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

[Michel]

Back to a very rainy Heathrow. Just waiting in the endless passport control queue now, as despite being a permanent UK resident with a biometric EU residency permit...because his passport is still a US one, my husband has to go through the massive queue.

I used to have this with regular monotony when travelling with my missus when she still had a Colombian passport with her perm leave to remain visa in it.

It changed when we had Sammy. Passport control often took pity on us pushing a toddler in a pram late at night and shoved us through whichever queue was shortest. I've been through the non-EU passport queue many many times at Heathrow

[Michel]

Welcome home both Passport control can be so bloody frustrating...

I know from countless visits to erm, rather less developed countries...

I didn't know you'd been to the US too Jim ..

[CitroJim]

Welcome home both Passport control can be so bloody frustrating...

I know from countless visits to erm, rather less developed countries...

I didn't know you'd been to the US too Jim ..

[Hell Razor5543]

I can tell of two stories that wind up US passport control (one is family related, the other isn't).

My Great Aunt was from South America (born in Uruguay, resided in Argentina, complicated story), and when she travelled between Great Britain and Argentina she used to put America as the destination on the 'passing through' form (whatever it is called). This used to REALLY upset the arrogant passport officers in the US, as they seemed to think there was only one American continent in the World. She would NOT change her answer on the forms, as (being a Boothby, even though it was through marriage) she was more stubborn than you would believe (all Boothby women are, to deal with the Boothby men and "that damned Boothby charm!). She took to carrying a small Atlas of the World to prove her point.

Peter Ustinov would, when filling out the Visa form, put, in the 'Colour' box, PINK! This also really upset those US passport officials, who insisted he was white. He refuted this, as he was (if you looked on a paint colour chart) clearly PINK.

[myglaren]

I dislike any VW suspension I have ever had to deal with, apart from the 93 VW caravelle we had as the boats crew bus. It was ok to be in, but usually fully loaded with 7 men and lots of personal and boats gear!

I'm nor really a lover of my 107s suspension either. It is really too firm for me but that will be more due to the small size and light weight of the car. That's why I use Gabby for not work things which are normally longer runs.

I was out in my son -n laws Audi A6 3.0 V6 yesterday and have to say I was pleasantly surprised - only around some country lanes but the suspension wasn't anywhere near as hard as I had expected and the experience wasn't a bad one at all.
Never ben in an Audi before.

They are looking for a roadster and tried a Z3, a Z4 and an Audi TT and hated all of them.
I did recommend a Morgan +8 but that was received with some scepticism.

[Michel]

I dislike any VW suspension I have ever had to deal with, apart from the 93 VW caravelle we had as the boats crew bus. It was ok to be in, but usually fully loaded with 7 men and lots of personal and boats gear!

I'm nor really a lover of my 107s suspension either. It is really too firm for me but that will be more due to the small size and light weight of the car. That's why I use Gabby for not work things which are normally longer runs.

Apart from the Audi TT, I've always found VAG stuff to be too soft and squidgy, plenty of understeer on Golfs and A3s. They ride very well on proper-profile tyres. I always find the base models I get as hire cars ride way, way better than the higher models - because they have tall tyres and no ridiculous "sport" suspension.

[Zelandeth]

Back home, and seem so far to have dodged the worst of jetlag - the fact that Monday was essentially one 30-ish hour long day essentially seemed to help as it just meant I slept like the dead last night (that'll be the one time this year then!) and woke up a bit later than usual, don't feel too groggy though.

Couldn't resist messing about with the Invacar a bit. Unsurprisingly she started first touch. Figured it was time to tick off a minor job though, so pulled the silencer off so I could hit it with the carbide mop and get some paint on it to give some external protection from the elements. Came off without hassle and seems to be in decent condition. Enough of the original finish left too, to confirm that it was originally painted with a dark grey enamelled finish. I'll see what the closest match I can find locally is.

Couldn't resist starting it briefly with the silencer off... suffice to say, it sounds exactly like you'd expect...the earth shaking thunderous sort of beat you'd expect from a 60s V-twin bike with that sort of sized engine. Quite nice actually...

[CitroJim]

Couldn't resist starting it briefly with the silencer off... suffice to say, it sounds exactly like you'd expect...the earth shaking thunderous sort of beat you'd expect from a 60s V-twin bike with that sort of sized engine. Quite nice actually...

Sweet I can almost hear it from here!

[Zelandeth]

Have started to look at the Saab with a view to it moving on to its new home soon.

This has mostly meant starting to move the stuff which has wound up getting stored in it back out of the car into places it should live. I've also taken the battery out and put it on charge - even though it was still quite happy to crank the engine over. The oil in there really doesn't look too clever either, so I stuck the pump on it before taking the battery out, and will put fresh oil in before it's next started.

Hopefully will get a chance to get that done and give it a quick clean at the weekend so it's slightly less disgusting! Likewise the Activa as the birds seem to have been using it for target practice over the last couple of days and I think have only missed one or two panels so far!

Edit: Very quick evening update. Reattached the now cleaned and painted exhaust to the Invacar.

Have also bent the mounting tabs on said exhaust straight again so it sits squarely rather than applying undue pressure on the downpipes.

We'll see if this high temp paint actually cures properly unlike the last lot which just wiped off! The whole lot will be essentially invisible behind the rear apron once the bodywork is sorted out, but given that these exhausts aren't exactly ten a penny, I'd rather offer it what protection from the elements that I can.

