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

[mickthemaverick]

I had my first when I left BT in 1990. Having had BT Mobile's Product Approval Lab under my management for the previous 5 years I was aware that the best performing products were Motorola and Sony. I had had Motorola's while on BT so I went Sony for a change and have never had a problem!

[Hell Razor5543]

My very first mobile phone was the Sony CMH333 (otherwise known as 'The Mars Bar Phone'). Most phones I have personally owned are Sony.

[Zelandeth]

As it was a pleasant day and I was "off the clock" for want of a better term, I pulled TPA out for the errand run today.





This was actually meant to be a quick run as I only had a couple of things on the list - but somehow I ended up having wandered around for somewhere around 40 or 50 miles by the time I arrived back home.

Two niggles turned up. One occasion she cut out. This was immediate, with no warning, and immediately restarted. I'm pretty sure this was down to scratchy contacts in the ignition switch as you can very visibly make the lights on the dash flicker by wiggling the key. Think some contact cleaner may be in its future. Failing that I'm at least 50% sure I have a spare floating around somewhere.

Second was an odd clicking noise coming from the front now and then after traversing a bump. This wasn't too hard to track down.



The mud guard has come detached at the rear edge. The noise was it bouncing around. This guard has quite a bit of corrosion at the rear edge and the bolt has just pulled through it. Given that this does also actually as a brace for the front of the shell it does want properly sorting. For now though I've gone with a very low tech solution and secured it with a cable tie.



Has been really nice to get this car out for a proper run again.

[myglaren]

Somewhere in the blog is a discussion on slide copying.
Found this today. No descriptions but looks clear enough.

There were a couple more but can't seem to find them.

[Hell Razor5543]

I got (a few years ago) s negative/slide reader that connects to the PC via a USB cable. I found it worked well.

[myglaren]

I remember that James, saw one but it doesn't look like it will work with Linux.
I really need one that will do 6x6 cm slides too.
A bodge it will have to be.

One of the others reemerged.

[Zelandeth]

It's been a while since I did any silly size comparison photos of an Invacar in the wild. So here's a picture of a Mini and a small car.



And next to my other small, two cylinder air cooled car. Not words I ever expected to be saying.

[CitroJim]

Even my AX looks tiny compared to a contemporary Mini Zel!

[Stickyfinger]

= Bigini

[Zelandeth]

TPA has been missing the original hinge pins on the engine cover for a while. Which honestly I don't mind. Because of the huge cool air intake duct it gets right in the way when you're trying to work in the engine bay, so being able to pull two bolts and just lift it out the way is quite nice.

What had been holding the hinges together was a bolt and lock nut arrangement. However a couple of times a year at least one of the nuts would usually make a bid for freedom, something I was usually made aware of by the engine cover rattling more than usual.



Finally got around to doing something about this at the weekend by sticking a couple of nyloc nuts on there. So hopefully those will stay put now.



A bit of an unexpected retro computing item has been added to the collection as of today. I have a plethora of saved searches on eBay for "items of interest" as it's an easy way to keep my eye open for potential bargains. A £25 Toshiba T3100SX probably being the best find for a while. Sadly I doubt I'm ever going to find an Acorn A4 at a palatable price, as that's one of the unicorns for a big fan of Acorn computers like me.

This wasn't quite such a high priority item for me, but nevertheless was something I'd had my eyes on for a long while.



This is an Atari Portfolio.



Not actually an Atari design, being essentially a rebadged DIP Pocket PC (similar to how Acorn re-badged the Psion Series 3 as the PocketBook), this was the first "palmtop" IBM PC Compatible ever released commercially. Well, "sort of IBM PC Compatible" anyway. There's an 80C88 in there, but quite a lot of the logic on the IBM-PC motherboard is in different memory locations to where it is on the PC, so it relies on software being "well behaved" and routing everything through the OS, most applications which try to interface directly with the bare metal will crash. Only having 128K of memory is a bit limiting too.

It's a system which really was an answer to a question nobody had really asked that far back (unlike by the early 90s when PDAs had started to become genuinely useful), but is an interesting technical time capsule - and is better known as the computer that John Conner used to hack an ATM in the opening few minutes of the movie Terminator 2. As such they do tend to sell for decent money. So when I saw this one with a buy it now of less than £30 I grabbed it.

Useful? Not really. Interesting? Sure.

[CitroJim]

That's a fascinating little device Zel Never even knew they existed!

