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

[CitroJim]

Since I retired I'm staggered at just how little time I have and how I ever found time for going to work I'll never know...

All my days are like a vacuum... All sorts of things do their utmost to fill it...

And it's not that I sleep a lot either - 6 hours a night on average - but what does fill a lot of my time is domestic stuff including keeping the house clean and tidy, looking after me and cooking... Those who know me know how everything in my life must be just so and that takes a lot of time...

parkrun feels like a full-time job at times too, especially when I'm rostered as a Run Director...

[Zelandeth]

I have no idea why ImgBB seems to have eaten a bunch of photos that were recently uploaded. I'll try to fix them this evening when I'm at an actual computer.

[myglaren]

Why not upload directly to the forum Zel?

[CitroJim]

Why not upload directly to the forum Zel?

You beat me to it Steve, the forum photo upload facility works beautifully

[Zelandeth]

Simple answer is that it's additional work. Especially as about 90% of my posts are put together on a phone.

There's a pretty large degree of overlap between my blog posts across several platforms, though obviously the interaction varies a lot between them. So having to upload images to separate locations adds a fair number of extra steps. I'm already grumpy enough that I basically have to use the native host on one forum as Invision decided to do away with support for BBCode tags a year or two back replacing it with a WYSIWYG editor on their forums...so inserting an image from an external host is exactly as much work as using the native host.

Point of fact: The Invision editor is one of the pieces of software that I have the most seething hatred for of any I've come across, ever. Especially as it likes to completely randomly just eat large portions of what you have written about 1 post in 20.

If I was using an actual PC to write these posts up I'd maybe be more inclined to use the respective uploaders on individual forums, but it's enough of an additional faff on mobile.

I've generally had pretty good luck with ImgBB so far, have had a paid account with them for several years. This is the first time I've had something really odd happen I'm aware of.

[CitroJim]

That all makes good and perfect sense Zel and fully understood.

I've never been much smitten by anything Invision has done and phpBB has run rings around their BB offering since day 1...

The only other forum I subscribe to uses vBulletin... Not overly impressed with that either... Not that I'd ever cross-post as that particular forum has a very strict no automotive policy. Even the merest hint of the mention of anything car related and the mods go bananas I'm sure you know the one as you're a member of it too

Mind you, I'm not so impressed with Farcebook and Instagram these days,... They change how they work almost by the day now and by the time you've got in figured out it changes again... Made worse in my case as I run three Facebook profiles: my own personal one and two parkruns. They, being commercial business type accounts makes it even more of a minefield...

I also run four Google profiles but they seem to have a more sensible approach and rarely change how things work and never very substantially...

[myglaren]

Simple answer is that it's additional work. Especially as about 90% of my posts are put together on a phone.

That makes a difference.
I refuse to fart about with stuff like that on a phone, too much like hard work.
Texts and using it as an infuriating camera is all I do.
And the very rare phone call. Made my first this year a couple of days ago to get the heating engineer to service the boilers (mine, son's and daughter's).
Just got voice mail so that's that.

[Zelandeth]

Images should now be fixed. Still have no idea what happened.

I'd rather not be doing editing on a phone, but it's just the way things are these days. If I waited until I had the opportunity to sit down at a desktop I'd probably manage to get maybe one post a week up - and by that point I'd probably have forgotten half of what I'd intended to write.

[Zelandeth]

A few days of updates to bundle into one here, so apologies if it's a little disjointed.

Before the MGB went back to its owner I wanted to look a little more deeply into the stereo wiring. I noticed while putting something in the boot that there were a set of probably early 80s pod speakers in there in addition to the recessed ones alongside the rear seat.



However I was only aware of having seen a single pair of speaker wires when I hooked up the stereo.

Hmm...speaker wire dangling out from under the rear seat. Yeah, that's always great for inspiring confidence.



A quick test quickly revealed that noise was indeed coming out of all four speakers. So someone has previously paired them together. Fair enough...have done that myself before in years gone by before head units with four outputs were readily and cheaply available. I wanted to take a closer look to see if it had been done behind the head unit or just daisy chained from the speakers.

Yeah...I had to go looking closer didn't I?



Which once I looked closer also revealed some truely high quality wiring connectors.



Which probably explains why the left channel was cutting out sometimes when you hit a bump.

There were other such wonders as a three way fused spur...to a ground connection and a permanent 12V feed just floating around with an uninsulated spade terminal right by the front of the heater box. A black wire of course just for extra giggles.

Eventually this lot was evicted from behind the centre console.



Which left the area looking like this.



Would have been tidier if I had inline connectors in stock but I'm sadly out of them just now.

Not a massive problem in this case though as there's plenty of dead space behind the centre console in this car and none of this is visible once it's tucked away where it lives.



There's no longer any visible spaghetti poking into the passenger footwell. Will call that good enough.