[Zelandeth]

Intention for today was to test the drive system on the Invacar to see whether the belt drive would change ratios properly. However before I got to that point a few things needed doing.

Firstly, if I was going to subject the drivetrain to higher speeds I wanted to check the oil levels in the gearbox and diff. Both have easily accessible level and fill plugs, so that's the work of minutes. Both needed a top up, but only a bit.

Next up was to investigate the odd scraping noise coming from the offside rear wheel. Actually turned out to be used error - this idiot had put the return springs on the wrong side of the shoes so they were touching the hub. Putting them back on the correct way around was exceedingly fiddly, but not really difficult as such. Definitely one of those things that is probably easier once you've done it a dozen times.

This is also the side that's been leaking - but the cylinder is bone dry now...will keep an eye on it. It'll be changed likely before the road, at £12 each it's not worth not doing.

Next up was to engage drive, get the revs up and see what happened. Answer was a huge cloud of dust and cobwebs being ejected from the drive assembly directly into my face. Oh, and the speed coming up nice and smoothly, bit of resonant vibration at a couple of points (from the belt which I know is a bit loose), but nothing untoward.

There's a notable change of the note at 45mph, which is when the system is meant to drop into a "direct drive overdrive" mode, which it seems to be doing. Great. Cranked the revs up a bit further, and briefly had an indicated 65mph on the speedo, at which point yet more crud was blown out. I caved at that point as the levels of noise in a small garage were reaching biblical levels, and I really didn't want the car to vibrate its way off the axle stands. Fundamentally though, the variomatic system seems to work as intended. Rear brakes too, even if they're not perfectly balanced yet.

Not really done much today aside from testing something, but it feels like progress.

[CitroJim]

Looking good Looks like your holiday has revitalised you!

65mph in the Invacar must feel Epic Zel

[Hell Razor5543]

Now, with a bit of careful tuning you should be able to get the 0 - 60MPH to something silly. Imagine the expressions on the boy racers when they get burned off the lights by an Invacar!

By the way, I think your blog title needs revising.

[Zelandeth]

0-60 not so much, but 0-30 will allegedly surprise quite a few folks out of the box down to the gearing.

Had planned to get some poking around this evening, probably aim to get the carb cleaned. Instead was just walking out the door when I got the cry of "the internet's broken."

Cue nearly two hours of swearing at my network infrastructure. Not sure what's going on...for some reason it's decided - but only in the case of Windows machines - that anything connected directly to the router's WiFi should route to the network switch...rather than the internet...Android and Linux machines behave normally.

Nothing has changed...so best guess is that Sky have issued a firmware upgrade or something that's messed it up. Not that you can get much worse than the piece of garbage SR-102 router Sky give you anyway - hence the external switch, wireless access point etc...

Have just unplugged the whole wired side of things for now and will do more battle with it in the morning. So that's the website, printer, NAS offline...in addition to WiFi coverage of about 2/3rds of the house. Not looking forward to plugging that back in as I'm sure I'll get about 3 million emails from the server complaining about the fact that it can't see the router...sadly I can't shut it down because I can't connect to it!

Well, I could, but that would mean walking all the way to the other side of the house and either finding a keyboard and monitor or booting the desktop back up...plus last time I switched it off I lost a hard drive. I think I'll just deal with the email deluge

[Zelandeth]

Okay...Have spent most of the afternoon faffing around here, and I'm none the wiser. It's just all decided to play ball again.

For some reason the router seemed to have decided to go into some odd "reverse bridge" mode where it was simply connecting the wireless to the internal wired connection rather than the external internet connection as it should have. ...As far as I'm aware, there's no provision on that router for *any* bridging mode use, nevermind weird things like that going on.

Anyhow...It seems to be working now, and I've moved quite a few devices over to the new wireless access point that I'd been meaning to set up for a while - intention is to turn off the wireless on the router entirely once I've moved everything over - so it will eventually wind up with one Ethernet cable plugged into it going to the switch, and the phone line...that'll be it. All the heavy lifting will actually be handled by far better quality equipment that will hopefully behave better. The internal networking hardware in the router as it is saturates at 144 megabits per second...which in a modern day household doesn't take much. Especially when you consider that's across everything connected to it and includes internal traffic rather than just the actual internet connection.

You really would think that if you were paying Sky this much money every month (not my choice, don't even go there...), that they could at least provide you with a router that's fit for purpose...

Edit: problems resurfaced this afternoon - but again only on Windows machines... everything else was working just fine.

Eventually found the cause... somehow DHCP had been switched off on the switch...so we had two devices on the network both trying to live at the same IP address. Checking that one blasted option has restored normality.

...the questions remain of how it got unchecked, how long it's been like that, and why it only caused problems for computers running Windows? We'll never know I suspect.

[Zelandeth]

Spot the difference...

...Okay that's a bit unfair. You need to look closer.

Activa now has fully working air conditioning again. Always a nice surprise on a vehicle this age when it passes the leak down test...

Didn't get a chance to look at the gauges before they took it off the machine, but based on the temperature of the various lines and the temperature drop across the evaporator, it seems happy enough.

Have also nearly got my web server back up and running. I decided the point at which I physically moved it was a good time to sort the software out as it was a hacked together mess. CentOS7 is now on there and things are mostly set up - should hopefully have it back up this weekend. Think it should just need the firewall settings updated and then the router updated to point traffic to the correct IP address and that should be it. In theory.