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

[Gibbo2286]

This popped up today, another one to add to the fleet Zel. https://www.gumtree.com/p/austin/austin ... 1473975824

[MattBLancs]

This popped up today, another one to add to the fleet Zel. https://www.gumtree.com/p/austin/austin ... 1473975824

Freudian slip on condition of the car?

A full ...

[Zelandeth]

The fleet sadly really is already two cars over capacity really.

On Sunday the Dunstable Downs Radio Club held their annual car boot sale/swap meet down Luton way. I've missed this the last few years as it has clashed with other events.

I very nearly escaped without buying anything. Nearly.



It's fair to say that if there's anything I need it is not yet more old computers...however this had to be mine the moment I spotted it.









This is a Sharp PC-7100. An 80C86-2 based PC-XT compatible portable machine dating from the mid 80s, this example being from 86 based on the serial number.

The seller indicated that the system was in working condition but couldn't read from the hard disk. They hadn't been able to test further than that due to not having 5.25" floppies on hand to try to boot from. Sure enough, this description was accurate.





Conveniently I do have a PC in my workstation which has a 5.25" drive so I chucked together a DOS boot disk and decided to see what would happen. It tried to boot, but would always hang when it tried to interrogate the hard disk.

Storage on this is provided by one of these nightmares.



This is a Plus 20 hard card. Basically a very slimline 3.5" MFM hard drive and controller card attached to each other in a single full width ISA card. These things even by the standards of MFM drives from the era were horribly unreliable when they were current, never mind after 30+ years.

They seem to fail in three ways generally. If they won't spin up it's usually because the heads have stuck to the platters. If the drive spins up but won't seek, this is usually because a rubber bumper on a travel limit post has turned to goo and the head actuator arm is physically stuck to it. Or the controller just turns itself into a doorstop.

This one seems to just be struggling to read. So *hopefully* it will work with a fresh low-level format. Unfortunately you need third party software to do this for most of the variants - some will work with Speedstor, but it's a roll of the dice depending on which firmware is on the ROMs. I'll need to stuff that onto a 5.25" disk and see what happens.

The BIOS on this computer is very limited, meaning you can't use any other drive. There's no configuration settings, it just looks for the controller ROM at a set memory location, and it's there or it isn't. The sandwich of drives in this also makes using anything else physically difficult as there isn't space for anything thicker than this.

The motherboard on this is really small. Looks like a lot of the heavy lifting is being done by two large custom chips.



Same 80C86 powerhouse of a CPU as the T1200.



While I was digging my way in to find the hard disk I spotted two things that need to be changed. One large Rifa cap in the power supply.



Also a battery which astonishingly hasn't leaked yet.



I mentally made a note to go back in and change that Rifa capacitor at a later date. Fast forward about ten minutes and there was a loud enough bang to leave my ears ringing and my entire workbench vanished in a comedically large cloud of smoke as the aforementioned capacitor let go. Great, my room was destined to smell of immolated capacitor innards for the next 48 hours. Rookie mistake.

Got a couple of other things I need to get finished off before I can really spend any time working on this.


This was the other purchase alongside the computer.



I had been after a proper adjustable fluorescent desk light forever - however the ones I've spotted before on eBay etc have always tended to either go for silly money or be collection only from unhelpful corners of the country. Or were recently made pieces of plastic tat.

This one looked to be in good shape aside from the missing remote ballast, was clearly a well made example and the price was right.

Didn't clock that it was actually a Dazor unit until I got it home and looked a bit closer. I think this badging also suggests it wasn't made yesterday (along with the rating showing 50 cycles rather than Hertz).



Evidently someone else in the past had tried to wire it up without realising it was meant to have a remote ballast given that both tubes in it were completely missing both cathodes. Imagine the resulting flash and bang woke whoever that was up! Tubes in there weren't anything special - just colour 830 2011 era GE Polylux XLs. Still decent tubes though which likely would have lasted ages if it hadn't been for getting nuked.

Here we are after the addition of a spare ballast I had in stock and a pair of new Sylvania 865s were put in.





Again with all the other lights in the room off.



Obviously it wouldn't normally be used to illuminate my keyboard - it's mainly for if I'm working on my usual projects of technological necromancy that I'll be grateful for finally being able to not be perpetually working in my own shadow.

The big difference between this and so many of the cheaper versions is that wherever you adjust the head of this to,it just stays there (unlike the hopeless thing you can see just peeking out behind the left hand monitor which is almost purely used as a headphone hook these days). Everything is properly sprung a counterbalanced absolutely perfectly. The head can also be swivelled to pretty much any orientation.

When not in use it folds away completely vertically so takes up no more actual space on the desk than a cup of coffee.

Starting is handled in pretty classical fashion for a fixture of this type of US origin in that it has a manual preheat.



