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

[Zelandeth]

Where numbers are concerned, it never ceases to surprise me how the number 147 seems to pop up in the world in general, even will clear of a snooker table.

Not a big report from today.

One tool I had been missing for a while was my little sander - which finally surfaced today hiding in a box in the shed. Not the foggiest idea how it got there, but it's back where it lives now.

The missing (since at least September!) Black & Decker Mouse returns

Main reason I had been looking for this was so that I could get working on smoothing out the surface of my newly made bodywork. As you can see looking closer, it does need it!

Just started to sand back the high spots

Not going for a Rolls-Royce mirror finish here, but hoping I will be able to get it reasonably flat with a bit of work. The above image shows just some of the high spots sanded a bit.

Quite clear with a very quick spray of paint that even a few minutes of work has improved things.

Long way to go but it's clearly helping

Unfortunately while I found the sander - I did not find the sanding discs to go with it.

Of course because it's Sunday and in England everywhere was closed by the time I got to working on car stuff, so that will need to wait until tomorrow. I still keep getting caught out by that...

The latter part of the afternoon was spent changing the obviously fried capacitors on my old PC motherboard...

Can we fix it?

Full gas tank in soldering iron, solder present, flux pen present, caffeine present... let's go.

Twenty minutes later the offending caps were swapped out.

Well it *looks* better...

Did this resolve the problem? Of course not. Went back and changed all of them in the power supply section of the board in addition to the ones that were visibly cooked, still nothing.

It appears that there's a deeper problem as there is still a lot of current being drawn from the additional 12V ATX connector, yet absolutely no signs of life from anything. I have a sneaking suspicion that the CPU isn't even running given the lack of heat being produced... I've tried...but it's time for a new board now methinks. Twelve years ain't a bad run really by today's standards. Oh well...no workstation for me for a while then.

[Hell Razor5543]

In my experience, if a motherboard won't power up after some of the CPU capacitors have failed it is possible you have had a cascade failure (where one weak capacitor fails, which then takes out the next weak capacitor, and so on), which can burn out tracks on the motherboard, kill the CPU and memory, and (if you are unlucky) can also take out the HDD and GPU.

We have a couple of clients who use the HP RP5000 base units. If I am called out for one of these playing up, and I find it has domed capacitors, I will replace the motherboard. We engineers carry two motherboards as part of our van stock, which shows that it is an expected failure. One engineer had four calls in a weekend for problematic base units, and all four needed motherboards.

I have tried to educate some of the stores where they use this base unit (some stores CANNOT be told), in that if they have a base unit that is playing up, pop the lid open and take a quick look inside. If they find domed capacitors they then call it in (well, they tell their helpdesk they have a base unit that keeps shutting down), which will then get an engineer called out.

[Zelandeth]

My guess is that one or more of the caps have gone leaky and that has overloaded one or more of the regulators on the board. That whole region runs quite warm so I don't imagine it would have taken things wandering too far out of spec to cause issues.

Not going to dig any further at this in terms of component level repairs, it's done its time and doesn't owe me anything. Time for a new one.

Every time I do any work on an exhaust I swear that it will be the last time. Today was no exception.

The van's exhaust consists of four main assemblies.

[] Manifold, downpipe and Flexi.
[] Expansion box.
[] Silencer.
[] Ridiculously long tail pipe.

Both the expansion box and silencer one mine are stuffed. The silencer has a heap of holes in and the expansion box suffers from a broken hanger in addition to one of the baffles having come loose so it buzzes like crazy at idle. Pretty sure the main silencer had collapsed internally as well, making the system far more restrictive than it should be.

The expansion box came loose without much protest. The silencer on the other hand...

After roughly two hours of swearing, hitting things with hammers, heating stuff with a blowtorch then burning my fingers on it, I finally wrestled the main silencer off.

Yes, that end was mangled by me trying to get it off...

I really want to get a better designed stainless system fitted with the tailpipe venting to the side of the van well clear of any air vents, but may just have to settle for a stock system until the MOT is out the way.

The Invacar was out and about again today, confusing people in central MK.

Invacar out and about - Central MK.

She does a pretty competent job of being a local runaround it seems.

Having a check over when back though it looks like something has been touching the sidewall of the nearside rear wheel.

Need to identify and resolve what's causing this.

Having a quick look didn't reveal anything obvious, so I'll pull the wheel off tomorrow to check. At least there should hopefully be an obvious mark to show where it's been happening. Most likely a loose bit of bodywork that thirty seconds with a drill and rivet gun can fix. Will report back when I've had a chance to fully investigate. Other than that she's continuing to run well so far...need to take a brave pill and venture more than a mile or two from home soon...

[Zelandeth]

Investigation this afternoon in the one hour of actual time I had was for the rub mark I had spotted on the offside tyre inboard sidewall.

Pulling the wheel off made it pretty clear that something had been touching, albeit not particularly hard.

Clear rub marks on inside tyre sidewall

Looking in at the wheel arch helpfully there was a nice clear witness mark where the tyre had been rubbing.

