aiming to make TPA into my interpretation of what the Model 70 could have been if it had been marketed as an actual market competitor to many microcars.  Aside from dual circuit brakes, a couple of warning lights and additional instruments the mechanical side to be honest is absolutely fine as it left the factory...I don't want to sound like a broken record, but it really is a bloody well engineered little car, it's just in the cabin it loses points really.  Yes, it is very basic and agricultural by today's standards...but is world's ahead of a lot of contemporary microcars, even four wheeled ones!

Stuff I'll be looking to do:

[] Electric fan for ventilation system.

[] Incorporation of forced cool air supply for the same.

[][] Possibly with the addition of a fresh air vent under the dash to get useful airflow with the windows open.  Plenty of room available to have a feed through the bulkhead hidden from sight.

[] Additional instrumentation pod (Oil temperature, oil pressure and a voltmeter).

[] Addition of a warning light for low brake fluid.  I'm no believer in purely relying on a warning light, but I'd really rather have one, especially on a car with single circuit brakes.

[] Conversion to dual circuit brakes if that's viable on a three wheeler.

[] Addition of a buzzer on the oil pressure light.  Dual purpose, making sure I can't miss it, and also to make it impossible for me to accidentally leave the ignition on.  There will be a kill switch for it so it doesn't drive me batty when working on the car and it doesn't scare the pants off anyone else driving her.

[] Carpeting.  50/50 mix of noise reduction and just generally because it will be nice to have.  I reckon carpeting the front bulkhead will make a huge difference as it acts as a huge bass resonator when moving - putting your foot on it at 60 drops the bass resonance in the cabin by a good 25% it feels like.  I'll be doing the front bulkhead, the doors (inside the void that passes for a door pocket and the rectangular recess below it that looks like it was made to have a trim panel), the parcel shelf/transmission cover, and the roof and rear pillars.  My roof has obviously taken a knock to the pillar behind the offside door so I'd rather have that covered...

Even just lining the roof should massively cut down on the reverb in there at speed.  I'm probably going to use either a dark blue (in the same colour family as the body) or a dark grey to match the seat.  My floor mats have had it anyway so need changing whatever I decide to do.

[] Installation of 12V and USB outlets under the dash.

[] Seeing if I can construct some form of storage compartment under the front service hatch, probably in the vicinity of where the battery lives in the later cars.  Would just be nice to have some basic tools and supplies on board without them rolling around the cabin. 

[] Actually installing some semblance of weather proofing on the doors.

[] Install a dashcam.

All stuff I can do without adding huge amounts of weight or making massive irreversible changes, and I don't think any of it will change the character of the car...just helping it be the best it can.  It's all stuff I can pick away at over months or even years.

 

Giving the RiscPC a once over this evening pretty quickly turned up a likely looking candidate for the issues I was having.

This chip deals with a lot of the I/O management I believe...and I'm not sure how it has happened but four of the pins have been damaged at some point.  I could see that one was already broken, but I decided to see if I could get the remainder to bend back into shape enough to ensure they weren't actually touching each other.

Sure enough the already snapped pin fell off the board the moment I so much as touched it, the others though I was able to coerce into sitting clear of each other.

I don't think there's realistically anything I can do with the broken pin though.  It's sheared off basically at the edge of the package so even if I had enough magnification and steady enough hands available I reckon I'd struggle to solder to it...never mind on such a tiny bit of metal.  I see two options...A: See if I can carefully cut away just enough of the package to find enough metal to either solder to or affix a bit of wire to by conductive epoxy, or B: Replace the chip...*if* I can get hold of one.  Finding a soldered in custom chip for a machine from the mid 90s though...I suspect that's going to be challenging.  I'll keep my eyes open for a donor motherboard though.  These machines do tend to be killed by leaking batteries, so it's not impossible I'll find a dead one I can rob the I/O management chip from...

I didn't expect anything, but I figured I'd see if we had any change in behaviour with the short removed at least.  I was staggered when the monitor woke up, and the floppy drive chunked its way into life for the startup seek.  Still didn't boot though, was still non responsive.  We did have some sign of life on the display though.

It's a lot more than I expected to be honest! 

