Elmas Xantia V6 and Musical Stuff

[elma]

Thanks, that's handy to know.

[CitroJim]

James, that's a real fantastic result and great news that the stylus is good Brilliant!

[elma]

I can't believe my luck, B&O has always been in the look but don't touch kind of area of audio for me.
I don't care that it's from 1981/2 it's blooming amazing.
It's stupidly loud too, no need to take the volume above 2 / 10 unless I'm in the garden.
The guy wanted £50 for it at the start of the bootsale, then £40 when I went past on lap 2.
I offered him £20 when he was packing up and settled on £25 which was £5 shy of my budget for the day, I think the fact that I often buy something from his stall went in my favour.

The Xantia gave me a triple scare today, it now needs an overhaul on the o/s suspension as well as the ns. I think P bushes and drop links is all it's asking for.
It also went all weird when I pulled onto the motorway, accelerated to 70mph and hit the cruise control as normal. However it just stayed at about 5000rpm, not changing up a gear as normal and the speed started to drop off. It only took a few seconds for the gearbox to return to normal but totally freaked me out. The cruise control took a brief leave of absence though.
I drove it the old fashioned way for a bit using the pedals and after I came off the motorway the cruise control started working again.
I can only assume it had a minor glitch as it refused to start for the first time at the start of that journey. When I turned the key nothing happened at all. I removed the key and tried again to fix that little problem. It's a really good job that I'm getting my tools soon, pushing the maintenance any further could be quite fatal to this car.

Edit, I bet the battery leads are loose, I know I forgot to tighten them up when I last tried to fix the leaky centre block.

[Zelandeth]

We used to have a barn owl that lived near to my parent's house. The favourite trick of that one was waiting until I was well zoned out staring at the stars at night, then materialising on the peak of the shed roof, and screeching from right above my head, therefore scaring the living daylights out of me. We were in that house 14 years, and it still gave me just as much of a fright the last day as it did the first!

Good score on the B&O gear! All I can say there I guess is welcome to the club! Yours looks to me to be basically the generation after mine, though it wouldn't surprise me if they're very similar units under the skin. Looks at a glance to be a good deal easier to get into for servicing - that's one area where mine falls down as it's a royal pain to get the chassis out of the case.

[Hell Razor5543]

When I was a lot younger my Mum, my brother and I lived in the Scottish Borders. We also had a young Alsatian dog (she was around 3 years old, but I cannot remember her name). Where we lived was isolated, and beautiful, in a small cottage. The two main rooms had fireplaces (with, obviously, chimneys). Mum had one of these rooms as her bedroom. The Alsatian used to sleep in Mum's room. One night an owl sat on the chimney that lead down into Mum's room, and then announced it's presence.

Mum was woken by several things at the same time. The main one was the noise echoing down the chimney (they can be very effective at amplifying noises, can't they?), but another one was her being pushed out of her bed by a very scared Alsatian trying to get into her bed. The bedside light hit the floor and smashed, the feather pillow had a similar experience, and there was general confusion. When Mum finally managed to find the light switch a scene of devastation met her eyes. There were glass shards by the bedside table, feathers everywhere, an Alsatian bundled up in a duvet bouncing round the room yipping in terror, and a stunned silence from the chimney. Mum unwrapped the duvet from the dog, dug out a clean blanket, and slept on the sofa in the living room.

[elma]

I think mine is easy to disassemble, it has a few pointers on the back.

The Owl Alsation story sounds like the sort of stuff I thought could only happen to me.

[Zelandeth]

I think mine is easy to disassemble, it has a few pointers on the back.

The Owl Alsation story sounds like the sort of stuff I thought could only happen to me.

Nope...Fits several incidents in my time as well! There are quite a few stories where someone walked in, joining the action already in progress and finding my dazed and confused, asked "What happened?" and my explanation starts out "Well, a lot of things...and they all happened very rapidly."

Such wonders as me managing to give myself a terrific belt of an electric shock while working on a coach with a 24V power supply (and nope, didn't have anything to do with the HV supply for the saloon lights either!), which resulted in me ejecting myself almost horizontally out the door, crashing face first into a stack of (empty) paint tins, which then set off a chain reaction which decimated half the workshop and took us the best part of two hours to tidy up! By some miracle nothing actually got broken, and nothing wound up denting or scratching the vehicle we were working on.

My partner in crime did start help me sort the mess out after he'd picked himself up off the floor from laughing at my misfortune...

All credit to him, it must have been downright hilarious between the startled yelp that escaped me, my near supersonic exit and the destruction that ensued.

Lesson learned: Starter motor solenoids can bite when you disconnect them...Back EMF is fun!

