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

[Zelandeth]

Zel, I admire you tenacity with those laptop PSUs...

Definitely going to get one of those desoldering stations

Tenacity or stupidity? Hard to tell!

If you'd like a test run of any of this kit you're more than welcome. Can easy run it over for a test.

As of today the van is now off to it's new home. Mixed feelings, I'll definitely miss it, but I know it was absolutely the right decision. Once something is getting little enough use that the brakes are complaining, it's time to consider if it's really time to move it on I say. Checked and it had done a whole 700 miles since the last MOT - and 50 of that was going backwards and forwards to the garage trying to get the brakes fixed...

Think it's the right call. Should help me focus more on the cars I do have...of which there's still one too many!

Also good to see that it will be living under a well built car port at the new home which will keep most of the weather off, which can only be a bonus for a 33 year old coach built van in terms of ensuring it's continuing survival.

Longer term I'd still ideally purely from a comfort perspective like to switch the Caddy out, most likely for something Berlingo shaped if one popped up in the right spec at the right price - probably the big sticking point for me is that I really want one with air con, and it wasn't a common option. If not a Caddy, I'd still love an early Cherokee, but they're just stupid money now. Likewise a proper old Volvo (which I still feel as a long term Saab fan I really should try at some point). So most likely it'll be a waiting game to see if a Berlingo (or it's Pug brother) were to pop up. I'm not in a rush to replace it, just would be nice to have both a proper set of rear seats and softer ride - not least because the roads around here are continuing to deteriorate visibly month by month.

I guess on the plus side they have finally sorted the northbound A5 between Stoney and Towcester, that had got to the point of being downright dangerous for a while. I hit a pot hole there in the Invacar which both literally bounced me off the roof and tripped the interia switch for the fuel pump.

We've got family visiting this week so there's not likely to be a huge amount of time for tinkering, but I'd really like to try to get the rear shocks on the Rover changed and see if it does anything to improve the ride. I've spoken to a couple of folks who reckon they are most likely the culprit. The shocks on this aren't spring loaded at all, and apparently there's a check valve in them which can get clogged up with old age which effectively vastly increases the damping rate as it further slows the flow of oil from one chamber to the other. So given I've already got a set in stock and they look easy enough to swap it seems worth a go. If it helps I'll get a front set ordered as well as it's stiffer than I think it should be there too, albeit nowhere near as bad as the rear.

Can't believe I've done nearly a thousand miles in it already!

Interesting on the run back down from dropping the van off with the new owner, they gave us a run back in their current modern - a reasonably well specced out Dacia Sandero. Have to admit...I was impressed. A LOT more comfortable than anything VW based we've had through the door in the last ten years - while it's still distinctly modern, it does actually have suspension travel, and the seats have at least some attempt at padding. The 900cc turbo engine while not exactly being fond of being revved hard definitely did an absolutely adequate job of pulling the thing along. It was an entirely pleasant way to travel. I wasn't wriggling around in the seat after an hour and a half trying to stop at least one part of me from hurting which I definitely would be in anything from the VAG stable. Astonishing to see how far Dacia have come in the last few years though. We had a shot of one of them as a demo back when they first reappeared in the UK, and the build quality really was quite shocking (one of the demo cars was returned when the driver's seat detached from the floor), but this one really seemed pretty decently screwed together.

[Gibbo2286]

Early Dacias were dreadful but since Renault took over they've gradually improved but........... I was in my local garage and the mechanic was deep under the bonnet of a near new one, I said "Are these as bad as they used to be?" "Same old s**t." was his reply.

[Zelandeth]

Early Dacias were dreadful but since Renault took over they've gradually improved but........... I was in my local garage and the mechanic was deep under the bonnet of a near new one, I said "Are these as bad as they used to be?" "Same old s**t." was his reply.

I tend to think that's pretty much the response you'd get from any mechanic unfortunate enough to be having to work on nearly anything made this side of the 90s though!

The only modern car I can actually remember ever being praised by the garage I used to use before I moved south was the original Aygo/C1/107, though even those have their jobs that can be a pain (radiator sandwiched between the lower cross member and slam panel rather than having brackets being one of my personal favourites).

[Zelandeth]

Had TPA out again today. Took the opportunity to investigate why the handbrake was being a bit sticky. As the pull cable had been well greased and the cable at the drum end was moving perfectly freely my suspicions were pointed at the cantilever mechanism under the floor being sticky or the return spring having failed.



Sure enough, it was quite stiff to move, especially towards the end of its travel.