The black button is pressed to turn the fixture off, to start it you press and hold the red button for a couple of seconds then release to turn it on.

Only modification I'll be making will be to add an earth connection to the case for safety's sake, but otherwise it will be left well alone and just used as it was designed to be.

If anyone can actually date this for definite I'd be really curious. I know that the styling can't really tell you all that much, but the typeface on the ratings tag tends to suggest to me that we're probably talking 60s or 70s.

Definitely one that the lighting nerd in me is happy to have grabbed - but both because it's a bit of an oddity to find fixtures like this in the UK, but also because it will be really bloody useful when I'm doing electronics work.

[CitroJim]

Excellent! Wish I'd have been aware of the DD Rally Zel, would have like to have joined you there... That Sharp was a good find... Good job you got rid of that Rifa smoke and stink bomb in good time

[Zelandeth]

Excellent! Wish I'd have been aware of the DD Rally Zel, would have like to have joined you there... That Sharp was a good find... Good job you got rid of that Rifa smoke and stink bomb in good time

I'll make a note to ping you an email when the notification goes out about the next one. It's an annual event though, usually more or less the last Sunday in May.

Dangerous event though! Don't think I've ever escaped empty handed. Only thing I was really keeping half an eye out for this year was a relatively modern DSO, as I'd really like a scope I didn't need to drag out of storage every time I need it. My old Hameg HM-205 was a great instrument in its day, but something like a Rigol 1054Z knocks it out of the water in every department now, and takes up about 1/4 the space on the shelf. It still breaks my brain that you can buy a NEW 50MHz, 1Gsample/s 4 channel scope direct from the manufacturer for £300 now.

Link

Friend up north has one of these and I've had the chance to use it a couple of times - absolutely blew me away what it could do and how easy it was to use. Yes they do the obnoxious modern thing of locking away some of the advanced features behind software keys - but they're not very *well* locked, and about ten minutes on Google will reveal how to get around said locks. Not that I'd ever condone such activities, and I've definitely never read anything about or known anyone who has done anything like that.

-- -- --

Had a little bit of time this evening to poke around with the little Sharp.

Got the offending smoke bomb - I mean Rifa cap - in the PSU replaced and everything back together. I'd like to get the scope on the output to make sure we don't have any excess ripple/noise on the outputs. However that means digging the scope out, and it's pretty well buried at the moment.

A couple of discoveries. Firstly was that it *will* actually boot off a floppy if you wait long enough. I thought it was hanging when attempting to access the hard drive, but it does eventually time out. At which point it asked me to enter a date. New problem...dead enter key on the keyboard! Every other one on the keyboard worked, just not enter. Of course being an XT layout we don't have a second one on the number pad, there's a + where you'd expect enter to be. Two screws being already missing from the keyboard suggests to me that I'm not the first person to look in to this.

This was quickly traced to being a problem with the key switch itself. Maybe I can revive it...but with good access to the back of the PCB I decided to just swap it for one that's rarely used. I nicked the one from Sys Rq.



Absolutely don't want to have to remove the enter key again. It has not one but two stabiliser bars on it, and getting the horizontal one back in the slots was an absolute swine of a job. It did however get us a working enter key.

Was while putting things back together I spotted a non standard key legend. One at the top right is labelled "Set Up."



Intrigued, I obviously pressed it.

Turns out I was wrong, this system does have a BIOS config menu, albeit a very basic one.



Interesting to see that this can be pulled up at any time and the changes applied immediately, rather than needing a reboot. I really am glad to be able to change the speaker volume - it was previously set to high, and the system beep was LOUD on this sucker, despite the speaker being tiny. Having tamed that somewhat has made tasks requiring frequent reboots less tiresome.

One feature this machine does have over the Toshibas from the same era is an option to flip the screen colours so you get the normal bright on dark text in DOS*. Though that looks quite odd on this screen unless you're in a dark room relying on the backlight. The panel itself is very similar to the one on the Toshiba T1200 (in fact, that's a Sharp made panel, so could even be the same one), though the Toshiba definitely has a far brighter backlight. For text based applications though they're both entirely usable. The deep, saturated cobalt blue on grey colour is really quite striking to look at and pleasing to look at. Even if my camera hates it.

* Not entirely missing on the Toshibas. There is an application - VCHAD.EXE if I remember right - which allows any of the onscreen colours to be redefined, so technically you could flip the colours if you wanted. That's handled at the application level though rather than in the hardware.

Having a working keyboard meant we have been able to actually get to a usable DOS prompt.



I did try running both SpeedStor and Spinrite, but the former couldn't make any sense of the drive, and Spinrite just hung on startup. This isn't entirely surprising. I've read in a few places that the Plus hard cards use some odd BIOS routines so tend to behave unpredictably if you're not using their own utilities, especially the earlier revisions, which this appears to be based on the branding. So that will be my next task, track down their utilities and see if that will let me low level the drive.

