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

[daviemck2006]

I thought you would like the uniroyals on the xantia. They are the best tyre for me just now, they were brilliant on my activa, 407, 107, daughters Audi and leon and I'm away to get two for my leon, shaun just put two on his 107. Reasonably priced too.

[Hell Razor5543]

Much to the dismay to the BMW X5 M which tried to undertake me on the sliproad onto the A5 coming out of Bletchley. They definitely weren't expecting a somewhat shabby looking (I NEED to do something about the paint) 26 year old Citroen to out drag them!

0 - 60 in "Jesus CHRIST!!!".

[CitroJim]

Much to the dismay to the BMW X5 M which tried to undertake me on the sliproad onto the A5 coming out of Bletchley. They definitely weren't expecting a somewhat shabby looking (I NEED to do something about the paint) 26 year old Citroen to out drag them!

Love it Magic

It has highlighted another thing for the to do list though. Now we've eliminated the torque induced play in the nearside suspension which was causing the car to pull right under acceleration, it's showing that there's a little in the offside as well I think. You don't feel it under load, but as you come off the power if you've got your foot well down you feel the car shift very slightly to the right. So I reckon the same bush(s) on the right will probably be wanting some attention at some point in the not too distant future.

Happy to rebush the other side for you at a mutually convenient time Zel Strictly, bushes should always be replaced in axle pairs and who knows, we may find the source of that annoying creak in the process!

[Gibbo2286]

Zel's mention of loose ends to my chain link fence suggestion reminded me of our service manager going to Birmingham speedway where they used chain link for the car park,.
I got a call from him saying that he couldn't get his car to move, it had suddenly ground to a halt on leaving the car park, a loose end of the chain link had threaded itself through the prop shaft UJ and it had wound on to the shaft like a cotton reel until it could go no further.

[Zelandeth]

Happy to rebush the other side for you at a mutually convenient time Zel Strictly, bushes should always be replaced in axle pairs and who knows, we may find the source of that annoying creak in the process!

I'll definitely have to chat sometime in the next couple of weeks and put our heads together to make a shopping list. I'm a fan of the "we may as well do everything while stuff's apart" approach. Plus she's such a good car it's worth doing properly.

Timing belt & rear brakes are at the top of the list though obviously.

[CitroJim]

Zel, excellent

[Zelandeth]

This afternoon I made a horrendous mess in the garage while pulling out most of the old rubber floor mats from the Invacar.



This took a lot longer than hoped as while it was falling apart, the bits that were still stuck to the floor were VERY stuck to the floor.

As expected given I could see daylight through it, the metal underneath the offside kick plate was largely missing.



I'll make sure a little plate goes in here to bridge the gap. I did note that a few bits were hanging down there into the area of the door runner, I reckon this may have had something to do with why that door jams so frequently.

Quite a few of the rivets aren't actually attached to anything because they've dissolved, so I'll replace most of them. I'll be adding a bunch across the floor panel anyway so it's held still against the chassis as currently it's totally free to move aside from at the edges. That's going to involve drilling several dozen holes from underneath... that'll be fun.

Then we can start getting the new flooring installed and she will start to look a good deal tidier inside.

[Zelandeth]

Well I think we might have found a large reason for the floppy floor. A significant number of the rivets weren't actually secured into anything because they were smaller than the drilled holes, some others were only secured to the floor panel itself, and several others had dissolved. I reckon about 20% of them actually secured the floor panel to the chassis. Oh, and most of those were loose.

After a brief period messing around with the rivet gun I lost patience and just grabbed the bag of nuts and bolts.



Just this has added about 70% to the rigidity of the panel. A lot of the rivets holding the body overlap to the floor seem to be just as bad, so I'm going to drill out and replace them all with stainless bolts. Just need to pick up some new big washers for the body mounting bolts.

While it's a bit tedious this shouldn't take too long. Currently there's no attachment to the floor panel aside from the edges. My intention is to have it bolted to each of the chassis rails/braces. Here's what's under the floor for those who haven't seen underneath an Invacar floor (courtesy of KPL when I pulled the original rotten floor panel was removed).



If there are still problems with any areas being floppy I'll probably attach a couple of lengths of ally bar diagonally underneath just to stop the panel from being able to flex so much. We're keeping things pretty simple though. Not wasting months on this.

The seat needs to come out next though as it's just going to make everything far easier. This isn't going to be a "take the whole car apart for six months" job though. I've been enjoying using the car too much for that, but I decided that I needed to sort the flooring situation after I did actually fall over getting out last week and very nearly took my eye out on one of the hooks on the garage wall because the flooring was so slippery.

Even when it wasn't trying to kill me the flooring was really scruffy though and was bugging me. While I'm not too precious about the outside I do like my car interior to be tidy, and having this sorted out will definitely help my enjoyment of the car. Very curious to see if it helps take down the noise level at speed at all.

The original kick plates are quite rough so I'm probably going to replace those, I've got some nice aluminium extruded pieces (they're actually stair tread plates) which will do the job nicely and as the return is a little less deep will make cleaning/greasing of the door runners less fiddly. Think I bought those back when I first got KPL for this very purpose as they were completely missing on that car.

I'm probably not going to get much time to work on the cars this week. Sadly a friend passed away from cancer at the end of last week so we're pretty busy both looking after their other half and generally helping out with the resulting admin and trying to get their house back in order. They've not really been able to put any effort into housework for the last six months so it's in a bit of a state. Obviously looking after them is priority one though, sorting the house comes later. Not a huge amount we can do until Tuesday when all the hospital gear is picked up anyway, so we might get a bit of time tomorrow...we'll just have to see.

[DHallworth]

Much to the dismay to the BMW X5 M which tried to undertake me on the sliproad onto the A5 coming out of Bletchley. They definitely weren't expecting a somewhat shabby looking (I NEED to do something about the paint) 26 year old Citroen to out drag them!

