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

[Hell Razor5543]

As for the big, green, American three axled thing......... a pair of scaffold boards up the back, and you could drive the Trabant onto the load bed and park that there. Technically speaking, one less car parked on the driveway.... what's not to like ?

But Zel has GOT to remember to offload the Trabant before going anywhere in the truck, otherwise his insurance company might not be happy!

[bobins]

The way driving licensing works for this is that it falls under an exemption for goods vehicles with a build date before 1st Jan 1960. The only proviso is that the vehicle can't be laden. Insurance apparently isn't actually that much of a headache simply because ex military gear like this has such a following that many thousand people have been here before.

Presumably the insurance restriction would be aimed at 'not for hire or reward' as opposed putting anything in the back. I'm sure plenty of exhibitors at the military shows will turn up with military kit or their camping kit and gallons of beer in the back of their trucks

[Zelandeth]

The way driving licensing works for this is that it falls under an exemption for goods vehicles with a build date before 1st Jan 1960. The only proviso is that the vehicle can't be laden. Insurance apparently isn't actually that much of a headache simply because ex military gear like this has such a following that many thousand people have been here before.

Presumably the insurance restriction would be aimed at 'not for hire or reward' as opposed putting anything in the back. I'm sure plenty of exhibitors at the military shows will turn up with military kit or their camping kit and gallons of beer in the back of their trucks

I think with most things like this the golden rule of "don't take the p**s" applies. Be sensible and you'll be fine. Take a tent (why not just use the truck?) and a few bits of random set dressing to a show you'll be fine. Stuff a couple of tonnes of actual cargo in there, not so much. It definitely wouldn't even notice 600kg of Trabant being in there I reckon. Eyes of the law would see differently!

It's exactly the sort of thing that is likely to draw the eye of the enforcement bods, so making sure you have all your ducks in a row is worthwhile.

One area I think a low of people forget - and is probably why a few of these things do tend to pop up relatively cheaply now and then is costs. I don't mean purchase costs, or the 10mpg fuel consumption (at current prices, filling the tank would be somewhere in the region of £400). I mean the five gallons of engine oil per change, £250+ a go tyres (and there are ten of them), or the fact that recovery from a breakdown even pretty local can easily be pushing four figures. Everything from a car scales up in similar ways, so just make sure you're going in with eyes open. Thankfully I've been rubbing shoulders with folks who run and or restore old buses and coaches for many years so that's not something I'm at all blind to. Mate up north ended up rescuing several of his project vehicles when someone had got six months into a project only to realise that their eyes were bigger than their stomach and their pockets weren't deep enough. Storage can easily end up being hundreds a month as well, which is probably my biggest concern.

Oh yeah, while I remember it thinking of traps for the unwary. Those off road style tyres they pretty much always are wearing? If you're driving something with those on tarmac and it is even slightly wet you need to be VERY careful. They have absolutely awful water displacement abilities and are frankly lethal on wet roads. Normal commercial tyres are scary enough - but those take it to another level. Take what you think is a reasonable following distance to the vehicle in front, double it then triple it again and you're probably just about going to avoid running over the car in front of you if it stops quickly.

I am honestly curious how big they are as it's been a couple of decades since I saw one in the metal - if I get five minutes at lunchtime I might grab the tape measure and go mark out the footprint relative to the Volvo.

Polymax down on the old Bordon army camp make and sell 'O' rings amongst other things. They recommend something called Aflas TFE/P for automotive 'O' rings https://www.polymax.co.uk/o-rings/aflas-o-rings/
There's also Butser Rubber who apparently make high grade 'O' rings https://www.butserrubber.com/products/seals-o-rings/

Cheers for that! More contacts are always useful.

[bobins]

Presumably age restrictions also apply to the tyres on historic vehicles in that you can't run them If they're more than xx years old ?

[Zelandeth]

Presumably age restrictions also apply to the tyres on historic vehicles in that you can't run them If they're more than xx years old ?

I'd need to double check, but I'd assume that's true. It would be subject to the same MOT as any other HGV if it were submitted for one, so anything over ten (?) years would be a fail. Though HGVs do also fall under the 40 year exemption for MOT requirement unless being used for hire and reward if I remember right. Though obviously the onus is on the driver to ensure the vehicle is roadworthy as is always the case.

