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

[Zelandeth]

An advanced fused composite!

Have to say it doesn't sound very "do a bit of that in your garage" compatible! But if you can just treat it like fiberglass and slap resin and matting at it maybe it's nowt to worry about

I'd think the sensible approach would be to drill the ends of any cracks to stop them spreading, rough up the rear of the affected panel, apply several layers of fibreglass matting behind it and fill any crack as necessary. At the end of the day the body panels on the Trabant are unstressed plastic just as with most GRP body panels. Interesting to see that under the skin the construction is actually very similar to the base frame design used by Rover on the P6.

Hopefully will be getting some more photos tomorrow, but unless anything there really scares me I'll likely be looking to arrange collection pretty soon. MOT history shows some advisories for corrosion in the bulkhead in the vicinity of the brake master cylinder, but I'm not too worried about that. Access to repair it if necessary doesn't look bad, and there is a pretty clearly obvious rust trap in that general area behind the battery.

The current owner did post up a video of it running from back when they got it, and is breaks my brain just a little bit precisely how much like the only other two cylinder two stroke engined vehicle I've driven, which was a snowmobile. Rather less aggressive I imagine though, that thing had 700cc of Bombardier up front and output something insane like 100bhp at north of 10K rpm...I abruptly learned the lesson not to crack the throttle on that open from a standing start - or it launched with sufficient force that you were promptly ejected off the back of the seat. We did have some vague plans of building that power plant into a go kart or buggy rather than something we got use out of about one day every four years, though in hindsight I'm kind of glad we didn't given that either me or John probably would have wound up killing ourselves with it if we had. The Porsche 911 Turbo engined beach buggy he created was alarming enough.

Kind of amusing to see a wacky trade like this happening again, bearing in mind a few years back I swapped a Lada Riva for a V12 Jag XJ-S. Just have the subjects switched around this time around.

[CitroJim]

Looking forward to seeing this one Zel!

[Zelandeth]

Had a chance to look into the lack of heating in the P4 today. Initially couldn't get any water through the heater core.

Poking a screwdriver into the feed immediately revealed the reason for this.



The valve itself was also well and truly gummed up. Eventually, after a good 15-20 minutes digging and generally faffing about with it I managed to get a decent flow through it.

Turned out that the linkages were also adjusted wrong, so the valve wasn't opening when the heat control was set to high.

I then faffed about for a while getting it bled - there's no proper provision for bleeding the system on these and the heater is the highest point on the system so it's a bit awkward.

We now have...some vague suggestion of warmth. I suspect I may need to bleed it a bit further or poke the linkages a bit more. Progress though. I also want to see if I can get hold of the cable and get the flaps for the windscreen demisted vents open. I'm not inclined to dismantle the whole control assembly to try to reconnect it, but if I could just get the demisters open and just leaving it that way would make sense at this time of year.

As Abby was in the office today so I didn't have the Peugeot on hand it drew the short straw for daily duty today.



Still enjoying this car. Hopefully I can get it equipped with more or less a fully working heater tomorrow.

[CitroJim]

Did you try giving the matrix a bit of a reverse flush Zel, I expect the matrix is full of crud!

The P4 heater should be good enough to roast chestnuts if all is good... I remember all cars of that vintage had heaters that behaved more like furnaces!

[MattBLancs]

Like a confectioners shop that Rover, 4 Star Fudge in the carb and now some sort of Heater Matrix Caramel on offer too!

I'm with Jim, loads of flushing in both directions on the matrix is worth a shot.

Did you say previously there's something up with the engine block (a crack?) So understand not wanting to challenge that, but could you feed some chemicals round just the matrix with it decoupled from rest of the system?

[Zelandeth]

The problem with reverse flushing it is that you can only get the water to flow so quickly before the flow causes the heater valve to shut itself because of the design. I'd really need to split it from the heater core to get a really good rate of flow back through it.

I did get a pretty decent flow through it though and there was no more gunk coming out - though yes if the car were sticking with me I'd definitely look to get some cleaning solution into the matrix to try to break up any crud that is inevitably in there. The radiator really should be subjected to the same treatment I'd think.

As it is, that's likely to be a job for the next owner given that I've had both some more photos and a few questions answered, and I'll be making a trip down to Portsmouth to pick up the Trabant next either Monday or Tuesday.

She definitely wants a bit of TLC, and there are definitely a couple of bits of rust that will want attention sooner than later, mostly just below the rear windscreen. The wiring definitely needs some help in a few areas - I can see a bunch of household screw terminal blocks under the bonnet for a start and there is definite evidence of a less than stellar audio install having happened at some point. Unsurprisingly it needs a really good deep clean throughout it looks like. Nothing which seems too alarming though, and I'm quite looking forward to it. It's always fun getting stuck into something totally new to me. Honestly curious to find out whether it really is as bad as a lot of the pub talk myths would have you believe, or rather is just massively misunderstood by most casual onlookers. My money is on the latter, but time will tell I guess!

[CitroJim]

Looking forward to the Trabant joining you Zel

[Zelandeth]

Well I've signed up to the first marque specific forum I came across while searching for a couple of parts, so that's hopefully getting us a step forward in finding where to find things before the car is picked up.

I couldn't find any decent looking models with a quick search, so this ended up arriving today.

