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

[Zelandeth]

You were lucky with that gear linkage Zel! I once 'lost' a gear linkage on my original AX back in 1990 going up the A5D (as it was then). Early ones had a habit of doing that after loosing a roll pin. Slightly later ones like Bluebell have a modified linkage to prevent it... Hopefully

Happily, I got to a layby and did a temporary 'get you home' on it...

I'll bet, with a bit of TLC, all those drives will work... They'll just need their mechanisms gently overhauled and their heads cleaned... Floppies were very reliable in their day... And so, indeed, were early hard drives as I recall...

Aye, if that had gone while I was driving it would likely have tried to launch the centre console through the sunroof. The bushes are only a friction fit as standard, so I'll be drilling a couple of small holes and adding some lock wire to catch the linkage and keep it clear of the road in case it ever comes apart in the future.

The old Apple/Schugart drives are pretty bulletproof, sure that they'll come back with a good clean. The Super 5 we'll have to see. The fact that it's locking up the disk controller may well point to more major issues.

-- -- --

First wash of the year for the van as we're using it for a run out tomorrow and it had turned rather green over the winter.









Nearly three hours later...





It's not clean. That would be vastly over selling it. It is however a good deal cleanER. I'll need to get a ladder and the brush out to try to do something about the top foot and the roof later, that wasn't on the menu today though.

Hopefully this will slightly reduce the number of scrap dealers sticking fliers under the wipers of it for about five minutes...

Will be nice to get her out for a half decent drive again, it's been forever. Only an hour up the road, but just getting out of town will be nice.

[CitroJim]

No photos Zel.... Maybe the time of day - 03:40!!!

[Armidillo]

No photos Zel.... Maybe the time of day - 03:40!!!

If you mean no photos of the 'green' Merc van in Zel's most recent post - might be just a Milton Keynes problem - all photos perfectly visible down here in NSW!

[CitroJim]

All visible to me now Alec Yep, we have all sorts of odd problems in MK...

Bit worried if you're seeing Zel's Merc as green though... Must be some sort of 'red-shift' effect on the colours due to the extreme distance between you and Zel

[Armidillo]

Well that was his description - I did put it in quotes !

[Zelandeth]

While the van wasn't exactly conventional transportation, the task at hand was dispatched absolutely fine and a good day was had by all at the British Motor Museum. Which I keep forgetting is so near to us here.



Definitely a sign I'm getting older I think. In days gone by it would have been the sportier things which really would have drawn my attention, but I reckon if I could have taken any one car home, I'd definitely have had to think long and hard about passing up this Alvis.



Not all that many years ago that's a car I would have walked straight past without a second glance.

Granted, wouldn't have said no to this either...or about 3/4 of the cars there!



I didn't take many photos given I was kind of struggling to keep up with folks as it was. I'll have to have a wander back over there one day by myself when I've a bit more time and my stamina is doing a bit better.

Later in the day I also took the van out to the supermarket, because I've paid my road tax just the same as everyone else, because I can, and because I enjoy driving it.



I have a long history of forgetting that Drive It Day is actually a thing, but this year actually remembered so made a point as the weather was lovely to pull TPA out and go for a wander around. Can't actually remember the last time I went out without a destination in mind.



Here's something very modern...and something very not.



Then about as close to a scenic photo as you can get in Milton Keynes I reckon.



I was out for about an hour and a half and covered about 30 miles. Sadly the only car of any note I spotted at all the whole time was a sole white MGB - which I spotted about 1/2 a second too late to wave the the driver as I was concentrating on dodging a couple of meteor craters masquerading as potholes at the time.

This did give me the opportunity to actually get out on the main road and I can definitely report that she's cruising more easily than she used to at around 60. So looks like the generator being properly regulated rather than just trying to pump more and more power into the battery actually does make a difference. Nothing else has been touched mechanically so that should be the only variable to change. To touch the coil feels to be running cooler as well, though that's hard to say for certain - though with the whole vehicle system sitting at ~16V when running at speed beforehand it would make sense for electrical things to be running cooler.

[Zelandeth]

Any Apache experts on here?

Been bashing my head against a brick wall all afternoon trying to get my site set up to support HTTPS.

Not that complicated... everything seemed to work just fine in terms of setting it up. However accessing it from any remote machine results in a HTTP 401 error. Works fine locally...my guess is there is some sort of file access permission issue - but what I've not the foggiest idea.

Everything is accessing the same files on the same machine on the same drive, as I understand it from the same program. So I've not the foggiest idea why it's not working. So far Google hasn't managed to offer anything useful.

[xantia_v6]

It is a bit challenging to troubleshoot without seeing the configuration, but are you binding the service to localhost rather than * ?

[Zelandeth]

It is a bit challenging to troubleshoot without seeing the configuration, but are you binding the service to localhost rather than * ?

Turns out my Apache configuration was spot on. The issue was our pain in the proverbial rear router not actually applying my revised port forwarding settings until I had *physically* power cycled it, despite it claiming otherwise.

Shouldn't have taken me most of the afternoon and evening to figure out, but I got there in the end!

[Zelandeth]

Ah yes...that moment when you make the mistake of cleaning a spot on a computer that you know spent several years in the home of a smoker...



Yep...that's going to be a complete strip down and scrub job then! Which let's be honest was most likely going to happen anyway. This is one of my machines, and with my recent find on the T3200SXC I want to fully recap the power supply as a precaution anyway - and getting that out means you're about 85% of the way to an empty case anyway.

