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

[mickthemaverick]

Does my Sharp EL509-A qualify for this thread?

Own work

[Zelandeth]

Try https://vetusware.com/download/Sprint%201/?id=4468 (I have not checked that the link actually leads to a working version of the software). IMO the best dos word processor for machines with limited resources.

Thanks for that link. I've grabbed a copy of the disk image and will give it a try later.

My usual stop for software for machines of this era is WinWorld as they've got quite a collection there - and have saved me on more than a few occasions when I've found that disk 8 of 12 for example on an installer has a read error...Less of an issue these days though as I think all of my software has been backed up now.

Edit:

Thanks for the suggestion! Looks like exactly what I was after.

[CitroJim]

Does my Sharp EL509-A qualify for this thread?

Yes! I think so

The style of a Sharp and a Casio are so similar it makes you wonder if they are made by the same people and just 'badge engineered'...

Zel, your thoughts?

[Zelandeth]

Does my Sharp EL509-A qualify for this thread?

Yes! I think so

The style of a Sharp and a Casio are so similar it makes you wonder if they are made by the same people and just 'badge engineered'...

Zel, your thoughts?

While they're superficially very similar I seem to recall there were quite a few differences to how Sharp and Casio approached certain arithmetic operations - which I remember driving me around the bend when the lecturer in the advanced vector calculus class in college *insisted* on us using Sharp calculators, so I had to re-learn how to do several operations. All of which I've now completely forgotten. In particular I recall being hacked off that polar to Cartesian (and vice-versa) conversions had to be done manually on the Sharp, whereas I could do it in a couple of button presses on my Casio!

Another difference was that Sharp in the 80s/early 90s used Spectrum-like squidgy rubber keys, whereas Casio have always used hard plastic ones as far back as I can recall.

Definitely a relevant entry to this thread though!

[Zelandeth]

Continuing the theme of "can you daily an Invacar in 2020?" TPA was out and about again today.



Had a good chat with a gent in the car park at the Westcroft Morrison's who was very curious as to the differences to what they thought were the facts about Invacars, and the story of how we'd been able to get some of the survivors back on the road. They own a VW based trike, so not a huge surprise they were drawn towards unusual looking three wheeled vehicles.

I really do need to figure out a better arrangement for our driveway at some point...With how well TPA is running these days I actually want to use the car, but it's a 15-20 minute production every time I want to get the car in or out - and if there aren't two available parking places on the road to temporarily stuff two cars on I'm basically stuck.

When we got to the evening I figured it was about time I tackled the Jag wiper assembly.

Afraid not a huge number of photos as I pretty much from the start was covered in grease so it wasn't really practical to get too many as it required me to wipe my hands and remove my gloves every time I picked the phone up.

Breaks down into a surprisingly large number of pieces.



Once we got into the motor itself it became pretty obvious that (exactly as I expected given the issues I'd had with the scuttle drains) that it had been sitting in water for a while.





Thankfully aside from the visible gunk you can see there the only evidence we had of this was a single very sticky brush (blue wire)...which would precisely have matched the symptoms that I was seeing. When I first opened it up the brush wasn't actually touching the commutator at all. The brushes have a bit of wear on them but look fine. A little bit of cleaning and working of the sticky brush got it moving freely again. The grease in here wasn't actually bad at all. It had gone a bit dark in a few areas but was still behaving like normal grease, I honestly expected it to have turned into soapy plastic by now...might well be that someone has been in here before me. The only bit that was chalky was on the reciprocating slider, so that was cleaned and regreased - I just kind of slathered all other moving parts inside the casing within reason.

Getting to the park switch would have involved removing the ring gear, and I didn't have to hand a small enough set of circlip pliers to get the retaining clip for that out. However testing it with a meter showed that it seems to be working fine anyway so I'm leaving it alone for now. I was pretty much expecting this - while I wasn't 100% sure I would have sort of expected a fault with the park switch to result in the wipers never stopping rather than not starting.

While it was a bit fiddly, didn't take long to get things put back together.



...At which point I stood up and heard something go "clink" onto the floor and roll off towards the kitchen.



Which after a bit of head scratching (it doesn't seem to be shown in the parts manual diagram) I figured out was a thrust plate designed to take up endfloat in the motor shaft...so I had to take pretty much the whole lot back to pieces again. Annoying.

Slightly later than originally planned, we got it back into one piece though.



Sadly far too late in the day to get it back to the car to test it by then though. We'll give it a try tomorrow...fingers crossed this will have sorted it though. I think it will though, reckon it was just that brush sticking due to the water ingress from the blocked scuttle drains.

[myglaren]

You certainly have more than your fair share of Percywhatsit Zel!

[Hell Razor5543]

Do you mind if I make a photographic suggestion, Zel? Take a look at some selfie sticks. I bought (as a birthday present) one for my cousin Bob that had a removeable phone clamp with a standard camera mount threaded hole on both the clamp and the other end of the selfie stick (so you could either just mount the phone on a camera tripod or (if you needed extra height) the whole selfie stick on the tripod. It also had a wireless (and waterproof) blue-tooth remote button so you could then take a photo without the vibration of contact (as you touch the shutter release 'button), even if the phone was out of reach. Putting the shutter release remote in a poly bag should protected it from stuff like grease while allowing you to operate it during mucky procedures, allowing you to continue with your photographic records.

