Zel's Fleet Blog - BX, Jag XJ-S, Sinclair C5, Mercedes 208D & 230TE, AC Model 70.

[MattBLancs]

Paraffin and an old toothbrush. Or maybe "Gunk" if you can tolerate the stink!

Think you are right, that looks like ancient spray lithium grease that has dried out and seems likely to inhibit movement in its present state. Probably good rust inhibitor qualities though, so suppose not all bad news

[Zelandeth]

I can't remember what brand the stuff I usually use is. It's not the best degreaser when using it by hand, but coupled with the ultrasonic cleaner generally does a decent job.

I actually have a carb that's been waiting to go through the cleaner anyway so all the more reason to pull it out at the weekend.

Have been doing some testing of the old computer hardware this evening. Firstly was confirming that I had in fact done the composite video mod on both of the Spectrums. I knew the older one (the one in the aftermarket case) had it done, couldn't remember if the other one had.



Unfortunately I then ran into a slight impasse in discovering that the supplier of the video converters I was about to buy no longer ships to the UK. This is something that I am becoming increasingly frustrated with in both the electronics and automotive sectors...I mean I fully understand WHY they're making that choice, but man it's mighty frustrating as a customer...especially when it's small volume sellers of niche products where you don't exactly have an obvious alternative to turn to.

Cue some frantic asking around if anyone I know on the Continent would be willing to take delivery of and (rapidly) forward it to me.

[CitroJim]

Love how your car has an admirer

Ohh, that grease goes very nasty after a while Zel... It's horrible stuff and I won't entertain it...

Is the speedo electronic then? At that age I'm surprised as many were still cable-driven, PSA especially...

[xantia_v6]

I think that (especially if not electronic) the speedo is likely sticking to the end-stop.

[Zelandeth]

The speedometer is indeed electronic. I think the issue is likely to be something to do with the drive to the actuator for the needle as when it's acting up it does show a reading, it's just way lower than it should be - 60mph shows just over 20. Then it will just jump back up to the correct reading. It's stable and consistent in both states.

The trip meter still moves at the correct rate which makes me think that it's purely something in the head that is amiss rather than a wiring issue between the instrument panel and gearbox.

[Zelandeth]

Full write up later...but door lock out, cleaned as best I can, greased and refitted...if anything it's worse.

Don't suppose anyone has the part number for the latch assembly handy do they so I can absolutely confirm that nowhere this side of 1999 has one in stock?

Obviously need to strip it down again but I've had enough getting sleeted heavily on for one day!

[CitroJim]

That's a bit bloody frustrating Zel... It's not as if a strip and reassembly is simple and straightforward... Fingers crossed it'll be good on the second attempt...

[Zelandeth]

Aside from the cursed thing that is the wing mirror adjuster that is an absolute pain to get together/apart it's really not that bad to get into.

Plenty of access to get the linkages onto/off the latch at least.



The door does now latch, but it needs a wicked strong slam. The one improvement is that the safety latch does now engage consistently rather than it just bouncing open 60% of the time.

I noted when I had it out that the latch plate still didn't move particularly smoothly even after I'd spent a while trying to clean it, so I reckon I just need to spend more time on that. The latch assembly is quite a closed design and there's no provision for it to be dismantled so trying to clean what's trapped between there and the body is a bit tricky.

Even if it had worked perfectly I was going to have to take the door apart again as in my haste to get things back together in the torrential sleet I forgot to plug in the central locking actuator. Oops.

[Zelandeth]

Well this is moderately concerning.



That coolant level hasn't moved a millimetre over the last year and 11K miles, however has dropped a couple of inches since it was checked last week. There's no immediate evidence of a leak, nor any obvious signs of head gasket failure. I'll need to do a more thorough inspection at the weekend. Sadly this is well into the realms of being modern enough to have plenty of plastic fittings and O-rings which are potential leak points. Plus of course the old favourite of the plastic tanked radiator. Which I'm sure with this having air conditioning would be a laugh to change.

Not the only thing which will be needing attention at the weekend. Spotted this as I walked past the van today.



Winter and it's tendency to get water into all manner of places it shouldn't be can go away now please. These headlights are quite hard to find these days so I'll be taking that apart, drying it out and cleaning/replacing the lens to body seal as necessary. Really don't want the reflector getting tarnished. At least removing the headlight is a five minute job and dismantling it about the same.

Haven't had a chance to look further at the door on the Renault yet. Though as it was dry this afternoon I did take it out for a quick run before the gritters appeared for the evening. Really need to try to do the same for the van soon, don't think I've even started it in the best part of a month.

