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

[MattBLancs]

Partner timing belt: rather incredibly the interval might well be ten years or 125,000 miles= an incredibly long time and/or long way for a belt, the rollers, the water pump to keep on performing, but certainly that's the mad figures quoted for my wife's 1.6 HDI 206.

[Zelandeth]

Partner timing belt: rather incredibly the interval might well be ten years or 125,000 miles= an incredibly long time and/or long way for a belt, the rollers, the water pump to keep on performing, but certainly that's the mad figures quoted for my wife's 1.6 HDI 206.

That would tie in with the last one in the service book being 2016, that would have been ten years. I don't think I'm waiting till 2026 to change it!

Likewise the two year service interval quoted for this in the handbook is going to be getting ignored...nope, it will be getting done rather more regularly than that in my ownership!

[CitroJim]

Excellent work on the laptop Zel and I do agree, change the belt (and water pump) for peace of mind...

Are you not doing it yourself?

[Zelandeth]

Timing belts are just one of those jobs I've never been comfortable with. Especially stuffed down the side of transverse engines when you can't see what you're doing half the time. I've also still memories very fresh in my mind of dealing with a water pump stud that decided to snap while doing the job on a diesel 306 many years ago. Which I then had to figure out a solution to, without the right tools.

I'm also somewhat time poor, so it's one of those jobs I'm quite happy to just chuck some money at a garage to have done for me.

[CitroJim]

Fair enough Zel All very good reasons, especially you not being comfortable with the job.

I'd do it for you but a) I'm time-poor for the next few weeks at a least with my house activities ongoing and b) I NEVER do a cambelt for anybody else but me just in case it all goes tits-up... I never make an exception to this rule, ever... I'll guide, instruct and assist but not do the actual job.

In fact, I'm very iffy about doing anything at all on other peoples cars/radios/IT kit/anything really for the same reason...

[myglaren]

A wise stance Jim!

[Hell Razor5543]

Fair enough Zel All very good reasons, especially you not being comfortable with the job.

I'd do it for you but a) I'm time-poor for the next few weeks at a least with my house activities ongoing and b) I NEVER do a cambelt for anybody else but me just in case it all goes tits-up... I never make an exception to this rule, ever... I'll guide, instruct and assist but not do the actual job.

In fact, I'm very iffy about doing anything at all on other peoples cars/radios/IT kit/anything really for the same reason...

Might it be worth asking Chris570 if he could do the timing belt?

[Zelandeth]

Fair enough Zel All very good reasons, especially you not being comfortable with the job.

I'd do it for you but a) I'm time-poor for the next few weeks at a least with my house activities ongoing and b) I NEVER do a cambelt for anybody else but me just in case it all goes tits-up... I never make an exception to this rule, ever... I'll guide, instruct and assist but not do the actual job.

In fact, I'm very iffy about doing anything at all on other peoples cars/radios/IT kit/anything really for the same reason...

A very wise approach, and one I tend to adopt as well for the most part. I do make the odd exceptions here and there, but they are for very specific friends who I 110% trust to understand how these things work. Car related it's usually just daft stuff like sorting duff dash lighting, getting a stereo working or wrestling a grumpy carb back into the land of the living. Have done a couple of valet jobs too. I'd not touch anything mission or safety critical like timing belts, brakes etc. It's all always just done because I enjoy it, with the reward usually being getting to spend a day or two with the vehicle in question. Summer before last (I think!) when we had that last week of gorgeous weather and I wound up with a 2CV for it springs to mind, must have spent most of the week with the roof rolled back and a huge grin on my face.

Would still love a 2CV, though having driven both I'd probably actually take a Dyanne. Having a couple of extra inches of shoulder room makes it much more comfortable, and (admittedly I've a sample size of one here) the one I drove just somehow felt less like it was imminently on the verge of flying apart at any moment. Just seems like it would be a less stressful car to actually live with on a daily basis. Wouldn't say no to an Ami either mind you, for all their styling is properly odd on the front end. Bit academic though as they have all reached prices well out with what I'd consider reasonable for how much car you're getting.

[Gibbo2286]

My last C5 one I chucked into the Citroen dealer for half a day, they had a fixed price deal. Spent the time wandering around the shops and had a Mc D. whilst it was done.

[mickthemaverick]

They had a fixed price deal at the Subaru dealer for my timing belt and water pump replacement. Trouble was it was £784 whereas the Gates kit was £230 - no brainer for me !! Mind you it's probably the easiest engine I've ever done it on !

[Gibbo2286]

I'd done quite a few before Mick but when it came round to the last one the novelty ha gone off.

[mickthemaverick]

I said it was a no brainer - I used that £500 to pay my way on our August Adventure and I know which one I'd choose again!!

[CitroJim]

I used that £500 to pay my way on our August Adventure and I know which one I'd choose again!!

Same here! Money very well spent Mick

[Zelandeth]

Well someone made a rookie mistake didn't they?

What should the very first thing I did once I got the T1600 to actually boot have been?

