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

[Zelandeth]

Yep, option 1 seems to be the overall choice. Haven't got as far as actually installing it yet but will probably look into getting that done next week.

Initial experimentation with the soda blaster today has yielded an absolutely???? godawful mess but little progress in terms of shifting the original paint on the Invacar.

Hard to tell if that's just my air supply not being up to spec or if it's just further evidence of the paint on there being able to withstand a tactical nuclear strike. The paperwork says the blaster wants air supplied at 50psi, and we had that shown solidly on the output from the regulator... I did experiment with setting it higher, which definitely increased the amount of mess generated, not sure if it actually improved the rate at which stuff was removed.

My entire garage is now about 1/2" deep in finely powdered sodium bicarbonate...oh well, at least it will smell fresh for the foreseeable future!

Guessing professional outfits would have a system in place to retrieve and reuse a lot of the media...

[Zelandeth]

Today was our????? third? visit with Star, the rescue dog we're looking to adopt. Today we actually took her out??? for a wal?k, helping convince the foster that we weren't going to do something absolutely daft the first time we left the house.

?Everything went well, and it's been agreed t?hat we will be ad?opting her. She will be coming home on Sunday morning. ??????

????A few photos from today - though they all seem to convey seriously huge levels ?of? de?rp??!???











Wasn't deliberate...they just came out looking utterly silly!

Obviously nothing to show???? car wise as this took up pretty much the whole day. However I've a few things planned for tomorrow all being well. Given FotU is only a f?ew d?ays away I need to get my tail in gear to get TPA read?y?!

[Hell Razor5543]

Yay!!! Welcome to the family, Star.

[Zelandeth]

Have made an executive decision regarding the paintwork????? on ?TPA. Simply that I've had enough faffing about. I'm getting things into a vaguely flat state then throwing paint on it. I could spend weeks (or months) trying to get a mirror smooth surface, but I think that's a task for another time. The most important thing I need to do with the car at this point in time is simple: Drive it!??

Okay...step one. Remo??ve all the residue from the soda blasting experiment. Just a bit left to deal with.?.?.??







Gave the van a quick wash too while I had the hose out as it was getting difficult to see through?????? the windscreen again. The joys of brick wall aerodynamics. ?

Have had another shot at clearing the fuel tank breather, I've tried several times so far but it's only in the las?t f?ew weeks I've had access to compressed air, so could try zapping it with this.



Will remain to be seen if it's???? actually made any difference.

Back to the Invacar paintwork. Worst bit of the car was this wheel arch I thin?k?.



I just went after it with the sander?????? to get it vaguely smoothed out, then set about chucking some primer at th?i??n?gs.??



Followed by some top coat????. Still obviously needs a few more coats (and in fact covering the rem?ainder of the car), but I think it will wind up looking better than it started out.?





Really do need to get hold of a???? spray gun for the compressor though...this is costing an absolute fortune in rattle cans! Hopefully will get it to a state whic?h would classify as "inoffensive from ten paces" in time for Saturday.

Had a brief moment of worry whe?n I was just packing up when I spotted this under the v?a??n??.??



Despite the engine being a little???? oily, she never usually actually leaves anything behind so the leak definitely required investigatio?n??.



The oily residue I think is mainly leftover from the leaky cam box cover. She doesn't seem to use a???? drop between services (granted, there are nearly eight litres of oil in there!)...and this didn't look to be oil. First thought was brake or clutch fluid...however there was no visible source in the engine bay, and hydraulic fluid was still sitting happily on the max mark. ?

Eventually I tracked down the source - that vertical tube to the left of the alternator. Looks to be a drain from the heater intake box, so just a bit of water draining off from? the earlier wash... nothing to worry about thankfull??y.

[Zelandeth]

Knowing that the rattle can route was going to cost me a small fortune, a spray gun???? has now been sourced. Had it in my head that the entry level was way more expensive. ?

I've been pointed to a local paint specialist as well so I'll drop by there tomorrow and see what they say. Hopefully they should be able to get me set up with some *decent* high build primer and a good chunk of paint. The suggestion has also been made that household primer and gloss (readily available in any colour you like) could also be a viable option. Given the minimal outlay involved there I'm probably going to give that a shot...if it all peels off in a month then so be it. ??

Tomorrow I absolutely need to throw the lights, number plates back on and remove the masking from the windows and go for a drive. She needs to drive 15 miles to and from FotU on Saturday, and has barely turned a wheel in th?e last month! So I reckon I need to do a thorough test tomorrow to make sure she's fit to make the journ?ey. The new pulleys have only been round the block a couple of times so far...and they're kinda critical co?mpo??nents?!?

[myglaren]

Rather than household paints, try Tekaloid.
It is still available - saw it a couple of days ago when I bought oil & filters for my C5.
Years ago (1983 ish) I repainted my rusty GS (only five years old) with it and it came out very nicely. 11 coats though.

[Gibbo2286]

I'd also recommend Tekaloid a proper coach paint that can be brushed on and hardens enough to be cut and polished to a fine finish, you won't get that with 'kitchen' paint.

For a small car like the one you're working on I've seen good results using a paint roller instead of spraying.

[myglaren]

Tried looking for my GS on Flickr!

Locked out

[Zelandeth]

Only problem I've found with Tekaloid (the time involved in applying a heap of coats aside) is that it's not available off the shelf in a colour even close to what I'm aiming for. At least judging from the colour picker on the first few distributor websites I looked at.

[Gibbo2286]

Can't help with the colour choice Zel, when I when I brush painted my vintage Rolls with Tekaloid I only wanted a regal colour so it was a choice between Royal Blue or Royal Maroon, chose the latter, But that was back in 1960.