[Zelandeth]

That's a fascinating little device Zel Never even knew they existed!

They do feel something of a solution in search of a problem at that stage of development. Yes it was very cool to make an (almost) IBM compatible PC that small in the late 80s, but it really was a very limited system. Not least in that any applications which used direct hardware access to try to speed things up would crash. Let's face it, a lot did in the 8088/86 era because doing it "properly" was so slow and when you were working at 4.77MHz that really mattered.

Give it another few years and you had devices like the Psion Series 3/Acorn PocketBook II, which presented something that's likely far more useful for that form factor.

Yes they had moved away from the PC architecture, but instead used software run on the host PC to convert a bunch of common document types into those which could be handled by the device itself. Given these were always really meant to be a companion to a desktop PC rather than a replacement, I think this made a lot more sense. Far easier to make a useful system with a reasonable power consumption and vaguely competitive price tag that way.

Probably the first "real" PC compatible sub-notebook that was genuinely useful in the real world I reckon was probably HP's 95LX from 91. That ran an NEC V20 CPU and had a system-on-chip design which was vastly more compatible with normal software of the day than the likes of the Atari. The only real caveat if I remember rightly was that it was hardware locked to using a specific DOS Code Page (850?) which occasionally could cause issues. It had 512K of memory as standard (1Mb was optional), and supported expandable storage up to 4Mb. So specs that are far more likely to allow you to run normal software.

Of course this did come at a price...at launch this had a $550 price tag $150 more than the Atari. Remember that's late 80s/early 90s $s too.

One of those is also on my watch list, but hasn't appeared at a sufficiently cheap price yet. These sorts of machines need to be pretty cheap as they are really just of interest value rather than something which will ever realistically earn it's keep in 2024. Aside from anything else, you're not really going to want to use that keyboard for much. Though it's probably still streets ahead of a touch screen!

[Zelandeth]

Had a look underneath the Volvo today courtesy of my preferred garage. Which in hindsight is what I should have just done in the first place. I just always feel a bit bad taking up their time as I know how utterly rammed they are, and they always refuse payment for diagnostic work. In contrast to the previous one where it was a case of book it in and we'll be in touch, this was a case of "You know how the lift works, help yourself and I'll be back in a few minutes."

First up, the light knocking noise from the rear end. This seems to be because the handbrake cable on the offside is touching the anti-roll bar. I'm guessing there would have been a clip or spacer to stop this happening present originally. Should be easy enough to fabricate a replacement.

They are of the opinion that there's nothing immediately in need of replacement. Evidence that the wheel alignment is out, definitely. Nothing is moving that shouldn't be or that should move is doing so more than it should in their opinion. The alignment being out could account for all the symptoms I've seen, exacerbated by the resulting uneven tyre wear. In their view the trailing arm bushes aren't anywhere near worn enough to be causing the degree of handling nonsense we'd seen. If the steering wheel is off straight, that could also in theory be causing the stability control to chase it's own tail, though neither of us were sure if we'd have seen warning lights to indicate the system actively intervening or not.

They have pointed me at the place they would use to get a proper four wheel alignment done if it were their own car, which I reckon I can far further trust to actually do the job properly. Apparently the place I'd used before are fine for tyres, exhausts and routine servicing but don't really have the time or finesse for jobs needing a bit more attention to detail as it's just a production line. Also no evidence that they ever touched the rear end when the car was last in, looking at the adjustment points - which is a bit annoying but honestly just feels par for the course these days.

So I'll go speak to their recommended place on Monday to get booked in and will see where that gets us. If we get the alignment issues resolved a new set of tyres will follow soon as they're all a fair ways worn, and the rears in particular have very uneven wear.

Having had a chance to wander around underneath the car though I can confidently say that this is the cleanest car underneath I've ever owned by a comfortable margin.



















Suffice to say a care package of a variety of snacks and drinks will be getting delivered to them on Monday as a thank you for the ramp time and assistance. It's really important to me that they know that I don't just take their help for granted.

[mickthemaverick]

Looks pretty nice under there Zel, here's hoping the 4 wheel alignment works out!!

[Zelandeth]

Looks pretty nice under there Zel, here's hoping the 4 wheel alignment works out!!

Fingers crossed. Dropped by and got a booking made today, going in on the 4th for a four wheel alignment. Place is actually a Jaguar specialist, and looks to be very well reviewed. So we'll see.

I still can't quite wrap my head around those under body photos and that being a 17 year and change old car.