[Zelandeth]

Do the wipers now work? Yes!

Do they now switch off? No!

Guess I need to pull everything apart again to figure out what's up with the park switch...which worked perfectly when I checked it!

[CitroJim]

Those wipers are really giving you the runaround Zel!

Fingers crossed this second attempt is the one that does the trick

[Zelandeth]

Those wipers are really giving you the runaround Zel!

Fingers crossed this second attempt is the one that does the trick

Just worried this is a fault I've introduced given I wasn't having any issues with them parking before...

[daviemck2006]

If the jag was a Citroen that would be the excuse used for its electrical maladies, its french innit lol. I guess just have to say it's old british. Should cover a lot of it! I've no doubts you will find the problem and fix it, just in time for something else to need attention!

[xantia_v6]

I have previously fixed XJ-S HE wipers that would not stop, but I have little recollection of what the problem was. My gut feeling is that the switch itself was OK, but the mechanism was not going into parking mode, so the switch was not being hit.

[Zelandeth]

I have previously fixed XJ-S HE wipers that would not stop, but I have little recollection of what the problem was. My gut feeling is that the switch itself was OK, but the mechanism was not going into parking mode, so the switch was not being hit.

You're pretty much on the money there.

I went back into battle with this thing this afternoon. Started at about 14:30.



Dismantled it...Couldn't see anything obviously amiss...Double, triple, quadruple checked that the switch actually worked and that there was actually continuity all the way to the harness socket in case we had a wiring issue.

Reassembled...Exactly the same. Rinse, lather, repeat...EIGHT TIMES.

Until...



I said six in the video, but this was the eighth attempt judging from how many pairs of gloves I'd gone through!

That was the first time it hadn't just taken off the moment I turned the ignition on.

The only thing I did differently that time was actually making absolutely sure that it was in the parked position when I reassembled it (I had the meter hooked up in continuity mode, beeping at me during the whole process).

I'm not sure precisely what difference this makes, but the one thing I can think of is that maybe if it's not hooked up in the parked position that the relay logic used to control things might get confused. No idea...All I can say is that this time around it seemed to work...and I spent a good five minutes further turning it on, off and switching speeds after I turned the camera off and it kept behaving. I'll put the rest of the mechanism back together tomorrow. At least I had the sense after yesterday's failure to only reassemble the mechanism itself prior to the test rather than the entire assembly.

The parking mechanism deserves a little bit of a mention as it's a little bit strange.

I've not had many wiper systems apart, and most of those have been on buses...but usually I'm used to the parking system being based around either a microswitch or a hall effect sensor which is triggered by the ring gear on each revolution - it's just ignored by the control system until you switch the wipers off.

The hardware in this case is a conventional microswitch and a little metal arm on a circular collar that's pushed around by the ring gear. What's strange about it though is that it's actually held clear of the switch by a spring when the motor is running. To make contact with the park switch the motor has to reverse direction, at which point the metal ring with the actuating arm on rides up a ramp on the back of the ring gear so it can press the switch. *That* is why the wipers always change direction and complete a stroke or two backwards before the wipers park...it's necessary to get the motor into the "parking mode" due to this strange arrangement.

I haven't been able to find a decent photo or diagram on the internet anywhere and the parts manual appears to show the earlier motor style, so I might try to draw a diagram showing this arrangement tomorrow. I honestly thought I had taken a photo of it but my phone claims otherwise. It's not too hard to see how it works visually but it's not the easiest thing to describe.

Given it now appears to be working, I'm not pulling it to bits again for the sake of a couple of photos!

That wiper motor came very, very close to getting launched into low earth orbit this afternoon!

That video was recorded at about 17:30 I think. I might have gone ahead and reassembled everything today but it was tipping it down so my enthusiasm for being outside was pretty slim.

In other news the latest addition to my little collection of vintage technology arrived this morning.



This is a Kovac K-80D circa 1972. Aside from one segment out on the display (given it's the same one on each digit and the display is multiplexed I'm guessing - and hoping - we've probably got a single dead transistor) this thing is absolutely immaculate. It honestly could have just been taken out of the box today.

Of course the first thing I did was take the cover off to have a look inside.



I've usually have expected a calculator from this era to have a vacuum fluorescent display to be honest...Things generally jumped from Nixies straight to VFD/LED and then to LCD. The handful of models I've seen using digital neon displays usually have used Panaplax displays, which are planar seven segment neon displays usually with several digits in one envelope. I certainly can't recall ever coming across one before which uses a seven segment neon display with individual tubes for each digit. I'm sure there are a few, I've just not encountered them so I'd say it's a pretty rare setup.

Let's take a closer look at that display, because it's probably the most unique part of this calculator.



These are Rodan MG-17G neon indicator tubes in case you were wondering.