With something that's six tonnes unladen and has a god awfully complicated braking system, would you really want to risk it without having a third party check it over?

[Zelandeth]

Windows 11 continues to try my patience.

I had a (currently very rare) half hour this evening where I didn't have anything else urgently demanding my attention, so I went to play some pinball.

About halfway through the second game Windows decided to interrupt me to install a big update.



Thanks for that. Yeah, you just go ahead. I wasn't using the computer or anything.

Substantial updates have a history of messing with the setup on this machine. Sure enough it's messed up the displays. Only one is showing up.



Though it's gone one better this time and has apparently wiped the Bluetooth pairing list...so neither of the keyboards, mice or the combined keyboard/touchpad that lives with it are working.

This is annoying. Especially as the externally accessible USB sockets haven't made it to the top of the to do list yet. So I need to get to the ports on the back of the motherboard. Which requires me to remove the lockdown bar, playfield glass, side trims, unbolt the apron and remove the playfield display. It's only five or ten minutes work (and putting that whole lot on gas struts is on my wishlist) but it's just *annoying* needing to pull it apart for something that's naught to do with anything I've done!

Sadly without four feet long arms there's no way I'm getting to it through the coin door.



If the motherboard was the other way around it wouldn't be a problem. However that would have made my cable management far more difficult. It would also have messed up my thermal management which relies on all airflow being from the front to rear of the case. A relatively minor item on my wishlist for the future has been to add some extension leads to bring the USB ports to an external socket I'd hide either inside by the service controls behind the coin door or on the underside of the machine. However I've not got to that yet!

Though this is now a moot point it appears as it now seems to have got stuck in a Windows startup repair loop trying to remove the aforementioned update as it's realised that has broken something.

This is something that I'll just need to bash my head against probably at the weekend as it's obviously not going to be a five minute job to fix.

Windows 11 is very much on its last chance here. It'll either untangle itself and work again or it's getting wiped and a Definitely Genuine Honest copy of 10 will go on there and it'll just never be connected to the outside world again. I really have tried to do everything properly with the software here, but Windows 11 just keeps finding new and exciting ways to break itself and/or hack me off and I'm just done with it. The underlying operating system should be just about the LEAST troublesome part of this build - yet it has consistently proven to be the most glitchy bit of the whole thing. Which given that the entire I/O stack in both hardware and software terms is all open source and it's tied together by an absolute sea of hand routed wiring is kind of laughable.

[myglaren]

Reaffirms my decision of never having anything to do with Microsoft and Windows.

[Zelandeth]

Reaffirms my decision of never having anything to do with Microsoft and Windows.

It's not a matter of choice here sadly as the software I need hasn't yet been ported to other platforms.

[myglaren]

Often the case of course, many have no choice, especially businesses. I'm just fortunate not to been anything Microsoft or Apple dependent.

[Zelandeth]

Business is actually an area where the choice is getting ever wider with how much of the world these days is web based.

Friend of mine back up north runs a company making subsea sonar equipment - their offices don't feature a single Windows machine.

The hardware requirements that MS slapped on 11 I think will prove extremely costly for them as a lot of companies are simply going to refuse to skip tens or hundreds of grand of hardware simply because someone has decided that these couple of instruction sets need to be natively supported by the CPU.

More tech savvy individuals have come up with workarounds to get it to install on machines that don't meet this spec (which shows it's not fundamentally critical to the function of the OS). However there's no saying that future updates won't break these workarounds so it's obviously not a solution for businesses. Switching away from the platform entirely is increasingly becoming viable though.

Even mainstream gaming is becoming more and more doable on a Linux machine. Steam have built a compatibility layer right into their client which just makes it work in more cases than not. The only thing I've personally not been able to get working reliably is VR support but I imagine it will get there in time.

I'm a bit stuck with this particular application though simply because it's a pretty niche use case and the various bits of software are being maintained by a small group of people. I wouldn't be surprised though if we do see a Visual Pinball release that goes cross platform at some point in the future though. Or Wine (the cross platform compatibility tool) gets good enough that it will Just Work. It mostly does now, it just gets a bit stuttery at times.