Cars have taken something of a back seat this week between the weather being just too cold, and trying to get things ready for the little technology showcase I'm putting on in...a few weeks now which is now feeling alarmingly close.

A fairly substantial stock take was one of the first steps here.

Firstly, a small pile of scan converters for the RGB compatible machines. These aren't cheap so they're reserved for the best of the bunch.



One of the big bonuses of having these on hand going forward is that they can handle both 15 and 31KHz line scan frequencies - so I *should* at long last be able to hook the Amiga up to a normal display and relegate the multi-sync CRT to storage for the time being. The requirement of a 15KHz capable display for a fair chunk of software both productivity and entertainment based has always been a big headache with that computer in terms of actual usability. It also does a nice job - I hooked up the Compaq PC next to my workstation which usually is just hooked up to the VGA port on one of my monitors (it runs Windows 3.11 in the usual 640*480 resolution) as an experiment, and the resulting display was absolutely pin sharp without any of the usual fuzz you usually see when running lower resolutions on LCD panels. So two will probably just wind up living attached to the back of the monitors on my workstation.

In addition to those three, there are another five cheaper converters which don't boast quite such fancy specs in terms of the signal conditioning and such, but have a couple of advantages...firstly they're £30 each rather than £150, and secondly while it's not actually mentioned anywhere in their specifications they can also handle composite/S-Video inputs. Which the OSSC can't, it's purely an RGB setup. This is useful as finding anything that does even a halfway respectable job of dealing with composite video is a bit tricky...there are the £5 ones on Amazon, which are basically useless for anything beyond actually proving a system is working. The image quality is absolutely appalling. The usual go-to choice in the retro computing community is a device called the RetroTink 2X - though there are two problems with that. Firstly they're $130 apiece, only available from the manufacturer directly in the USA...and they no longer ship to the UK following the changes to the customs rules a year or so back. They *do* ship to the UK...but only for their flagship product, and at $600 a shot (plus shipping, plus import duty, plus VAT - and I needed five) that wasn't happening. So I was very pleased when I completely at random discovered that these ones which are billed as RGB to HDMI only boxes did the job and promptly bought several more.

Most of the systems in question here have RGB video outputs anyway, the notable exceptions I needed to keep in mind being the Commodore 64 and Atari 800XL which are composite (or UHF) only. Oh, and the Spectrums - though those will be using dedicated displays which have native handling of composite video. Yes, the Spectrum does only output UHF out the box - but the input to the RF modulator is actually composite video, so getting composite video out of one involves lifting a single resistor and soldering in a single wire link. Suffice to say both of mine have had that modification done as the improvement in image quality is night and day even on a good period TV.

The Spectrums will both be running through projectors. The first of which shown on test here.



This little DLP one does a really good job (despite it costing me a whole £8 from a charity shop), the camera has absolutely murdered the image there - the colours are exactly the correct, deeply saturated hues you'd expect.

The other projector is this old beast.







This is a Sharp XG-3850, dating from 1993 and likely cost about the same as a new small family hatchback at the time.

For a start, it's a wonderful little technological time capsule in itself as projectors from this era are basically extinct. Secondly, using a £150 computer through a £5000+ display device just appeals to my sense of the absurd.



It actually handled text a lot better than I had expected, even when I deliberately chose awkward colours.



I was quite impressed with that, especially given that you're looking at a standard PAL composite image there being displayed via a trio of early 90s LCD panels with a native resolution of 640*480. It certainly does a lot better job of it than the other LCD projector I have from ~2005, which is coming along purely as a backup. The DLP one knocks them both out of the park, but you kind of expect that.

The Spectrum in the original case will be set up in a pretty prominent location in the room with the DLP projector with Jet Set Willy running. Expecting that to be a pretty good hook to get people interested. Haven't 100% decided what the other one (which isn't in an original case, having been upgraded to one with a real keyboard at some point) will be running, but one of the organisers has mentioned having fond memories of Dizzy, so that's high on the list.

Aside from display adapters, a practical software loading solution for a lot of the machines was also involved in the stock take. Spectrums I don't mind so much as they load from tape relatively quickly for the most part and I've always found to be pretty reliable about it. I have ordered a couple of flash based tape emulators, but can always just use my tablet if they don't arrive in time. However loading from tape on things like the BBC or C64 both takes an eternity and I've found to be far more temperamental than on the Spectrum. Especially on the BBC.