I tidied up the wiring to the passenger side interior light switch too...it was long enough to touch the floor, held up by one decomposed bit of tape and running through two very rusty screw terminals (it's the yellow to light blue wire in a couple of pictures above - then changing again to a purple wire a few inches out of shot). I shortened it to a more sensible length, replaced the two screw terminals with one Wago, and securely zip tied it to the heater control cable to keep it safely away from people's feet.

I suspect the speakers in the boot have just been connected directly to the speakers in the back of the car, so I'm leaving that alone for now. The sound quality is pretty dire so if a speaker upgrade is put on the cards in the future I'll see about unhooking the extras at that point. For now I'm leaving things be.

The rev counter was further investigated.



Nothing I could find amiss behind the panel, and I'm not sure what else to do at this point without having a known good tach head to try substituting the one in the car for. It might be repairable, but I wouldn't want to try without a replacement on hand in case I made it worse! There's not much else to test with this one - it's a current sensing tach, so all the coil current runs *through* the rev counter, so there's no way the signal can be lost...as any break in the circuit would result in us having no spark.

While I had the indicator switch apart to get the rev counter out I greased it up, which has put a stop to it making an absolute horrendous nails-on-blackboard squeaking noise when you went to signal left.

On a similar note to the issues with shrinkage of the sunroof, I notice that the door seals seem to be similarly afflicted, which may well be responsible for the somewhat horrific amounts of wind noise (even by the MGB standards).



These seals don't have a gap in them, they're a complete loop, so it's not possible to just shuffle it around and deal with a bigger gap somewhere less critical. It's tending to try to pull itself out of the door aperture at the top as well, so it's not really doing much by way of being a seal in several places.

Do feel better for having tidied up the spaghetti behind the stereo though...the moment I dug far enough in to see those taped connectors I knew action was needed!

I also did a little to tidy up that speaker wiring under the rear seat. It was just safely tucked out of the way rather than making major changes. This is as I suspect we may be revisiting some or all of the speakers at a later date, so it doesn't seem worth investing any significant time in wiring that would likely just be replaced.

I also took it out and gave it a decently brisk test run to stress test things to ensure we didn't have any issues with cooling, fuelling etc. No issues were found, car seemed happy. So it was fuelled up, given a quick going over with the vacuum cleaner, then dropped back off with its owner.

I definitely need to have an MGB on fleet at some point. I keep forgetting how much I enjoy driving them until I have another shot of one. No they're not exceptional in any way, they're just fun.

Fast forward to that evening, when in a slight change of pace I set about coaxing this clock mechanism back into the land of the living.





This is a Tamura mechanism and seems to be of good quality. The only issue was that the gearbox of the little 1rpm synchronous motor had seized up from lack of use. Once I was able to get into it and give it a highly technical wiggle it picked up and ran perfectly. The motor is a completely sealed unit, if it wasn't I would look to dismantle it to be cleaned and lubricated appropriately. However as it was running completely silent I don't think there's a huge lubrication issue there.

Unlike flip digit clocks the mechanism here is quite simple, with the motor simply pushing a lever to advance the digit once a minute - there's no continual tension on everything, which has the advantage of being completely silent.

The only casualty we had from the trip across the Atlantic was one of the wires to the neon which provided the illumination. A very simple problem to fix at least.



The whole unit was then reassembled and proven to be working fully.



Whole thing will be coming apart again soon for a good deep clean, I wanted to have it proven working before I spent the time doing that though.

Unfortunately this has now highlighted to me that my 60Hz supply well...isn't. It's gaining the best part of a minute an hour.

So will need to have a think about that. Will investigate whether there's any ability to fine tune the frequency on my supply, but doubt it. Replacing the motor is a non starter as it's flipping tiny compared to any 1rpm synchronous motors I've been able to find so far.

Guess I could swap it out for a tiny stepper motor run off an Arduino or similar as the timing there should be more than precise enough...though that seems like overkill.

Bit irked that this inverter supply is so far off frequency wise...with all electronic control it's not hard to get a stable frequency.

Fast forwarding to this afternoon while I was trying to ignore the sound of the roofers seemingly tearing the house apart by getting a few things on the website in order. While the main page for the Invacar is still in progress, the associated FAQ page is now live.

The page for the BX has been updated to show that it has moved on to a new owner. I've added a placeholder for the Cavalier too as I'll be starting that page soon. My aim there is to keep reasonably up to date as the project progresses rather than playing catch up like I have with the Invacar which is *way* harder.

Behind the scenes I've also made a few tweaks, including one visible change in the form of the background. I've had comments from a couple of folks that they found the white on black hard to read. So I've switched to a more unobtrusive dark grey background in the hope this will improve readability. I do have plans in mind for a major redesign, but that's likely years off. It involves a heck of a lot of work plus me actually working out how things like CSS works...though doing that would obviously make my life way easier going forward.

I also randomly discovered one orphaned page in one of the lighting sections. Apparently at some point I'd managed to accidentally delete the link to it from the section index...no idea how long that's been the case. Oops!