It only required an undercoat and top coat though not multi layers.

When the American bought it he changed it to Midnight Blue, probably at great cost.

[Zelandeth]

Yeah, the problem with the Invacar is that the original colour is quite an odd one actually, almost a very pastel turquoise rather than blue. Seems there were a plethora of shades used through the years, but I've gone for a bit of a shaded interior surface as the reference so it should be as close as possible. I'd previously been looking to use a modern Ford colour which wasn't a million miles from one of the in period colours used when the cars were repainted as it was readily available from any major motor factors.

Sadly none of the standard Tekaloid colours are even close, a bright sky blue is the closest they seem to offer.

I've had a small pot made up of standard gloss to experiment with. To be honest I'm enjoying the experimental process anyway even if it doesn't actually work out in the end.

[myglaren]

Needs Beige!

[Zelandeth]

So I'd really hoped that I'd have???? time to give the Invacar a proper sh?akedown prior to the trip to FotU tomorrow. However I ended up with next to no time to do anything car related today. ?

??However I did pick up some paint? while I was out running some other errands.



This actually looks a lot closer in person than the camera makes it look. It's also matched???? to the transmission cover which is slightly lighter than the doors.

Couldn't resist splashing a ?bit onto the car in the interests of curiousity?.



Does show how far off the mark the blue I'd been using actually was. ???

This was at like 2200 though...so no test drive.

Tomorrow morning will be the first real test, heading over to Buckingham. If things go? well, you'll see her at the Festival of the Unexceptional.

If things don't go well, I'll probably be there wi?th a scruffy Mercedes camper instead?.??

[Zelandeth]

Never? had a chance to do an update over the weekend as we've been massively busy, figured folks would want to know what had been going on.

I wanted to get the Invacar to a show on Saturday, 15 miles out of town, having just had the entire drive system in bits. No test run had been possible due to time constraints...so I felt I had two plans open to me. Get up really early and do some gentle testing a?round the block before heading to the event...or saying "I'm confident in my work" and just running with it.

So I pointed TPA towards Claydon House and cracked the throttle open. This marked the first time I had ever driven her out of town too, in addition to being the drive system test. ?

Knew I had the van as a backup if anything did go awry. H?a?ving booked in to the show ages in advance I was determined to get something there though. ?

?So...did we get there?



Of course we did!



On the way there I was somewhat amusingly stuck behind modern traffic doing 35-40mph all the way there. On the way home however I had a nice clear road...and all I can say is that I'm staggered by how well TPA drives. She's more than happy to cruis?e at the legal limit. Way happier than you'd expect from a tiny little three wheeler that wasn't even considered a real car when it was launched in 1971. In fact she's far happier sitting at 60mph than several normal cars I've owned from the late 80s. It's honestly startling.

One thing they're well renowned for is being tossed around alarmingly by crosswinds, and Saturday was a pretty windy day. The issue was far less pronounced ?(even at 70mph on a bit of dual carriageway) than I was expecting...definitely found driving a lot less unnerving than expected. Not sure if that's in some way due to the change from 12" to 10" wheels with wider tyres...but it's definitely nowhere near as bad as expected. The only other one I know in use is on the 12" wheels and the owner has indicated that it's quite scary on a windy day.

No car stuff on Sunday unsurprisingly, courtesy of collecting this ?idiot who has now officially joined our family.







She seems???? so ?far to be settling in fine. In fact far more so than we'd hoped... apparently she hasn't been out for a walk of more than twenty or thirty minutes on a well known route due to her being so easily spooked. Both yesterday and today we've been out for a couple of miles, even including the pet store. Yes she is skittish, but she coped very well given the issues we had been told to expect.

I think she's just thriving on a house where she's sharing with one dog and four doting humans (she's a truly massive cuddlebug) rather than having a few hours of attention a day in a house where there are 30+ dogs...and the associated noise and smell.

Sure there's a caption just waiting for this expression...



Sure that you'll see plenty more of her as time moves on.

While I was at the car show on Saturday I was handed something else new to me, something I've wanted to add to my collection of random old computing technology since 1999 when I first saw one - An Acorn RiscPC.



It's scruffy as anything, is missing the lid, has broken retaining springs for the front drive bays (they all do that) and it won't even run the power on self test, much less actually boot. However it has a few very useful expansion cards fitted.

StrongARM CPU upgrade.



The somewhat legendary 486-PC-on-a-card. This is really handy as it allows you to properly run normal PC software without faffing around with emulation or anything (bearing in mind that the architecture is utterly different to a standard PC of the time), but as it shares the drives, video etc it's a far cheaper and saves a lot of space than having two totally separate machines on your desk.



It also still has a hard drive in (can tell you purely based on the noise at startup that it's a Conner made drive), so will be interesting to see if there's any software from the back in the day left on the drive.

I've been after one of these machines forever...but they rarely come up for sale at reasonable prices as owners when asked if they would part with them tend to respond with "you can have my RiscPC when you pry the mouse from my cold dead hands...". So I'd pretty much given up on finding one.

It does need work though. Though the failure to boot is most likely due to damage caused by this.



I can't see any broken traces yet, but I'd bet one or two are and that oscillator crystal has probably died.

Of course rather than investigate that I simply removed the old battery and cleaned up the residue...and then did the most important thing: Fixed the retaining springs on the flip up covers over the drive bays.



Needs a really good deep clean though.

[daviemck2006]

Caption for doggie


Oh crap! Zels going to fibreglass my feet!