The error I'm getting in DOS is "Sector not found reading drive C" which suggests a formatting issue rather than the dreaded "General failure reading drive C" which usually means doom at the hardware level.

I have found that MFM/RLL era drives do just seem to need to be low levelled periodically (we're talking like 10 years, so we'll outside their original design life). My theory is that it's down to the magnetic data on the disk literally fading as the coercity of the media is relatively low. Spinrite is usually great for this as it allows you to read data off, format and rewrite data on the fly without having to faff around and actually wipe and reformat things. I'm *hoping* that's the issue we're facing here and that I'll be able to get this drive going if I can find a way to properly low level it. As with only a single 5.25" (I think 360K) floppy this system isn't really all that usable as it stands.

Still an *interesting* machine either way, but I'd really like to get it fully working.

Probably had it on for an hour or so this evening and the system seemed to be stable - and we had no further smoke shows, which my nose and smoke alarm appreciated.

[CitroJim]

Great progress Zel! Watching this with interest

[Hell Razor5543]

Might this be of help, Zel?

https://www.loewenhagen.de/DOS/format.html

I once had an HDD where an application had gone badly wrong, and caused numerous clusters to be marked 'bad'. After a bit of research I ended up using FORMAT C: /U /C, and it got the whole drive back into working order. Yes, I had to then install an O/S, but I knew that was required anyway.

[Zelandeth]

The issue here I think is that we need to low level format this, rather than just rebuilding the file system, this is to lay down the actual physical sectors and tracks on the drive (not an issue with IDE or later drives as you didn't have access to the "bare metal" so to speak as the controller handles it all). Usually there's a program built into the controller card for most of these drives which is accessed via the DOS debug command G=C800:5 if memory serves. Alternatively the third party programs Spinrite or SpeedStor also handle this, without needing to remember oddball debug commands and with a rather more user friendly user interface.

Unfortunately, these hard card style drives (which are essentially just an MFM drive and the controller card both bolted onto the same frame) often required their own flavours of proprietary software. The Plus drives fall into this category - which is most likely why Spinrite hangs when it tries to start up. Unfortunately, the company never let their low levelling software into the wild (wanting you to send the drive back to them for warranty repair if something went awry to the extent of needing a low level format), which may well explain why among collectors they seem to have such a poor reputation for reliability. So I may be a bit stuck here. For now anyway.

-- -- --

In other news, we may actually have some fleet news coming up in the daily category. Unexpectedly.

I absolutely haven't been looking for anything in that area as the Partner has been doing an absolutely fine job of what I've been asking of it. Few niggles here and there, and she will want a couple of jobs done in future, but nothing dire. Probably the biggest gripe we had, if we could call it that is that Abby doesn't find it particularly comfortable to drive. Which isn't ideal given that she needs to make a 2+ hour drive each way to work once every couple of weeks. Not enough of a gripe to make me actively look for anything, but it's always been in the back of my mind that we might look at something a year or two down the line. Whether that be a newer generation Parlingo or something different, hadn't even thought about that really.

Today however I stumbled across something which was such a joke run as far as our wish list was concerned that I felt that I needed to fully investigate.

The wishlist off the top of my head in no particular order.

[] Load area suitable for transport of two large dogs.
[] Automatic.
[] AC.
[] Cruise.
[] Heated seats.
[] Enough space to transport four adults in comfort.
[] As not Audi-like suspension as possible.
[] Modern, safe & dependable enough I can trust others to use it regularly. So made this side of 2000.
[] Mainstream manufacturer so finding parts isn't a huge pain.
[] Not absolutely ruinous fuel economy.
[] Not resale silver.
[] Warm/light coloured interior.

The last item is the only one which we strike out on sadly. I'm not going to quibble over that though. Bit more expensive than my usual fare, but seems potentially a nice enough upgrade that I'm willing to entertain it. It's also nice enough condition that it should be possible to just look after it and *keep* it nice, rather than starting out with a substantial to do list.

Nothing has been confronted yet, but open to guesses what I'm looking at.

[bobins]

An Volvo of some ilk ?

[CitroJim]

An Volvo of some ilk ?

I was thinking more of one of those posh people carriers based on a Tranny (or other, possibly a German) van...

Maybe one of those 'lekky vans that look a bit like a VW Type 2 if you squint a bit and overimagine

[bobins]

Please don't let it be a Nissan Qashcow

[mickthemaverick]

Just to be different Suzuki SX4 ?

[NewcastleFalcon]

Just to play along, Sounds like you may be looking at one of those darlings of the car manufacturers these days...the SUV, and perhaps hints at why they are popular.

Interpreting the reference to "As not Audi like suspension as possible" I shoved into google cars with soft suspension. First up on the list was the Volkswagen Tiguan generation 2. Now whether soft is regarded as a desirable characteristic is personal taste, but it was a useful search term to hit the more comfortable, less sporting type of vehicle.