Witness mark on wheel tub where tyre has been catching

Turns out that the whole body moulding there had a good 3/4" of wobble because the tiny 1/4" bolt (no washer used on it) at the top of the wheel tub meant to hold everything in place had pulled through the body. This affected pretty much everything from the rear of the door to the tail light.

I drilled three holes to the rail behind there and using nice big washers riveted the back of the wheel tub to the chassis. Whole area is rock solid now, and it looks like we have more clearance. While I had the wheel off the ground I also took the opportunity to adjust the handbrake again as now fifty miles have been covered the shoes have bedded in a bit as you would expect.

One thing I had noted on all my previous high speed runs had been a very noticeable smell of hot rubber, will be interesting to see if this turns out to be the culprit rather than the CVT belt that I had automatically been blaming...doubt I'm lucky enough for it to be the cause of the vibration at speed too, that's more down to the condition of my secondary pulley I reckon.

Given that they never seem to have used a load spreading washer on that bolt it was only a matter of time until it failed, so I'll be taking a look at the nearside shortly to try to ensure the same thing doesn't happen there. Despite the damage to the wing there it is solid though, so it seems likely that someone has already done a repair in the past...

[Zelandeth]

Having a closer look at the area where the bodywork was originally rubbing on the wheel (having figured out I could use my phone to get a better look) shows we now have reasonable clearance.

Nearside rear wheel inner arch clearance

Taking a look at the opposite side shows that it seems to be fine too.

Offside rear wheel inner arch clearance

I will probably add a couple of rivets to this side though as there's quite a bit of wobble there, given it's a five minute job it just seems to make sense and is likely to help prevent issues in the future.

Never really got a decent photo of the badge when it was refitted a couple of days ago so fixed that today.

AC Cars badge now refitted - took a bit of careful research to get the angle right

Yes I do realise how utterly pointless details like that are given the cosmetic state of the car!

In honesty though the badge is far safer on the car, it would have been very likely to disappear into one of the bottomless boxes of bits otherwise, probably never to be seen again.

Had a few errands to run today so they were of course an excuse to get the Invacar out.

Looks comically tiny in the B&Q car park...

Ironically not the *oldest* car there though!

Next up I needed a few things from Toolstation...this however involved having to brave the dual carriageways. This was nowhere near as terrifying as you might have expected and we arrived in one piece.

Not something you see out there every day...

Sorting the wheel arch has definitely noticeably reduced vibration at speed so the wheel rubbing definitely played a part there. She's still not exactly refined, but far better... there's also no longer an obvious burning rubber smell entering the cabin as soon as speeds head north of 30mph.

On the way home though we did see further signs of the drive system not being entirely happy with life. Any real attempt to get above 45mph resulted in obvious slippage in the drive system with it shunting between "gears" so I just dropped to 40 and took it easy back home.

I'm not really surprised by this given that save for a couple of experimental belt tension adjustments I've not touched the drive. The secondary pulley in particular has a badly pitted surface...so I'm going to pull them both off tomorrow and give them as thorough a clean as I can with the equipment I have to hand. I'm also going to give the belt a careful check over and will replace it with one of the spares I have in stock. For all they're old the rubber seems to be in perfect condition.

Given I know new pulleys and belts are readily available at not unreasonable prices I'm not going to persevere too far beyond giving things a good clean and resetting the belt tension (which after 60 miles may well need attention anyhow, any further issues and I'll just get replacements on order.

[Gibbo2286]

Probably a stupid question but have you replaced the battery on that motherboard?

My niece was about to dump her 'black screen' computer and all it needed was a new motherboard battery.

[Zelandeth]

Probably a stupid question but have you replaced the battery on that motherboard?

My niece was about to dump her 'black screen' computer and all it needed was a new motherboard battery.

A good call, but yep. New battery and a CMOS reset had both been tried. I think this is one of those cases where I have to admit that it's just dead.

Anyhow...thanks to the generosity of another friend who has a house full of bits of obsolete tech, I've got another machine here now which will keep me going for a while.

I'm no Apple fan normally, but I do have to admit that this line of machines is exquisitely well designed.

Granted...given the original price tag they better had have been!

Yes it's from 2006, but with dual quad core Xeon 5355 CPUs and 16gb of memory (which I'll max out to 64 simply because obsolete server grade memory is stupidly cheap) it should do just fine for my needs - especially as being Intel based it will happily run Debian. If I was stuck with MacOS that would be a deal breaker!

Will strip it down for a thorough de-dusting tomorrow before looking at getting things set up again.

Edit: My OCD wouldn't let me call it a day without replacing the two missing expansion bay covers. No they're not anodised the same colour as the case like the original ones, but at least they aren't missing.

If this becomes a long term resident I may need to make a transparent side panel for it, I usually class that as "needless faff" on computers...but the innards of this thing are so nicely designed it's a shame not to show it off!

[Zelandeth]

I decided against a full stripdown, against my usual rules on this occasion. Simple reason was that someone had obviously already done it. While the fans are a little dusty the heatsinks on the CPUs, memory and innards of the power supply were all spotless.