After dousing the whole contraption in penetrating oil and working it a whole bunch it freed off. I'll need to get the car jacked up so I can give it a proper clean up and lubricate it with something better than WD40, but it has at least proven I was on the right track. I do think the return spring might be a bit tired as well which wouldn't help.


I've also got one of the shock absorbers on the Rover swapped out.

Pretty simple thanks to Rover having actually provided proper access to the top mounting nut.



Basically a ten minute job.



Only slight headache has been the whole upper housing spinning on the nearside one, but I've found the vice grips now at least so can deal with that next time.

The one which came off is utterly knackered. Providing absolutely no damping whatsoever in one direction, but is virtually impossible to move in the other - if I stand on it, it will compress over the course of about a minute. So that won't have been doing anything any favours. It feels based on the old fashioned "bounce test" that there's a lot more movement on this side than the other.

Will hopefully get the other one done tomorrow and will see if that's helped the ride at all.

[CitroJim]

That shock has some epic patina on it Zel

[MattBLancs]

Depends on access to get either of them in, but a Stiltons generally better than Vice Grips / Mole grips - as seeks to bite harder as it tries to turn.

Agree with Jim, it's definitely showing its age a touch that shock! Surprised it moves at all let alone free in one direction

[myglaren]

Unlikely, those Stiltons are made of cheese.

[Zelandeth]

Hopefully I won't need too tight a grip. The other side wasn't massively tight on the threads, just enough to compress the rubber mount, then retained by a lock nut (which I removed no problem). The impact probably would shock it loose without needing to lock the body in place - just need to decide which is the least hassle to implement!

[Zelandeth]

Other damper now done.

How did I get anything done before I bought an impact gun?



Impact spun the nut straight off without having to bother clamping the top part of the shock in place or anything like that.

Again it was a ten minute job.



Just like the other side this one was providing absolutely no damping in one direction but far too much in the other.

This hasn't fixed the issues with the ride being horribly bouncy, but has definitely helped. So the springs are definitely binding up I reckon - really isn't anything else involved which can affect things. The feeling is that things are over-damped, it's like driving a HGV without any cargo on board. The springs themselves could well just be tired as well. I haven't *seen* any cracked leaves, but I've never had the rear jacked up with the wheels off yet. That might be a job for the weekend if time permits. Will get them given a proper painting with some lubrication at least as best I can without taking everything to bits anyway.

[Rp0thejester]

Could you not just swap what sides they were fitted on, might straighten the body then

[Zelandeth]

Nothing like being inconspicuous while out and about.



Yesterday evening before the rain arrived I decided to take a look at the springs. Well, one of them, I ran out of dry weather before getting to the second one.

These are some chunky brake drums.



At one point in time these wraps around the springs would have been useful. Sadly that time is long past and they were simply holding in a considerable amount of mud, grit and rust.



So I've scraped all the crud off and given everything a good slathering with engine oil and have left it to soak.



Nothing broken I can see at least. It really does need to come apart to be properly cleaned and greased long term though. If we could get it to something resembling an acceptable state in the meantime though that would be nice!

By the way, yes there is an axle stand just out of shot under the frame.

-- -- --

Ran into an old Toshiba computer gremlin yesterday afternoon that I'd not seen before.

I was typing away when Word Perfect seemingly lost its marbles. A little further investigation showed a keyboard issue. For instance, pressing H results in this.



Which is ctrl+Z followed by H. Turned out to be a few keys affected. Booting up from a floppy disk showed no change so it must be a hardware issue. In we go.



Swapping out the keyboard for a spare didn't change anything sadly. These systems like most of the Toshiba machines don't have a controller on the keyboard itself, the matrix connections are fed straight into the motherboard and decoded on there - on the T1200 this IC here.



I could change that IC alone, but given it only takes about 15 minutes to swap out the logic board and I'd need to take it out to work on it anyway I'm inclined to just swap it for a spare. Not as though I'm short of them. This is a worrying sort of failure though as it's not as far as I can tell due to any external factors, it's just decided that it's lived long enough. Not a huge issue when it's stuff that's fairly readily obtainable like 4116 memory chips in the Apple II, but when custom chips start just randomly dying that's more of a problem. See also the PLA in the C64 for a commonly documented example...

Hopefully this is just a genuinely random failure not the start of a bell curve...I've had very little trouble with these machines up till now beyond the power supply issues and some LCD panels decaying, plus the occasional hard drive that's grumpy as you'd expect about having been forgotten for 20 years.

I was working on the webpage for the T3200 when this started playing up. Probably the second most time consuming part of that was putting this together for the page.