[elma]

Dominoes the Zel way
I've not been had by back EMF yet but in my industry it's only a matter of time.
I've had a few capacitor bites, don't like them very much.

Been doing a little reading on the new stereo.
Apparantly it's undesirable as it's Japanese and the anoraks joke is it's a Beocenter 2000 with a metal tape button.
I found it all quite funny, the thing sounds amazing through crappy speakers that came out of an offices suspended ceiling and it's only 20 Watts.
I've far to much to do tomorrow but am hoping to strip it down, clean it up and see if I can get the tape player working asap. My work tools will easily cover that, it's just car specific tools I don't have right now.
I cannot find a Manual for it and the main, unanswered, question on my mind currently is can I use the Mic or Recording plug on the front to plug my laptop into it? I would love to use it for films, cds and digital music as well as records.
No luck making an aerial yet, all my coat hangers are plastic or wood. No doubt something will turn up tomorrow. The tuners very good, it's picking up a few stations very well despite the lack of aerial.
I also need to work out how to set up the stylus. B&O specify 1.5 grams of force and I have no idea how to check that. It doesn't skip but if I walk heavily I can hear my steps through the speakers. It's either incorrectly set up, on a much too flimsy surface or poking twin and earth cable into the DIN sockets isn't vibration proof. We've some granite/Marble tops in the stores I will repurpose tomorrow to eliminate the trampoline effect where it is sat. Din plugs can wait and I'll work out the stylus weight tomorrow.

[Zelandeth]

Get a digital stylus force gauge off Amazon. They used to be silly expensive, but mine was about a fiver and took a heck of a lot of the guesswork out of setup.

You should be able to use the tape in connector as a line in just fine, though you'll obviously need to make or buy an adaptor cable if it's a five pin DIN socket like mine.

As far as noise through the turntable is concerned, is it possible there are shipping screws still in place not allowing the turntable to "float" as they usually do? Should be easy to spot if that's the case with the cover off.

I keep meaning to attend to that on mine but keep forgetting...not something I really notice because it's in a room with a concrete floor - and because the thing weighs as much as a small car anyway.

The bus zapping incident came about when I was poking around the ignition switch with a meter. We'd had intermittent issues with it refusing to start, and wanted to figure out whether it was the starter contact or the solenoid at fault.

Thanks to where Bedford positioned the ignition switch in conjunction with the cab layout in a Plaxton Supreme IV, having used a normal column mounted key switch with really short wires it's basically in the least accessible place it could be. So I was sort of folded between the steering column on one side and the seat squab on the other. I couldn't see the back of the switch I was probing, so was working by touch. I knew it was only a 24V feed, so the only electrical safety worry I really had was shorts and the resulting potential for burny pain from hot wires etc. So I was holding the meter probe on the start terminal with the index finger of my right hand, just about able to still turn the key and hold the meter in my left. Got a nice solid 24V reading and the engine turned over, fine. Until I released the key from start. At that point the back EMF from the collapsing field on the starter solenoid exited the starter circuit via my right index finger, flowed up that arm, down my body and exited back to vehicle ground through my backside where I was sitting on the metal kick plate on the floor. At which point I made a noise apparently normally associated with a dog getting their tail stepped on and according to John, "Then you disappeared!" as I launched myself out the door in complete shock. I have no idea how many volts were involved there, but it was a proper old belt I tell you! Took me a good five minutes at the time to figure out what the heck had happened (and for my eyes to stop spinning)! I won't repeat some of the things I called the coach. Not that me and that one didn't already have a history. ...would still gladly buy it tomorrow if I could despite (because of?) that.

I'd love to say I never made the same mistake again, but I did...albeit to far lesser an extent, on a Vauxhall Corsa tracing a suspiciously similar fault. That just got sworn at indignantly without any real comedy to report.

...Now I think about it, maybe I should just steer clear of electrical work on things wearing a Bedford/Vauxhall badge...

[myglaren]

Watch out buying five-pin DIN connectors, there are varying configurations. As I found out with my Quad amps
I'm afraid I don't remember the details as it was at least 10 years back.

[CitroJim]

Watch out buying five-pin DIN connectors, there are varying configurations.

Yes, 180 degree and 270 degree ones...

That refers to the pin arrangements around the circle...

[myglaren]

But also the wiring - IIRC there is the NAIM way and the Quad way.

[CitroJim]

But also the wiring - IIRC there is the NAIM way and the Quad way.

Oh yes! That's the trouble with standards... Too many of them!

[elma]

This is like buying spheres

[elma]

I have ordered a pair of plugs now.
Thankfully the adverts say B and O type so I didn't have to go into the finer details.
Thats it for toys for the week now.
Next week I'm after the force gauge, a lead to the laptop and A traveling Wilburys Record, must have Tweeter and the Monkey Man on it.