VP is actually a surprisingly demanding bit of software even though you wouldn't think it - it's just a pinball game, right? Windows XP had one of those built in. Well yes and no. Space Cadet was basically a glorified game of Pong where you were batting a collection of pixels around in a 2D space. VP on the other hand is actually a three dimensional physics simulator. The ball has weight, spin affects how it behaves, whether it's rolling or sliding across the playfield, what things it hits may impart spin, and even under the right circumstances the ball will get air and bounce off the underside of the virtual playfield glass. Especially off the third standing target on Firepower. It's also modelling how the weight of the ball hitting things causes the playfield to react slightly - and feeding data from the accelerator in to accurately model nudging. Plus there's the actual graphical representation of everything (which is being rendered in full 4K resolution). Not to mention the emulation of the MPU running the show and having that control the electronics of the virtual table, and talking to the I/O controller to route your inputs to said emulated MPU and to trigger the physical output devices in realtime. That part isn't really so hard with today's computing power as we're generally talking about systems running on a 68000 variant, but like everything else it is timing critical. It's not surprising that it does actually require something more powerful than a toaster to run it smoothly though when you realise how much is going on behind the scenes. Plus of course the OS overheads which in the case of Windows in particular are very much non trivial.

[Zelandeth]

Give me strength...

Who in their right mind designs a software installer for a networking device which depends on a WORKING NETWORK connection to install the software? Especially when said installer is well over a hundred megabytes.

I'll tell you. TP-Link. That's who.

This is the sort of stupidity which just makes me want to bash my head against the wall.

[Zelandeth]

All right then. Let's get this sorted.

Lock bar off, glass out, side trims out, apron unbolted, display unplugged and removed.



Eventually after something like twenty trips around on the Windows Startup Repair merry go round we got back to a system that would actually boot - albeit still very broken. Only one display working, in a ridiculously low resolution, and the system just seeming very unstable and unhappy.

A bit of digging revealed that this isn't an isolated incident for folks with AMD hardware, and Windows Update is entirely responsible. What has happened is that Windows has decided that it knows best, and nuked the manufacturer's driver set and installed it's own. However it hasn't properly uninstalled the original drivers, and the Microsoft ones are far more limited. It also hasn't replaced ALL of the drivers, so there's a bunch of the software still sitting there, dazed and confused trying to figure out why it now can't talk to other bits of the system. This resulted in broken graphics and half the motherboard chipset not working properly.

Having stuck the proverbial middle finger up at Windows, their software has been uninstalled, and the correct, up to date AMD software reinstalled. This at least so far appears to have resulted in a working system. Haven't had a chance to actually play a game on it yet but it *seems* to be working again. Though of course nothing to say it won't do it again in the future.

It is absolutely absurd that the software can behave like this. Especially when I looked and the date on the driver MS had installed was nearly a year older than the one already installed...so the fact it was willing to just nuke it was all the more baffling. A lot of people only discovered this after noticing performance drop offs over time or some features suddenly ceasing to work. It seems to be a total roll of the dice as to whether it actually breaks things though.

Well now I've got it apart I'll take the opportunity to tidy up the new wiring before it goes back together. May as well use the opportunity.

Disconnecting it from the outside world does have some downsides though. Firstly it means that I'm going to have to physically hook up a flash drive or similar to transfer any new tables. I will also need to manually look up all the details for the front end rather than just being lazy and punching in the table ID number and have it grab all the details from the IPDb. Also means I won't be able to have my high scores sync to any online services, but I've never bothered with that anyway so that's no huge loss. I'm nowhere near good enough for that to matter in the slightest!

Getting media to the table by far the biggest annoyance. Especially as it requires grabbing things from several different sources and I usually find I've missed one...that involving having to trudge all the way up to my workstation upstairs when I realised that rather than just reopening a browser tab I can see getting really annoying really quickly.

I *should* be able to use the system admin console to create rules which will block certain driver software from being altered in any way, though that is a bit of a pain in itself as the AMD software does update itself semi regularly and that would obviously be broken by this. I need to have a think about whether I do want to mess with things or just cross my fingers that it won't do the same thing twice...

[Zelandeth]

It's been a while since I had enough free brain cells and five minutes of spare time to get a proper update on here.