I may well go back and tweak it a bit before it appears on the page - the dark blue lines for one I'd like to make brighter as that's a ten second tweak. There's a lot less integration on this than on the last board I did one of these for so there was a lot more shuffling of labels involved.

[xantia_v6]

On the Tosh, I would try resetting the CMOS memory before digging further into the hardware.

[Zelandeth]

On the Tosh, I would try resetting the CMOS memory before digging further into the hardware.

Good shout, though has already been tried to no avail sadly.

This gizmo finally turned up a couple of days ago.



Which helpfully enabled me to identify some of the completely unlabelled devices on the T1600 power supply boards.



Helpfully it also allowed me to weed out a few dud components.



So I was able to continue rebuilding this board with known good components on the topside.



You'll never guess the plot twist which came up next...

It still didn't work. So something is still amiss with the board, but on this side.



That's basically where I'm drawing the line on this one for the moment I think. I simply am not set up for surface mount rework, and am not in the mood to drop probably another £2-300 on the necessary equipment to deal with it. Especially as it's mostly equipment I'd only use once in a blue moon. So the next step for this is just going to be reverse engineering things to track down the power pins on the connector to allow us to slot in an alternative power source. Yes we'll lose the advanced power management features, but at this point I just want a working machine.

If someone else out there is properly set up to do troubleshooting at the component level on a board this densely packed, you're more than welcome to have a bash at it. However I'm calling time for my part.

Speaking of technology...eBay and insomnia are a dangerous mix. As we've seen plenty of times over in this thread I think.

Completely forgot I'd ordered this until it turned up today. Oops.



This is a HP 620LX, or what $899 would have bought you in late 1997.

Big brother to the Psion Series 5?



Or what essentially evolved into the netbook, but ten years early?



Bit of both I think. The comparison to the role netbooks filled before they got killed off by tablets definitely feels relevant though. Basic functionality designed to compliment rather than replace a desktop machine, and optimisation really pushed towards the portability side of things.

I've only used Windows CE once before, and I remember it being painfully and very clunky... though with 16Mb of memory and a 75MHz processor it seems snappy enough. Having a decent resolution colour screen helps too.





Should be interesting to have a play around with anyway. Useful in 2023? Not so much I imagine, but interesting nevertheless. Plus it was cheap!

What the heck else have I bought lately and forgotten about...?

-- -- --

With regards to the cars, the Rover is currently in the bad books. Unsurprisingly, the subject of our ire is the carburettor.

The cold start device decided to stick a couple of days ago. And in the mile it took me to notice it managed to drain the remaining 1/8 tank of fuel - at which point I discovered that 1/8 a tank on the gauge equates to "empty."

Thankfully this didn't leave me stranded in a £2/hour parking space as there's a separate reserve fuel pump which got me to the nearest fuel station.

Having poked the sticky linkage and coerced the cold start linkage back into the correct position, we had an idle back at the correct side of 2000rpm. However the car was also idling absolutely pig rich.

I was disinclined to go twiddling adjustments given the car had been running fine up till that point, and I was generally suspicious that we had flushed some gunk into the carb. Especially given there was a *little* crud in the sediment bowl.



However it quickly became evident that something was awry anyway, the slow running control being held in by approximately half a thread, to the point that it pinged out and disappeared over my right shoulder when I touched it. I rather suspect that under normal circumstances the adjustments shouldn't need to be at that extremes for normal running.

Helpfully you can get the lid off the float bowl on these carbs without dismantling too much, so I figured it would be worth taking a look at that to get some idea of how clean (or not) the carb was likely to be.

Hmm...



I get the impression this won't likely be helping anything.



So yes...next step here will be pulling the carb and giving it a thorough clean I think.

Which means I get to undo that cursed carb to manifold nut again. That was *so* much fun last time I had to touch it.

While digging around in that vicinity I did spot one obvious vacuum leak on the brake servo line.



That won't be helping anything.



That's probably disintegrated recently following the failure of the original brake servo a month or so before I got the car, which had resulted in a bunch of brake fluid being drawn into the intake. Easily replaced though - albeit having no impact on our current issue.

So onwards towards a carb strip down, clean and rebuild. I did notice some evidence of a vacuum leak from somewhere in the vicinity of the throttle spindle, so not the worst time to be throwing a new throttle spindle and bushes in anyway. Hopefully should be some insurance against future issues. I wish parts for the carb on the Invacar were half as easy to get hold of...

[mickthemaverick]

Have you got one of these in the collection Zel?

https://www.i-bidder.com/en-gb/auction- ... 4c01176bf6

[MattBLancs]

So yes...next step here will be pulling the carb and giving it a thorough clean I think.

Mmmm, four star fudge!