Been years since I built a model kit, but this looks to have a decent level of detail and seems like it should go together simply enough. I can tailor the colour to match the actual car too just by buying some alternative paint which is a bonus.

Even if the pictured car is a bit tidier than what I'm bringing home (at least just now).

We can work on that though!

[mickthemaverick]

Having seen those Zel I'd say it would be a better bet to make the car look like the model!!

[CitroJim]

Is that A21 DDR plate on yours Zel? That's a great plate and I fear many youngsters won't 'get it'...

I wonder if another Trabby wears A21 GDR?

[Zelandeth]

Is that A21 DDR plate on yours Zel? That's a great plate and I fear many youngsters won't 'get it'...

I wonder if another Trabby wears A21 GDR?

Plate was put on it by the current owner I believe. A21 GDR appears sadly to be on a 2021 BMW, so significantly less interesting.

Sadly I suspect that a huge number of the people looking at the car will be blissfully unaware that there was ever even split between East and West Germany, never mind having a clue what the DDR was.

We have now officially reached the "impatient" phase of having a new car collection on the horizon. Though that does mean that I really need to start gathering together all the bits of P4 which I'm sure have managed to diffuse themselves throughout a large portion of the house by now.

[bobins]

The humble Trabby also meant so much to so many back in the former times. It was a small form of independence and freedom for those lucky enough to have one - although in reality for many that just meant freedom to do what the state was happy for you to do
Once The Wall came down many wanted rid of their Trabbies and desired 'Western' cars as they wanted to look forward to better times, not backward. Then came a bit of Ostalgie and they started wanting them back again

[Zelandeth]

P4 has been loaded up for its run down south tomorrow morning.

Think I managed to round up all the spares.





Two hours plus change it looks like if the traffic plays ball. Pretty sure the return trip will take a bit longer!

This evening I had a bit of a poke around with an old PC which arrived here last week. Tiny little desktop system - smaller than a whole bunch of portable machines even.



Seriously, this thing is *tiny* - here's a Spectrum for scale.



Internally it was actually surprisingly clean - and thankfully turns out to be equipped with a Dallas clock chip rather than the NiCd battery which was so commonplace in systems of this era and has killed tens of thousands of systems when they leak and start dissolving the motherboard.



This does mean that I'll need to do a little surgery to that chip to allow it to use an external CR2023 cell. That's infinitely preferable to trying to coax a motherboard which has suffered corrosion damage back into life.

The seller had tested it and rapidly switched it off when they smelled the unmistakable smell of capacitors letting the magic smoke out. So I was planning on a recapping session for the power supply.

Quite a few small form factor systems used an external power supply brick, but this one has it internal. In this tiny, very densely packed little cuboid.



Which predictably wasn't exactly the easiest thing to service, but thankfully it does "hinge" open on one side.



The majority of the caps in there are made by our old friends at Nichicon...so there's our target! Their caps probably account for about 98% of the repair work I do on equipment from the 80s and 90s.

Sure enough...



Thankfully these have only recently started to leak it looks like so there was no damage on the board (a nice change for me!). Much better.



The Rubycon ones were left alone as I've never had any issue with a single one of those unless the hardware in general has obviously been absolutely hammered.

Given how densely packed this thing is when it's folded back together I was a little apprehensive to apply power to be honest. Thankfully it didn't go bang when powered up though.



No nasty smells or anything, and even better after a few power cycles it correctly POSTed.



The hard disk is running and sounds healthy - though that doesn't necessarily mean anything yet.

Sadly this is as far as I can get now as Amstrad in their infinite wisdom have used a proprietary keyboard interface. So I'll need to see if I can find an appropriate keyboard or adapter if someone has made one.

This would actually have been a pretty punchy little machine back in 1990/91. It's running a 20MHz 80386SX, would have been nice to see a full-fat 386, but the 20MHz clock speed (I'm more used to seeing these clocked at 16MHz) should help, and they've provided 64K of cache as standard, and have provided a co-processor socket. It came with 3.5Mb of memory, an 80Mb and had an SVGA capable display card (which can also emulate CGA, EGA and Hercules modes). They have also managed to provide two half-length 16-bit ISA slots. Not a bad spec at all for the time - especially for something taking up barely a square foot of desk space. It's really a densely packed little machine, and as you would expect weighs a tonne for the size it is. Probably doesn't weigh all that much less than the Compaq desktop it's shown next to earlier.

This one came with a card in one of those slots which I'm curious to investigate once I have the system up and running.



This it turns out is an Amstrad made clone of the Ad-Lib sound card. Should be an interesting little machine once I've got it up and running. The compact form factor could be quite a bonus in terms of being something genuinely useful for playing around with older software and such.

[Hell Razor5543]

A couple of decades ago I used to teach PC maintenance to long term unemployed. There were two designs of PC we had, a large Goldstar unit and those little Amstrad small form factor PCs. They did a decent enough job for what we needed. I did, on occasion, have to open up the Goldstar monitors for failing solder joins (every 18 months or so), but that was about it for repairs.

[Gibbo2286]

This is more in your dept than mine Zel, an old friend never got into computers so for the last umpteen years has used Brother typewriters, nobody it seems makes them any more so she asked if I could get one working for her, gave me these two, so can I get one working with bits from both? That's the task but...................
As you can see the innards a completely different.