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

[Zelandeth]

There is a strong likelihood of me driving to my daughter's in Germany in May this year. If their return policies permit I may be able to take your parts back then. It would only cost you the return fuel from my daughter's near Mainz to the supplier, if that is profitable Zel?

Do bear in mind that you'd be looking at a 1000km round trip for that!

[mickthemaverick]

I assume then the supplier is 500 km from Mainz, in which case the fuel alone, Shell Vpower, would make it non viable Zel. Of course if postage within Germany is viable there may still be a chance for me to send it from Mainz?

[bobins]

I presume ¼ pallet or ½ pallet freight charges aren't any better for transport prices ?

[bobins]

I used to go through and past the Zwickau area once a year or every other year, but haven't been there for a while now. I'll be back in that area of Germany this or next year, but probably in Helga the Merc...... but I don't think a Trabby engine strapped to the boot lid will add to the experience

[Zelandeth]

Aye, quite a trek from Mainz to Zwickau.

Will do a little further digging to see if I can find a cheapish solution but I'm not going to lose sleep over it. Especially as there's damage to so many parts that the core engine likely isn't much use as a rebuild candidate anyway. Cylinders could be rebored and sleeved, but aside from possibly the lower crankcase half (note: I've not actually seen what condition that's in yet) that's about it. It is quite an interesting little engine though so having it as a demonstration piece for some shows isn't the worst thing.

The spectrometer project mentioned a couple of pages back has had a few hours further spent on it. Primarily trying to see if I could tame the issue with the very lumpy response curve. This rapidly degenerated into me producing an *exceptionally* ugly spreadsheet which implemented Planck's and Wein's Laws, allowing me to spit out a nanometre by nanometre response curve to use as a reference for any source temperature.

Yes, implementing this thing in Excel was...interesting.

If I'd had half a brain I'd have just given in and installed MathCAD - but I hate that package with a burning passion so persevered with Excel. This really isn't what it was designed for, but it's surprising what you can do with a bit of patience, some old physics textbooks, a bit of time on Google and a substantial amount of bloody mindedness. So I made it work.

This "kinda sorta" allowed me to dial in a correction factor which has definitely vastly improved it, and probably would do absolutely fine for most hobbyist applications. I can get it to give me readings which are within 100K of what we're expecting in terms of colour temperature and sane looking CRI numbers, but it's not very consistent. It also seems to be far further off the mark for LED than fluorescent sources.

However between me and another friend who's also got a strong interest in all things discharge lighting have ended up thinking it would be really nice to be able to get a bit of proper analysis done. This would be a great opportunity to turn the spectra page on my website from a bit of a curio for those who have an interest in the field to a potentially genuinely useful tool and repository of data - a repository which unlike a lot of the mouldy old datasheets is likely to be properly indexed by search engines so the data is actually available for anyone looking for it. This however is pushing quite a ways beyond normal hobbyist needs, and we really need something we can trust the results we're seeing from.

I think I've pushed this one about as far as I can. Reckon I have three issues I'm pushing up against.

One is the obvious non-linear response we have across different wavelengths - which I have been pretty well able to compensate for I think using some brain power and determination. This is the simplest to solve I reckon.

Secondly is that I reckon there is also a substantial non linear response in terms of the gain between light and dark. Being a webcam sensor originally this thing was designed to handle normal video, not a bunch of spectral lines on a dark field. I suspect that there is automatic gain control getting involved and which is skewing things. The controls I have access to for that side of things are very rudimentary, which makes it quite hard to find a balance between not saturating the sensor with bright parts of a spectra while not losing less intense parts in the noise floor.

Third problem also stems from the origins of the sensor - and that's that there is sharpness enhancement being applied which results in a false dark halo around very bright lines. Though this doesn't seem consistent, I think because the image processor is probably utterly baffled and getting itself tied in knots trying to interpret the image. There is no way to get to the raw data coming out of the CCD here - it's literally just chucking out a ready compressed video data stream onto the USB bus. We can change the compression type and alter some very basic settings, but the controls we have are rudimentary at best.

At the end of the day, it's a kit someone is selling for $70 based around a modified webcam sensor really intended to demonstrate the basics of spectroscopy and nothing more. It works, and with a bit of a correction factor added works astonishingly well for what it is. However it's just never going to be good enough for what we want to do.

To that end an Ocean Optics USB2000+, set up for the 190-890nm range is now on its way to me. That absolutely should be more than good enough for what I'm wanting to do. SpectraSuite (Ocean's optics lab software) should indeed be able to spit out all the data I want natively without needing to resort to third party applications. All I'll need to do is collate it into something that I deem is polished looking enough for sharing.

Should be really interesting to delve into things in this depth. Aside from being able to demonstrate how equally some modern kit in fact isn't created, my friend has both some really unusual lamps for which documentation just doesn't exist along with some fluorescent lamps which date back right to the dawn of the technology, so be interesting to get proper measurements taken of those - all we generally have to go on currently mostly are fuzzy scans of 80+ year old catalogues.

Again one of those things I'd always said I'd like to have, but had never been able to justify buying. Having a collaborative project in mind makes that a much easier sell to my mind.

[Zelandeth]

Had some fun and games yesterday.

Apparently a bunch of the rules concerning freight imports to the UK changed (again) as of 31st January when whatever the "transitionary arrangement" we'd been working under since ever-giving gift that is Brexit happened expired. This becomes a problem for larger shipments which would be classed as freight rather than whatever the classification is for smaller packages.