I know that as the infamous battery is right next to the video memory expansion slot and that contact issues there are common.  Sure enough wobbling the video memory (VIDC memory in Acorn speak if I remember rightly) made the pattern on screen change.

A quick test to see if the problem is with that memory is simply to remove it.  The machine has onboard video memory, you just don't have access to the highest resolution and colour depth modes without the expansion fitted.

Powering up then resulted in a buzzing noise from the speaker...and the unmistakably obtrusive chatter of a Connor hard drive booting up an OS echoing around the room.  I was staggered to see this then appear.

Now something is still very unhappy given the video issues that are visible...but given that there's physical damage to one of the main ICs on the motherboard, getting it to boot at all seems need miraculous to me.  Seems to be 50/50 as to whether I get the above display or this...

This artefact is actually a bit more complicated than it might at first look, as it's not just the screen display being folded over - it does actually seem to be getting drawn that way as the application bar scrolls left or right as you mouse over it, so it seems that we are in fact in some strange, probably invalid screen mode.  It's also not just the monitor getting confused, the signal being fed in is a normal VGA signal.

This is a lot more by way of "first light" than I was expecting to see when I found that damage this afternoon.  I'll have a bit more of a think about this tomorrow.  Might ask a few folks who have the correct kit for working on tiny things if they reckon it's viable to repair the pin on that IC...though I doubt it.  I suspect a dead board as a parts donor is more likely to be needed.

It's dazed and confused, but definitely isn't dead yet.

[Zelandeth]

I don't think I can really go much further with the RiscPC project at this point.  Realistically I need to track down either a replacement IOMD21 chip or a parts donor motherboard.  There's just no way on earth that I can repair what I've got with the equipment and experience I have.  I'm just not set up for nanosurgery like this.

To make it more clear how small the thing I'm trying to repair is, here's a fingertip next to the IC in question for scale.

That's not happening!  So I've put feelers out in a few locations to see if I can track down a parts donor of one sort or another.

While I had the workbench clear I set about wiring up the additional instrument pod for the Invacar, just need to bolt it in place and add the senders for that.  I think this is where I'll probably have it sit.

The exact angle will be chosen to minimise reflections in the face of the gauges.  They're just cheap random ones I've accumulated over the years in there at the moment, but I'll try to replace them with more period correct Smith's or similar ones as time goes on and I find appropriate gauges at autojumbles etc.  I'm not willing to pay what seems to be the going rate for them on eBay these days.  This will be getting attached to a metal bar that runs under the dash rather than to the plastic itself, so won't put any additional strain on the already brittle plastic or anything like that.  It will also be removable in the future without leaving any visible evidence if I decide to get rid of it.

I've no real interest in the absolute values that these gauges will show me, I'm far more interested in observing what the baseline for "normal" is for my engine, then any sudden deviation from that norm will be cause for investigation.  I may feel that in the more distant future that it's unnecessary, but I'd like to be able to keep tabs on things until I've got at least a couple of thousand miles covered trouble free.  Given I do have plans for a long trip in mind which will probably involve a lot of sustained high speed driving, I feel that it's a good idea to have the pod there at least until that's happened.  If I was purely trundling around locally I'd be less bothered. 

[LightBulbFun]

32 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

I don't think I can really go much further with the RiscPC project at this point.  Realistically I need to track down either a replacement IOMD21 chip or a parts donor motherboard.  There's just no way on earth that I can repair what I've got with the equipment and experience I have.  I'm just not set up for nanosurgery like this.

To make it more clear how small the thing I'm trying to repair is, here's a fingertip next to the IC in question for scale.

That's not happening!  So I've put feelers out in a few locations to see if I can track down a parts donor of one sort or another.

I can definitely still see some metal on the IC where the pin used to be

so it should be possible to solder a thin wire to it, tape that thin wire to the top of the IC then loop it up and back round and solder it to the pad/trace/via the pin used to be on/go to

not sure I quite have the equipment (or the hand stability!) to do that mind! 

but perhaps @cobblers might be able to help?  

 

but as a side note do you know what that pin does exactly? if its just a ground pin or such then it probably wont matter that its missing given the IC probably has a bunch of others doing the same role!