Depending how the roofing work goes tomorrow I might try to make a start on the page for the Cavalier. We'll see how time goes.

[CitroJim]

Excellent Zel Pleased you're back... I was starting to miss your regular posts here...

[Zelandeth]

Oops.

I absolutely definitely didn't accidentally end up buying another camera today.



Really didn't need it...that's me up to three 35mm SLRs in operation now (assuming this one *is* in working condition, though signs are good so far aside from the light meter). I've heard quite a few people speak fondly of these old Prakticas and this was really cheap. So I couldn't resist.

It's a much more basic camera than the likes of the Olympus Om-10 which has very quickly been adopted as my go to camera for most things, but should be interesting to test it out. Not a camera you can use discreetly though, this has to have the loudest shutter of any camera I have ever used. It is quite ridiculously loud. Initially the exposure meter was refusing to work, but after a thorough clean of the battery compartment it's sprung to life. I will need to make an adapter though as this relies on the steady 1.35V of a PX625 mercury cell to give an accurate reading. An SR44 and a diode to drop the voltage is about the best modern compromise.

The Om-10 has recently received a nice little upgrade too. While it's a very competent camera, the one thing it lacks "out the box" is a fully manual mode. To get full control over the shutter speed you need one of these.





Which plugs into a socket on the front of the camera.





Then you've got fully manual control over everything if you want it. Not something I'll probably use massively frequently as the auto exposure control actually does a pretty good job, especially for the period. It is nice for occasions when you've got awkward lighting though. Just gives a bit of extra flexibility.

This evening I've given this little thing a bit more attention.



Which you can probably see is rather cleaner now.

However it's decided to play up! First failure was the replacement neon for the time display dying. Much to my surprise this turned out to be that the lamp itself had died, having apparently leaked. I didn't have another NE2 handy...so an NE2G was pressed in...same idea but with an argon/mercury gas fill and a green phosphor. It's a tiny little cold cathode fluorescent lamp. Actually looks quite smart.



They don't tend to last very well though as the phosphor degrades - though we'll see. I am running this one very conservatively.

The radio then decided to pack in...going silent but returning if the case was tapped. Classic dry solder joint behaviour. Let's go digging.



Some quality soldering in here.





However with anything that looked slightly suspect reflowed, it refused to work at all once back together.

Oh well, I'll need to go after it tomorrow with the multimeter then. Helpfully I do have the schematic as it was provided on a sticker on the base.



A little on the tiny side though. Nothing a few minutes and a scanner can't fix however.



We do seem to still have some life as there's a very faint pop from the speaker when you turn the radio on, so the signal stages will be where I start after the basic supply voltage checks.

That's a job for tomorrow evening though I think.

[CitroJim]

Excellent! I remember the Praktica Super TL2 from long ago back in the 70s when I was a bit into photography... It was a very desirable one back in the day and well regarded. The luxury end of the Parktica range if I recall correctly...

You're finding all the problems with bringing a long-dormant bit of 70s domestic electronics back into service Zel... They don't initially like it very much but soon settle down... Check all the usual suspects and happily, there's not many of them!

[Zelandeth]

Yeah, we'll get it to cooperate. Have to admit actually looking at the schematic for the first time I'm quite surprised by how complex the output stages are. To my mind that at a glance looks almost more like a valve based design that's been tweaked to use silicon rather than a cheap and simple setup you'd expect in a basic bit of consumer tech like this.

The more I'm looking into this thing the more I find myself questioning whether this is actually a bit older than I had originally thought. Annoyingly there doesn't seem to be anything by way of obvious date codes anywhere. The only thing which has likely contenders is the speaker - M6952. Which would suggest this thing is likely from the very early 70s.

I'd originally been thinking mid to late. Though that date code, the types of transistors used and overall complexity of the circuit for a basic AM/FM radio just seem to point at it being quite old.

[myglaren]

The OM-10s are brilliant. Had one and an OM-1MD. Loaned the kit to my then daughter in law never to be seen again.
Love the way it didn't even need to be switched on, press the shutter release and it did everything itself. Even controlling the flash duration with the right flash. Also had the manual adaptor but rarely used as the OM1 was better for that.
Had a mate with a Praktica Super TL (1) when I had a lowly Edixa-mat reflex (which was OK but limited).

[CitroJim]

It's a very standard late 60s/early 70s Far-Eastern AM/FM radio Zel, especially the output stage... An absolute classic that dates from the earliest days of transistor circuits... Nothing to fear there...

Given it has silicon transistors, it'll be late 60s at the oldest... And having silicon is a definite advantage... Many Ge transistors are now starting to show their age...

Love how the AM/FM switching is so basic and simple... Switch off the AM mixer/oscillator in FM by swapping its supply to the FM front-end to switch it on and on FM switching in the ratio detector... Elegant in its simplicity and capable of giving good results...

Posher versions would have used the AM mixer/oscillator as an additional IF stage on FM...