Trabantwelt have a contract with DHL for smaller parcels, and it's DHL that handle all the customs nonsense. However they only take shipments up to 50kg - the package containing my engine is somewhere north of 60kg. Historically they would have used a freight forwarding company in this case - but that apparently now needs a customs agent in the UK to receive the goods, deal with all the paperwork when it lands. As you'd expect, the advice on the gov.uk website is about as clear as mud, and in the half hour or so I spent trying to decrypt it I found at least two cases of the guidance notes directly contracting themselves or which clearly hadn't been updated in the last five years. Yep. That's about normal then. The advice for companies shipping to the UK basically seems to be "get a private specialist in the UK to deal with this for you for £££££" and if you're a private individual trying to do it yourself, good luck! Big companies will probably just have a contract with someone to handle that, but that just isn't viable for smaller ones or those that only ship here occasionally. Not really surprising when I was trying to get parts for the Renault a year or so back that basically none of the commercial sellers in the EU who had the parts I was after would ship to the UK any more. This having made getting second hand spares so much harder is one of the things which has definitely influenced the decision to move that car on. The one seller I did get the last batch of bits from (in Latvia I think it was) emailed me afterwards explaining how much of an utter nightmare the paperwork had been and that as a result they wouldn't be shipping to us in the future - thankfully *after* I'd got the tail lights and steering column I'd ordered rather than just abandoning the order which I did appreciate.

Trabantwelt however is staffed by nice people who are willing to do a bit of lateral thinking to get around a problem. They've confirmed that I don't mind doing a bit of final assembly myself (I don't - if so much of my existing unit wasn't knackered I'd have been rebuilding it), and instead will split my order into two or three parcels. These can just be shipped through DHL with their existing setup without issue. Obviously it will cost me a bit more than the originally quoted €120, but at the end of the day I need the parts so it is what it is. I just appreciate them taking the time to talk to me and try to figure out a solution, especially as I don't imagine the UK is exactly a big market for them to start with.

Definitely caused a brief panic, but looks like we've hopefully come up with a solution.

Also on the subject of shipping - I never cease to be surprised by how SLOW it is in the US. I've got something on the way from over there which so far has taken eight days actually in transit just to get from the seller to the international hub - a distance of roughly 600 miles. Does make you wonder how Rock Auto manage it! Well...No it doesn't actually. They just built their warehouse all but next door to a whacking great freight terminal which dispenses with the fiddly internal US shipping side of things entirely. Smart!

[bobins]

We could do with a big warehouse in Calais where EU goods could be shipped to and then the private buyer could just nip over, remove any external packaging and shipping labels, then bring things back in the car

[CitroJim]

Good plan Bobins

Whilst I'm delighted it's been resolved with a workaround Zel, all this post-Brexit nonsense is just the absolute height of lunacy and I'm baffled such utter stupidity is permitted to prevail. Why?

[Zelandeth]

This is the hotel our convention is in.

Suffice to say the lifts are essential to us surviving the event, and they struggle to keep up at the best of times. This year we were starting out with one already down before we even got there. Slight eye roll at the hotel there for not being more on the ball.

Anyway, to help keep things moving they've also allowed us to use the staff lifts. Fun part is unlike the public facing ones, two out of the three cars there haven't been replaced yet, and are still the original Express Lifts units from when the building opened - 1981 if I remember right. Of course the engineer in me was far happier to find this and geek out at the old lifts. There is evidence of a certain amount of cannibalisation of the one replaced car if you look closely at the floor buttons.

Pretty sure this never would have had printed numbers by them, they would all have been embossed into the floor call buttons themselves.

The upside down door open button for 5 amused me somewhat...though the fact that the random one for 5 being in 9 does bug my OCD.

No surprises they run far smoother than the shinier looking 2005 ones what the public have normally got access to.

Still wish I'd jumped at the opportunity to grab some of the bits from the service lift in our old work building as it was still the original unit from 1968, and was astonishingly largely still original. All relay logic and thermal timers - the control cabinet was a work of art. I'm not specifically a lift nerd, but I can very much understand why some people are. Especially older ones are some of the most beautifully engineered pieces of technology that nobody ever thinks of.

Nice view over the Clyde at night here.

Volvo turned 47mpg on the way up here if my calculations are correct, which is frankly just silly for a car this size. Though admittedly it is absolutely made for munching up the miles on the motorway, it is such an unstressed cruiser.

[myglaren]

No wonder it is confusing, they have forgotten to replace the button for the thirteenth floor, silly billies.

[Zelandeth]

No wonder it is confusing, they have forgotten to replace the button for the thirteenth floor, silly billies.

I never even noticed we don't have a floor 13! Which given that I've been coming here since 2022 doesn't say much for my powers of observation!

[CitroJim]

I believe no hotel, and maybe any multi-storey building, anywhere has a 13th floor... Seen as potential bad luck - as is so often associated with the number 13.

[Zelandeth]

We definitely did at work - HR and Audit were up there!

[CitroJim]

We definitely did at work - HR and Audit were up there!

See what I mean about bad luck and omens

[Zelandeth]

Drums 'n' Roses are still brilliant. An hour plus change since the show finished and my *brain* is still vibrating.

Their show each year really is a highlight. I do enjoy that their show has now just become a recurring fixture.