You need to watch those X5M's, they're quick cars!

The newer ones do 0 - 60 in 3.8 seconds and the older M50d's are no slouch either at 5.2 seconds.

Been a couple of times I've toyed with the older ones in the Activa. There's no getting away from the physics of it on the roundabouts but once you see a straight they're usually long gone.

Good to see an Activa being driven as it should be though Mine hasn't been out this summer at all.

David.

[Zelandeth]

Hello there...



We've got yet another system to join the vintage Toshiba portable computer family.

Well...sort of.

I used to have one of these back around 2000 which I used for a lot of my school work. It sadly failed at one point due to capacitor issues on the power supply board (which these machines almost all suffer from at some point, likewise on the display backlight inverter board). It was stripped down with a view to being repaired however due to a communications breakdown (read: my father ignoring everything he was told) when we were clearing out the loft several key parts ended up getting binned.

These machines seem to change hands for alarmingly large sums of money in good order these days, so when this one popped up for £50 I grabbed it. Especially as it has the optional hard disk, most T1200s had dual (720K) floppy drives.



This is important as apparently the non HD equipped machines lack several other bits, so you can't just slot the drive in. I'm hoping that once I make one good one out of the two (my original has a largely un-yellowed and almost unmarked case for a start) that I'll be able to recover some documents off my old one's drive. The 20Mb drive uses a proprietary JVC/Ricoh interface so there's no real way to get data to/from it without one of these laptops (or a handful of other, even rarer machines). Not the last time Toshiba played this card...the original T3200 uses a 40Mb drive with a similarly oddball proprietary interface, made by Fujitsu in that case.

I will definitely be swapping the keyboard for mine...that is just nasty...



Though a trip through the dishwasher for the keycaps would probably make the world of difference.

Unsurprisingly this one doesn't work...just showing an amber light on the power supply. So at the very least that will need to be recapped. Hopefully that will be enough to get it going...time will tell.

Be a nice little productivity machine if I can get it working reliably. It's based around an 80C86 processor (a low power CMOS based version of the 8086), has 640+384K of memory to work with and importantly over the other machines of this era I have, backs these specs up with a hard disk and a screen with a decent backlight. The lack of that is by far the biggest blot on the Amstrad PPC512's copybook.



My original one was still running the original battery which was ancient even when I was using it, yet that with a bit if careful power management (you can manually power down the hard drive and drop the clock speed (down from 9.5 to 4.5MHz if I remember right) it used to get me through a full secondary school day and the 45 minute bus ride to/from the place without breaking a sweat.

... I've never had a modern laptop which could do that! Never mind one from the mid 80s.

What do you bet that a clean, working example now turns up locally at a reasonable price?

[CitroJim]

Gosh! Not seen one of those in decades Zel...

What a find! And all the best for getting it going again... I'm sure you will

[Zelandeth]

I suspect it will put up a fight. These can be quite stubborn machines to get going from what I've read. I'm not sure whether it will be possible to power the machine from an external power supply to prove the operational (or otherwise!) state of the rest of it, or whether there is a data path between the power supply and motherboard. At least the PSU is a physically separate board! If it turns out the board just wants something convenient like 5V I may well investigate an alternative power supply. Maximum power usage is 24W (and most of that is the hard disk) so you don't even need anything particularly beefy...

I don't really mind whether the hard disk in this machine works (though given how vanishingly rare these drives are it would be nice!) but I really hope my old one isn't dead after sitting for over a decade. I'd really like to recover a couple of documents off there! I always try to make sure my old drives are spun up and exercised every year or so at least as I've found that the best way to beat stiction issues and such like. However as these have the power supply integrated into the data connector I have no convenient way to power it. At least the oddball Fujitsu one from the T3200 has a standard Molex connector for power.

Just remembered, the T3100SX had yet another *different* proprietary drive type!

[xantia_v6]

Here is mine:

The case has yellowed despite being in its carry bag, so not caused by UV.

It has not been powered up since 1999.

I will see how you get on before plugging it in.

[Zelandeth]

Here is mine:


The case has yellowed despite being in its carry bag, so not caused by UV.

It has not been powered up since 1999.

I will see how you get on before plugging it in.

That looks like a lovely clean example! That a hard disc equipped model?

The biggest issue that these systems seem to have is leaky caps in the power supply and display backlight inverter boards. Not massively difficult to sort, but it is fiddly. Problems can occur with tracks dissolving, though I think that's more of an issue with the 1100XE due to it having the RTC battery being on the board rather than the T1200.

-- -- --

I appear to have managed to fail to take a photo of my progress today...but not a huge issue given there's not much to see!

All of the rivets to the left of the seat in the floor of TPA have now been drilled out and replaced with stainless bolts. The vast majority just disintegrated the moment I touched them with the drill so clearly weren't doing much useful.

The difference in rigidity of the floor panel with only that done is huge...you can still make it move, but it has resistance and doesn't just flop around. Thumping it with a first now makes a solid sounding thud rather than a hollow rattle.

I definitely want to make a point of changing all of the fasteners involved here as they're all clearly shot. So the seat needs to come out next as there are half a dozen buried underneath it that I can't get to any other way.

Goes without saying that I'll be looking closely at a few of the other body mountings where rivets have been used in case they're in as bad a shape - though the water being trapped under the floor mats for years probably made the issues here so much worse.

[xantia_v6]

The T1200 I currently have has the 20MB hard drive. The first one I had (long gone) was also fitted with the optional internal modem.

I have a couple of desktop PCs (nothing terribly exciting) from the late 80s and 90s, and plugged them in a year or so ago, and one of them actually had the real time clock still running after 20 years (it was about 3 hours out).