The cooling system on this thing is very much based on the "high volume, low pressure" approach, with four huge (150mm I think) fans running at pretty low speeds.

So on with testing. Grabbed my old PC's "Home" drive and dropped it in (installing or removing a drive in this thing honestly takes 30 seconds) and pushed the button.

It then proceeded to scare the living daylights out of me. Ah yes...the Mac startup chime. Have added "can you turn the volume of that down?" to my to do list.

After a very lengthy POST (normal on what's essentially server grade hardware) it then booted up just fine. Now this drive had been taken out of a domestic PC based around an Athlon X2-64 CPU, then dropped into a bit of hardware where about the only similarity is being the x64 architecture...the only signs of any unhappiness are a few warning messages scrolling past during booting (due to a couple of missing expansion cards). That's quite something.

Immediate impressions? Despite using a somewhat hacked about Debian install at the moment, lightning fast and *quiet.* This is one to show to anyone who says you can't make an air cooled machine truly quiet.

I know that getting these things to boot from install media can be a pain, so I'll need to research that before I get a fresh OS install on there.

It's now been put in place on my workstation shelf...even if lifting it up there did nearly kill me.

Yes I know, my office needs a tidy

Thirty kilos isn't heavy to carry. It feels a lot heavier when you have to lift it up to shoulder and a bit height.

That's enough of the computer stuff. You'll be glad to hear that we will be returning to our regularly scheduled automotive mayhem tomorrow unless anything really interesting happens. Sure there will still be some photos of this thing because the engineering is just too nice not to share.

[myglaren]

It then proceeded to scare the living daylights out of me. Ah yes...the Mac startup chime. Have added "can you turn the volume of that down?" to my to do list.

The legendary "Sosume".
So called as the Apple Foundation (Beatles) declared that they would sue Apple corp if they started to be involved in music.
Apple allegedly called the jingle the sosume to stick two fingers up to - Apple

[Zelandeth]

Only thing I have learned in the last couple of days:

I need to buy an impact wrench.

I've been trying to get the CVT pulleys off the Invacar. The bolts holding them on are utterly disinterested in moving. I decided to call time when I managed to lift the car onto two wheels at the other end of the breaker bar.

Being honest it's a tool I've been wanting to add to the toolbox for a while - especially since the van arrived given that the wheel bolts on that are torqued up to some utterly ridiculous level and there are five on each wheel.

This is just going to be an expensive month no matter what I do! Got tax for the Activa, exhaust for the van, MOT for the van (argh...still need to work out why the cab marker lights don't work)...oh...and it needs a tank of diesel too.

[myglaren]

Lidl are doing a cordless one this week for £35.
Someone on autoshite has one and seems to think it is OK.

[bobins]

The pulley bolt isn't a reverse thread, is it ?

[Pug_XUD_KeenAmateur]

talking of Breaker Bars, what does everyone else do for a Breaker Bar? Maybe you've all got Compressors and Air Tools? (not an option for me)

I've got a 3ft 1/2 Drive Breaker Bar, one of these, but in practice its a spectacularly useless bit of kit, tending to flex at the joint

I usually use an old 1/2" Torque Wrench for getting things undone; it holds up to me jumping up & down on it on occasion remarkably well (I've newer Torque Wrenches also, which don't get treated as such)

Maybe one day I'll get Santa 'll bring me a 3/4" Dr Set....

[Gibbo2286]

This is mine, it's a 3/4" sq/'dr with an 1/2" adapter, with a length of scaffold pole it will shift anything.

I should warn that if your breaker bar won't do it it's unlikely that an air wrench will unless you have access to a really heavy duty one like the commercial vehicle tyre workers have.

[Zelandeth]

My usual one is an offcut from the end of an old Saab 900 Turbo tailpipe. Probably 2 1/2' or so long. Long enough to shift most things but short enough as to limit the amount of things I can break with it... usually if it won't come off with that and plenty of heat it's not going to shift without a major fight.

I do have a longer scaffold pole offcut that's probably six feet or so long, but rarely use that given the history of sheared bolt heads and exploding sockets it has...that was what was tipping the Invacar over.

To be honest this is a tool I prefer to be mains powered. It's not something I'll use all that regularly, so being cordless would just inevitably mean that when I did come to need it that the battery would be flat, and knowing the state of my garage it would then be an hour long battle to find the charger.

I've got one ordered from Amazon now. 350NM of torque combined with the impact side of things should do the job just fine. It never ceased to surprise me how the one back at the garage used to shift bolts that I'd been fighting with for days with what felt like a really modest amount of torque...the impact action really does make all the difference.

The pulley bolts are not reverse threaded - just have been pretty much open to the elements for a couple of decades. They've also rusted to the locking tabs they pass through in addition to the pulley itself and just being really tight.

If the new tools can't shift them when they arrive it will probably be time to pull the engine again and take the gearbox to my usual garage to get them to pull it to bits...which I would rather avoid for obvious reasons.