Definitely going to have to happen sooner now given that I now know how bad it is...plus there's a clean spot on the lid which is going to bug me. I'm also about halfway through its writeup. Will be satisfying when done though, and on the plus side the case itself is rather less yellowed than I thought it was.

[CitroJim]

It's not hard to see why smoking kills... I've dealt with a few vintage radios that have lived with heavy smokers and it's a horrible job... I found nicotine pretty much resistant to all but warm soapy water and a good hard scrub with a variety of brushes...

The satisfaction of turning an apparently matt brown Bakelite case back to a bright shiny cream one is amazing!

[Zelandeth]

This morning I had three fillings done at the dentist so hiding from the world was the order of the day for the afternoon as I felt like I'd been kicked in the head and my jaw had been half ripped off.

I had a computer needing some TLC, so attacked it.



Not the worst machine to get into, only real grumble with the T3200 is that step 1 in getting the top case off is completely dismantling the display as the cable doesn't detach from the motherboard. Only takes a couple of minutes to do, but I lost a good half hour swearing at it the first time I tried to dismantle one.

It was entirely stripped down and the case went through the wash while I attacked this.



There was no visible evidence of any leakage on this unit, but I decided that all the Nippon Chemicon ones were getting changed. Plus this one.



On account of the brown crustiness at the base - which I think is actually flux residue as there's a lot of on this board rather than capacitor goop. However I figured better safe than sorry.

The underside at least a better picture than the one from the T3200SXC.



Few dry joints on the heavier components but nothing horrible.

Just one capacitor was showing signs of just starting to leak visible once it was removed.



So it was definitely worth doing this job anyway as there was a failure waiting for me down the road if I hadn't, even if I couldn't see anything amiss just looking at it.

Case looks rather better after a good clean.



The case is slightly yellowed, but nowhere near as bad as it used to look.





Astonishing the difference a good clean can make. Despite this machine having quite a few miles on it it's scrubbed up not bad.



All back together and working.



...The second time around.

First time around it was immediately apparent something didn't sound right. Turns out that some idiot forgot to reconnect the fan in the power supply when they put it back together didn't they...which meant I had to basically take the whole thing about 80% of the way apart again. Rookie mistake.

Quite easy to spot though. The fans on these whine quite a bit, and as there are three identical ones they form quite an obvious slightly out of phase harmonic tone with each other - which while I'm sure some folks would find annoying, for me is something I've spent so much time around it is just nostalgic and strangely comforting. It was immediately obvious though it didn't sound right with only two of the three fans running though...which is probably a good thing. The power supply on this thing chucks out about as much heat as your average neutron star at the best of times, so don't imagine it would appreciate running for long without cooling.

Now just to finish writing the page for it.

Oh...and do a lot of web page updating...it turns out that having switched over to using HTTPS that my visitor tracker no longer works. I need to update the code embedded in the pages to fix that...all 184 of them. Not difficult, just tedious.

In news for other machines (albeit related), here's a sneak preview of what will be on the page for the T3200SXC. Got the annotated diagram of the motherboard made up for those who are curious.



Yes there's one messily corrected error on there which will be tidier in the finished version. This machine dates from 1991, and it's astonishing how much more integrated a lot of things are compared to the T1200 from 1987.



I really need to label those images to show what system they relate to...that's a derp on my part. Excuse me while I add it to the to do list.

The one for the T3200SXC took me about a quarter of the time the one for the T1200 did...you know why? Because I had the service manual in front of me rather than entirely reverse engineering the thing from scratch then realising when I was basically done that I had a manual literally on the screen to the left of where I was working on it! To be honest I'd probably have struggled with the T3200SXC one anyway when there are things like the "system integration controller" thrown in...

Funny how I'd virtually not touched this hobby aside from bits here and there for a good few years, but I've been really enjoying this lately.

[CitroJim]

Great work Zel!

[Zelandeth]

Made a mistake today. One I keep making. I went upstairs at my local photography shop over in Bicester. It's become basically tradition now that every time I do that I wind up coming out with another camera.

I nearly made it today, until a friend I was showing the place (which is why we were there in the first place) picked up this a lovely little Kodak Retina Model B to compare to the A he owns. Not a camera I'd ever looked at before, and I was quite taken with how nicely engineered a little camera it looked to be.

Tag price was £20 (including a 6 month warranty!) - and I couldn't say no.



The case is very tired, but it's done a good job, the camera inside it is really tidy. Few signs of wear - but after nearly 70 years we aren't going to complain.





I never realised before quite how tiny a camera these are.





Really is a nicely engineered little thing.



All of the controls are on the ring around the lens so it's quite busy, but it's pretty intuitive.



Aperture runs f/4.5-16 and it has shutter speeds from B through to 1/300s, so should absolutely be usable in the real world. The viewfinder is a little hazy but the lens itself looks nice and clear.

Realised after getting home that I don't actually have any non-oddball 35mm film in stock just now that isn't actually in a camera...IR yes, ISO3200, yes, quite expensive Lomography colour modified stuff I'm looking forward to playing with, yes... anything well suited to a first test of an unknown to me camera...not so much! Guess I'll need to make another trip over there at the weekend then...they do have a camera fair running on Saturday morning after all...

[CitroJim]

That's a lovely looking camera Zel I'll be really interested to see the quality of photos it can produce. Excellent ones I'm thinking...

Do you have a period light meter to go with it?