The pinball table is continuing to behave itself. I also took the opportunity to tidy up the last of my wiring. Not entirely happy with a couple of bits (particularly in one corner where there's a bit of wiring that is shorter than ideal), but you have to call time on things somewhere. Otherwise I'd still be perfecting the thing this time in 2036.



Last things I need to do in here at some point will be to add a couple of brackets to secure the audio amp and a couple of power supply bricks at the back. I've come up with a solution to provide a bit of support for the PC cards as well. An extension to bring the USB ports to the front is also on the list...except for the fact that I've lost the board I bought for that. Eh, it's gone back together for now. For now a wired keyboard can just be stowed inside and left connected to the rear ports on the PC motherboard.

I even tidied up the wiring under the chime unit which I had been ignoring until now because it was so awkward to get at without pulling the chime unit out.

If Windows bricks itself again we will be going down a different route a variant of Windows that's optimised for embedded devices (which this kinda is!) and gives me a lot more control over things. Just setting up the software itself (and 140+ table configurations) is a non trivial task though, so leaving it well alone so long as it's behaving is my preferred option. For now though we're back up and running.



Quite a significant moment here though - you may note that the usually present pile of tools and bits of table on top of the organ are no longer there. Yep, I've put the tools away and started properly clearing up. It's officially done to the point I can do that.

The head did go back on the Rover last weekend.



It was all going well. Distributor back in, and was about to start on the carb when I realised something. I'd missed a small, simple but critical step hadn't I?



Excuse me while I find every curse word I could think of.

I get the impression that forgetting to put that fluffing O-ring in place before fitting the head is kind of a right of passage if you work on these engines with any regularity. I am not the first to forget it and definitely won't be the last.

Incredibly annoying though!

So I need to pull the blasted head back off again to put that stupid thing in place. Thankfully I bought two head gaskets last time in case I needed a backup... I'd planned that to be for in a few years rather than...tomorrow, though.

Really annoyed with myself. The one thing I'm really short on just now is time, and I've just wasted somewhere in the region of four hours by the time I've sorted my mess up.

I have however finally caved and bought a tool to make it a little less tedious.



First foray into the world of red tools. I had a couple of vouchers burning a hole in my pocket, and I'd been getting nudged in their direction by a couple of people. This seems to have good reviews, so will be curious to see how I get on with it.

[bobins]

That M12 ratchet is a gateway drug into the world of Milwaukee. It's how I started. I find myself looking for the next M12 tool that might come in handy one day. I resist, but I'm not strong enough sometimes - I end up hoping the supplier is out of stock and so I'll have to go without for another day. Save yourself whilst there's still time, Zel. Save yourself

[Zelandeth]

Had an hour this morning to attack the Rover.

This brought me officially now back to where I was a couple of weeks ago.



With one notable difference!



Looks like it's sitting off centre, but that's just how it is. It sits snugly around a post, so there's no wiggle room in terms of positioning. The original one was also off to one side a bit. The one on my previous P4 was the same.

Unexpectedly I had a further chunk of time in the afternoon. Which eventually concluded in this happening.



Had me going initially as I still had a dead miss on cylinder 5. However it was just a tight intake valve. I'll go through and set them all properly when I next have a chance - intake needs to be done with the engine hot anyway, likewise the oil will be getting changed as it's obviously water contaminated from last time round - I wasn't doing it until I'd confirmed the engine was actually going to run though and end up wasting another couple of gallons of oil.

Got a weep from the thermostat housing, the fuel feed to the carb needs a tweak, I can't find the throttle return spring (horrible feeling it's at the bottom of the drain pan), and it's obviously tappy as all hell because the valve clearances have been set by nothing more than Mk I Eyeball, and I've not a clue where the timing is actually set.

However it's running. It's running on all six. It doesn't appear to be pressurising the cooling system any more (you could see vapour wafting out the radiator as soon as the engine started before). I'll take that as a win at this point.



Proper set of HT leads absolutely needs to get on my shopping list. I keep forgetting how horrible they look.

The power ratchet is - and I hate to use this term as I think it's horribly over used - an absolute game changer. Especially when dealing with stupidly long threaded things like the nuts that hold the rocker shaft in place. I reckon it probably saved me somewhere in the region of half an hour today - and on a job that took less than two hours all in that's an appreciable amount of time.

Kind of kicking myself for not getting one sooner...as I expected I probably would!