With proper Estates not being too common without heading back from the more modern vehicle, the SUV has taken over that ground.

The Tiguan hits a few other lines on your "wish list". It's competitors mentioned in the What car review were the Volvo as previously mentioned, in XC40 guise, and also the BMW X1 and yes the there are many others of the "type" from all the other manufacturers from Nissan Qashqai, to Vauxhall Grandland...they all make a large SUV.

Neil

[myglaren]

Odd coincidence, my eldest and family were here over the weekend in a Ford Ranger, he is swapping it in a couple of weeks for a Tiguan.

[Zelandeth]

You lot don't hang around do you?

Just to play along, Sounds like you may be looking at one of those darlings of the car manufacturers these days...the SUV, and perhaps hints at why they are popular.

Interpreting the reference to "As not Audi like suspension as possible" I shoved into google cars with soft suspension. First up on the list was the Volkswagen Tiguan generation 2. Now whether soft is regarded as a desirable characteristic is personal taste, but it was a useful search term to hit the more comfortable, less sporting type of vehicle.

With proper Estates not being too common without heading back from the more modern vehicle, the SUV has taken over that ground.

The Tiguan hits a few other lines on your "wish list". It's competitors mentioned in the What car review were the Volvo as previously mentioned, in XC40 guise, and also the BMW X1 and yes the there are many others of the "type" from all the other manufacturers from Nissan Qashqai, to Vauxhall Grandland...they all make a large SUV.

Neil

No SUVs here. Not the fake jacked up cars pretending to be off-road capable nonsense anyway. If I was buying anything with the SUV tag attached to it, it would have genuine go anywhere ability and look very like this.

I really, really miss that thing.

I really cannot seem to get along with anything from the VAG group made this side of the 90s. They have park bench seating and between the lack of padding, me not apparently being shaped anything like the Industry Standard Human that their seats are sculpted for and despite what the internet may seem to say having suspension with so little travel that the wheels may as well be bolted straight to the chassis, I just find myself actively in pain after 30 minutes or so travelling in them. The top of the line Skoda Superbs I've found to just about be tolerable, but they're still far too unnecessarily stiffly sprung for the type of car they are trying to be.

Tiguan may well be softly sprung in the VAG range compared to Audi's offerings, but it's still set up far more stiffly than it really needs to be - which just seems to be a given across the entire industry these days.

I think the Audi Q7 was probably one of the most outright unpleasant things I've ever been in in terms of the ride. It managed to be horrifically fidgety and transmitted every single rut, ridge, pebble or pot hole directly into your spine, yet also floated and wollowed around when presented with any semblance of lateral loading like a drunken hippo on a space hopper. I was still running the Xantia back then, and the Q7 didn't seem to have any more actually usable space inside in any direction save for head room. Certainly nowhere near what you'd expect to look at how vast they are externally.

Just to be different Suzuki SX4 ?

I actually had to resort to Google to find out what one of those even was. Afraid not.

Please don't let it be a Nissan Qashcow

I'd rather eat my own head than drive one of those (and have to see it on the driveway every time I walked outside).

I was thinking more of one of those posh people carriers based on a Tranny (or other, possibly a German) van...

Maybe one of those 'lekky vans that look a bit like a VW Type 2 if you squint a bit and overimagine

There are two downsides to anything van-based. Firstly is that the insurance seems to just be vastly overinflated compared to a normal car with a comparable price point. The Partner also suffers from this - if I wanted to put business use on it, it's well into four figures per year. No, our D risk graded postcode doesn't help. However the Xantia identically covered from the same address was in the region of £350. The other is that until you start getting into really recent examples they still tended to be pretty light on the luxury equipment side. Hence why finding a Partner of the generation I currently have with AC isn't exactly common and cruise while available is virtually unknown.

We're not talking about anything electric or new enough to depend on a touch screen to do anything. I'm talking about expensive relative to my usual self-imposed sub £1K budget rather than needing a second mortgage here! The current VAG company car on the drive (which because of annoying rules nobody but Chris can drive) is a VW Multivan, which is very nice in a lot of ways - but at well over £40K as specced it darn well should be! You still have to make a bit of a choice on any journey though between decent bootspace and the rear passengers being allowed to have knees unless you take the rearmost row of seats out though.

An Volvo of some ilk ?

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner.

2 owners, 63K miles, a history file well over an inch thick, and being sold because the owner has recently treated themselves to an Alfa that they'd always wanted, and between that and the Volvo XC70 they also own it's just become surplus to requirements.

It just ticks all of our wishlist items supremely well. Plus I've always wanted to try a Volvo. Have owned five Saabs, and always felt like I should sample their most obvious competition. Always thought it would be a 240 I'd end up with first, but this will do!