The first to arrive was the one for the BBC, a device called a GoSDC. This just plugs into one of the ROM sockets on the motherboard, takes an SD card and both handles loading the necessary filesystem ROM images (my system doesn't have the DFS ROM fitted, so I can't use the disk drive I have for it!) and provides a front end for loading software. It should be as simple as slotting it in, preparing the SD card on a PC, then following instructions to load software after setting a few parameters for the adapter. In theory, however my BBC is being stubborn. It only seems interested in loading anything that's in the leftmost two ROM sockets, whereas it shouldn't care (aside from the OS ROM which *has* to be in a dedicated socket). So something funny is going on. Plugging the GoSDC into that socket results in the expected text appearing at boot - but also results in a "Language? _" Error as it then fails to load the BASIC language ROM which I've had to displace. I also can't leave the GoSDC in that slot anyway, as my machine being an early issue 2 board has a large heatsink nearby on the system integration ULA chip which gets in the way. Which is why the standard expected location to put this in is the third out of the four sockets. However it is ignored there.

I need to do some proper consultation of the manual. It's entirely likely that someone has been messing with jumper settings in the past, and several of those do impact how the ROM is addressed. Unfortunately my manual is far later than my machine and several of the factory hard-wired links seem to differ from what the manual states is the default configuration - so I really want to find an earlier one to compare to otherwise I'm just going to end up chasing my tail.

We did have a bit of success on the Acorn front though. This dropped through the letter box today. A real surprise as I only ordered it from the maker's eBay shop yesterday!



This is a cartridge based solution which takes an SD card, slotting into the Plus1 expansion unit on the back of the Electron.





Contrary to the headaches I'd had with the BBC, and the fact that I hadn't even tested the Electron at all since it's arrival up to this point, this worked straight out the box as expected.



Will need to load some additional software onto the SD card to ensure everyone's family favourites are on there, but that's otherwise ready to go.

Barely an hour later the functionally similar device for the C64 arrived, the SD2IEC. This gets a definite mention for style, being made to look like a tiny replica of the 1541 disk drive.



As with the situation on the Electron this worked exactly as expected.



Though this really does highlight how horrifically slow the disk interface on the C64 was! Loading a game from the SD card on the Electron takes generally one or two seconds, whereas it's still often the best part of a minute on the C64. The difference in video quality is stark too with the C64 lacking an RGB output.

I've got similar devices on the way for the Atari and Apple II. I'd have liked to get one for the Amstrad CPC, but they're only being made by one person at the moment it seems, and would never get here in time. Plus I've already spent a small fortune on this project, so it will just have to make do with loading from tape for now.

Next jobs are a couple of Toshiba power supplies needing recapped and seeing if I can coerce the Apple II into behaving in slightly more stable manner than a jar of nitroglycerin in a microwave. Oh and gathering a bunch of software, giving everything a clean, rounding up enough monitors, HDMI to VGA/DVI or whatever adapters, power leads etc, and figuring out how I'm actually going to transport everything. There is a large Excel spreadsheet with everything in, though it actually feels like I'm making headway now at least and I feel a lot more prepared than I did 48 hours ago.

[CitroJim]

Awesome

[Zelandeth]

Get in there...



Of course the big question will be if someone has tried to power it up?

Guess I'll find out when I start tearing into the power supply PCB. Really hoping not as I'd really like to have one of these in working order. From the photos this looks to have been far better stored than the previous two if nothing else. Plus having the original case is always a big bonus.

[CitroJim]

I remember those when they really were the business Zel!

A great price for something very collectable

[Zelandeth]

I remember those when they really were the business Zel!

A great price for something very collectable

It would be really nice to get a working T1600. I've got a T1000 and a T1200 which I use regularly (plus more dead ones that were used to make the one working one than I care to think about!), so would be really nice to have a T1600 to round out the lineup. Wouldn't complain at the extra screen resolution over the T1200 either.

Given I think this is a third of what I've paid for either of the previous T1600s I've bought (both with comprehensively blown up power supply PCBs) it would be kind of hilarious if this turned out to be the one that was actually repairable. Suffice to say I will absolutely NOT be plugging it in to see if it works!

[CitroJim]

Fingers crossed it's a good 'un

Suffice to say I will absolutely NOT be plugging it in to see if it works!

Always a good policy with any old electronics. It would be a good plan to check all electrolytics and diodes in the PSU before a cautious run-up...

Can you test the PSU in isolation before trying to power up the rest of the computer?

[Gibbo2286]

I had an A3 printer given to me that was a non runner, took a bit of working out but I found the fault was caused by the gungy stuff they use to support the components had become conductive and was leaking away the juice to ground, worked fine after I scraped it all off.

Incidentally, anyone want a Jones cassette player before I bin it, it works......sort of but crackles and creaks from the speaker so needs fixing.