Digital cameras can never properly capture the colour of a neon discharge.



The window over the display is lightly grey tinted to help improve the display contrast.



Looking closely at the battery meter I think gives a good impression of how clean this thing really is. The complete absence of lint and gunk in the recesses around it tells the story I think.



It just about qualifies as hand held!



Okay. Maybe not. I think I'd label this as "portable desktop" in terms of form factor. It's the best part of a kilogram when loaded with batteries anyway so you're not going to go and stick it in a pocket.

Definitely glad to have this one in the collection, especially for the trivial price I paid for it. I'm used to anything with a more unusual display technology going for more money than the £14 I think it was that I paid for this.

[CitroJim]

That display is awesome Zel! Very similar to Nixie tubes... Never realised they were ever used in calculators :surprised:

My you be successful in restoring the missing segments...

Possibly an easier task than Jag wiper motors!

[Zelandeth]

Had a little package arrive for the Invacar I'd forgotten about until it turned up today.



I noticed the last couple of times when out after dark that the indicator flasher was struggling a bit at idle when the headlights were on. To be honest I was rather surprised that it worked at all given it was in this state when I found it originally.



I'm pretty sure that I shook a not inconsiderable amount of water out of it as well.

Given a new one was all of about £3 delivered from eBay it just made sense to change it.





Indicators now flash even without the engine running with the headlights and brake lights on, so looks like problem solved. It's still a thermal flasher though so we should still get the old school variation in flash rate depending on system voltage (and ambient temperature) we're used to. The old one has been stowed in the "tired but serviceable in a pinch" spares box.


Next task, with everything now apparently working again it was time to put the wiper assembly for the Jag back together and onto the car. I was glad to find that the wiper assembly still behaved after I had reassembled it all.

However when finally putting it back on the car one of the hose stubs snapped off the check valve for the windscreen washers.



*sigh*

I uttered some quite unprintable things when that happened.

Realistically it was all of £2 for a replacement from Motorserv...just was annoying to have to go out and get more parts! This is just one of those jobs which has been determined to take as long as possible from square one.

Nevertheless once I've got the replacement check valve fitted tomorrow hopefully I'll be able to button that area back up and forget about it for a while.

While I was putting things away I stumbled across an LED P21 retrofit bulb I discounted using for actual vehicle lighting a while ago and realised that I did actually have a good place to use it.



That's far more useful than what used to be in there for a fraction of the power usage. We've found we do actually tend to use that light quite a bit in the evenings in the summer if we're sitting under the awning and/or when tidying stuff up. So having actually useful output from it is definitely a bonus.

This is a pretty accurate before photo if you were actually looking straight at it.



At this point we make another drift back into the area of vintage technology again as another package arrived for me this morning.



First up, the Texas Instruments TI-1250.



This was a (relatively!) low cost calculator dating from 1975. The TI-1200 (which I have one of already) is identical but doesn't have the memory functions - well...it actually does. It just doesn't have the buttons fitted!.

This one is pretty much immaculate. The only visible wear anywhere is on the label on the back.



Here it is modelling next to my TI-30 for scale.



Nicely this one seems to be mercifully free of the key bounce issues which plague both my TI-30 and T-1200.

It's noticeable that this doesn't have the "screensaver" mode that the TI-30 does which blanks the display aside from a single chasing dot to save battery power. Also when the TI-30 encounters either an error or an overflow condition it actually prints out "error" on the display like so...



...Whereas the TI-1250 simply flashes the whole display to signify such conditions.

This display is also about twice as bright as the TI-30.

Next up is the Casio LC-828. Again still with its admittedly rather battered box.



While the box may be battered, the contents are immaculate.



Launched in 1985 this is a carbon copy of the LC-826 from 1979, simply using more modern LCD technology allowing the yellow filter to be dispensed with and with the case graphics having had a slight refresh.



Display seems to be identical even down to the border around the function symbols.



Now for the main reason I grabbed this little trio though, the Sharp EL-8130A. I'd not seen one of these before.



First impression on picking it up: "This feels expensive."



It basically feels like a solid slab of brushed aluminium that someone has just carved a calculator out of.

I was expecting this to be mid 80s...but a bit of research shows this to date from 1977-79!

Look how thin it is!



That's 0.5cm right there.

Even the texture printed on the rear of the case looks classy and brings to mind leather bound books.



Guessing from that serial number this one dates from 1979.

I'm waiting on batteries to arrive for this before I can test it, though I've confirmed it does work. Still had the original (very dead) batteries in, being Sharp branded they're almost a museum piece in themselves.



The flat panel keypad looks just like your typical touch sensor, but has an almost leatherette sort of texture to it and does deform just enough to know you've actually pressed a key - miles better than that Tandy (Casio made) PDA I got hold of last week! It also has the option for a keypad beep, which with any membrane keypad seems a sensible option to have. Turning that on or off is what the key with the musical note on is for.



An interesting little time capsule from the era where there was a distinct race between makers to create the thinnest possible calculator.

Should hopefully have some more actual car content on the way soon!