Yes, boot it from a write protected floppy disk and run a virus scan before I took any other disk near it. What didn't I think to do until yesterday morning? Yeah...

So this ended up being most of my lunchtime yesterday.



Thankfully it had only actually made it onto about half a dozen disks, none of which had been used in anything else since. Several layers of me being an idiot here. First was forgetting to run the virus scan, second was not write protecting the disks with the software on, though that would have been mitigated if it hadn't been for item number three.

A significant chunk of the preceding evening was spent digging through various corners in this room attempting to locate the relevant disks to let me get the machine set up. Eventually I found an empty sleeve which had evidently contained DOS 6.22 at some point given the writing on it, but everything else was notably absent. Right up until I had one of those "Waaaaaitaminit..." moments about an hour and a half later. Somewhere a few months ago (I suspect it was when I dragged the T3200 back into the land of the living) I had a critical patience failure with the fact that any time I was doing a job like that I ended up wasting at least a couple of tens of minutes trying to find the disks I was looking for, which were all in separate boxes grouped by what software they had on them. Which would work fine if the shelf they lived on wasn't shared with about three thousand other things - a running theme in here as there must be a good three times more things in this room than there's really space for. As it is, they frequently got buried and/or separated. This usually resulted in me eventually running out of patience and just writing fresh disk images (as I did on this occasion for most things). Utterly fed up of that nonsense I spent a reasonably chunk of time getting together everything I usually need to get an 8086-486 era system back up and running and into a state where it can be useful again, and put them all into their own nice, organised and clearly labelled box.



Even the container itself is clearly labelled.



Where was it during this whole nonsense? Just under two feet to my left, in plain sight. Excuse me while I go find a wall to bash my head against. I really ain't the brightest crayon in the box sometimes.

Does also help drive home just quite how much I'm looking forward to us being able to move to a bigger place. I hate clutter, and basically feel like I'm slowly being buried alive in here - there just isn't any space for proper storage for the belongings of four adults who all have hobbies. I have looked at trying to have a clear out as well, but fact of the matter is that pretty much everything I have in here is related to hobby activities that I do actively partake in and enjoy. The reason I periodically discover things I've not seen for five years is simply the number of layers of other items I need to remove first to get to them! The only hobby I've really not been doing much with recently has been the lighting technology side of things - but in that area I've already had a pretty major downsizing exercise so it's not really taking up all that much space any more. Few more boxes of that will get cleared and passed on to other collectors when I next come across them in the loft.

I've got a 0-30V adjust able DC-DC converter on the way which will hopefully allow me to do away with this rather messy arrangement which is currently providing the -22V rail.



No, that definitely isn't a bit of Cat5 cable being used to supply power...Fine, it is. I already had an offcut that was pretty much exactly the right length, and it's only supplying somewhere in the region of 5mA (0.1W), so will be absolutely fine. Elegant, not so much.

Next step for this machine (which will probably happen once the next bit of power supply turns up) will be a proper deep clean, as it's absolutely disgusting currently. Given I'll be about 5 minutes away from taking the motherboard out (which admittedly now I'm used to how these machines come apart/go together is roughly a ten minute job) I'll probably do a quick assessment of the various parts machines I've got and transfer the working guts into the cleanest lower case, swap out the cleanest upper case, screen back shell etc to get as tidy a machine as possible at the end of it. It's quite noticeable that the upper case moulding of this one has yellowed significantly more than the base, whereas I've others which are in far closer to their original colour. The keyboard will probably get cleaned before that as that is truly disgusting...

Speaking of cleaning keyboards, here's one which two of you will recognise which went through a similar process a week or so back. It's quite satisfying seeing something with 25 years of accumulated dust and grime behind it scrub up this well. Though in all fairness, this one really wasn't in a bad state compared to most similar bits of hardware when they arrive here!





This will be in use for a while now I think, not least because my usual IBM one is very much in need of a complete strip down and clean. I'm a pretty clean person by and large and don't eat at this desk, but even so over time keyboards become quite disgusting - and it must be the best part of ten years since I actually gave it a complete strip down and clean rather than just the keycaps and accessible surfaces of the outer case. I know it has been done since we moved in here, but I think it was pretty soon after we arrived here.

Have had a couple of vague nibbles on buyers for the current Rover, but nothing concrete yet. Guess I need to actually cast a little wider net. A friend has offered to help out with a place for it to live in the meantime which is helpful at least. Think it's probably time to get the Caddy actually advertised too as it doesn't look like the lead from up north on that is going anywhere. That at least I don't imagine will be too hard to shift given the market for small van type things always seems pretty buoyant, even though it not being compliant with the plethora of low emission zones popping up everywhere will dent its desirability a bit I'm sure.

P6 will be getting delivered early on Tuesday morning all being well, so even if there's nothing else to report until then, expect a (very) photo heavy post on Tuesday as I investigate it.

[CitroJim]

Gosh, I'd forgotten old DOS machines could get viruses Zel!

Looking forward to hearing the Rover P6 is with you all safe and sound and here's hoping the P4 soon finds a new home