Hard to believe it's been a year again already, but once more I found myself here with the Trabant.
Which shortly later resulted in this being issued.
Which the car doesn't actually need - but I don't have a four post lift or a set of brake rollers at home. Plus I reckon the MOT represents excellent value in having a second pair of eyes look over the car. I'm only human and can and do miss things and make mistakes. Plus in the event anything did happen it's one less thing for insurers to quibble over. It will continue to be tested yearly. Fingers crossed I get to cover a few more miles between now and the next test...given the car was parked up for about ten months of the last test period after the engine went bang.
Had a look at the plugs when I got back from today's driving and this is what they have to say.
One downside that was apparent with having knocked the mixture by a notch though was once again having to poke the cold start lever a couple of times before I got onto the main road and the engine started to do meaningful work and get some heat into it. I think this however is largely down the the supposedly smart choke as Mikuni call it trying to be too smart for it's own good. I'm sure the warmup profile they have works fine for a bike. The cylinder on a bike engine will heat up really pretty quick when you're stationary given there's virtually no airflow over it. This is a bit different though in that there's a great big (really quite powerful!) fan blasting cool air at the engine as soon as it's started - so I imagine it takes a good deal longer to get up to temperature than a similar capacity bike engine would. I'd really prefer to just have a cable attached to the choke control on the carb that I could set where I wanted it. Something I might have to look into at some point in the future. It's not a problem really rather just an annoyance.
I really do need to kick the idle speed up a touch as well as it is idling too slow currently - and being a two cylinder two stroke it makes it very well known that it's a bit too slow! Quite a contrast actually as as soon as you're off idle it really is a heck of a lot smoother than you'd expect. That is a moderate faff to adjust though as that screw is right on the back of the carb so is completely inaccessible with it attached to the intake boss...which given I imagine is going to require a few trips backwards and forwards dialling it in will get old in a hurry. Which is why I've been putting off dealing with that. I did see if I could cheat by tweaking the throttle cable adjustment (the idle speed adjustment is basically just a set screw which sets the resting position of the throttle slide), but that just makes the throttle hang 50% of the time...so no, I'm just going to have to do it properly, being lazy isn't an option. I did discover that I had at least 1/4" of slack in the throttle cable though, so it was worth messing with anyway as there's no way I'd have been able to get full throttle with it like that.
Current fleet:
07 Volvo V70 SE D5, 88 Renault 25 Monaco, 85 Sinclair C5, 84 Trabant 601S, 75 Rover 3500, 73 AC Model 70.
Well I do believe I've figured out where a recently developed rattle from the front end of the Trabant had come from.
Generally bolts holding the exhaust system together shouldn't be merrily spinning around in place when everything is bolted together. That's what I get for reusing a couple of old fasteners with somewhat suspect looking threads. I've just nipped things up again for now as that will all be coming apart when the new exhaust arrives from Germany, so I'll replace the nuts and bolts then. The one nearest the camera in the video clip above is actually an utter pig to get to as it's near impossible to get a spanner or socket onto the underneath of that flange on the car as the exhaust itself, starter motor or crankcase are in the way pretty much every way you try to get to it. There's not much on the Trabant which is really annoying to get to, but that's definitely one example.
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The beginnings of an engineering related Occasional Distraction (TM) are currently in progress. This is actually one that's kind of been at the back of my mind for a number of years but I've decided it's time to actually do something with as technology has progressed now to a point where I think it's worthwhile. Those of you who have put up with my ramblings for long enough will know that among the utterly useless in real life things that I enjoy is playing pinball. I was extremely happy to discover when I accompanied the family on a trip to Arcade Club up in Bury last year that they have a solid half of one of their floors dedicated to it. Though I really wish I'd taken the photo from the other end of this line where the more classic machines were rather than this modern Stern nonsense.
I shouldn't really be too hard on Stern I guess - at least they're still actually making them. Plus there's nothing really *wrong* with them, they're just exceptionally average in my view and rarely hold my attention long. They've gone with lots of electronic fluff to try to draw people in rather than actually investing in designing a playfield that flows well and has any real replay value in my view.
I'm looking forward to visiting there again at some point, especially as they've apparently moved the machines since the last visit to a different area which is 16+ only so the perpetual stream of screaming ill behaved children who detracted somewhat from the experience last time should be greatly reduced.
There is a downside to enjoying this in the UK though, and that's that it never really was as popular here as it was in the US. This combined with pinball having enjoyed something of a resurgence in the last five or ten years has meant that machines in the UK are fairly thin on the ground, and are painfully expensive. For the vast majority of the tables I'd really want to dedicate a chunk of floor space in my house to you're looking very likely north of ten grand, and I quite simply ain't paying that much for something that is absolutely not useful in any way beyond providing entertainment.
Step forward the virtual pinball table. The idea of emulating tables on a computer is nothing new - It's a genre which has existed on computers pretty much since the dawn of computing (I'm pretty sure I've seen a video somewhere of one that somebody made running on a Xerox Alto). Obviously though there are big limitations to sitting at a desk looking at a screen and using a keyboard to control a recreation of a table, no matter how lovingly the graphics have been recreated and perfectly the physics are modelled - and some of the recreations that people have made are *incredibly* good.
You can take this several steps further though thanks to a few advances in technology in the last ten years or so - not least the wide availability of large 4K resolution widescreen displays. A 40" widescreen display conveniently is very similar to the usable playfield size of a "standard" table - and somewhere around 45" for a widebody table - even though that's a bit of an odd size that's not too commonly available, but if you're willing to accept a bit of fudging the numbers on perfect scaling a 43" one will work just fine and is a screen size which is orders of magnitude easier to find.
The basic idea is that you take the TV, flip it over onto its back, rotate through 90 degrees into a portrait orientation, and there's your playfield. That's immediately orders of magnitude more realistic feeling to look at than looking at a monitor on a desk. Though obviously you can't just have the TV floating in mid air or sliding around on its back on a desk, you need to have something to support it - a cabinet of some sort. Which then allows you to go several steps further and build other hardware into that cabinet which can go the extra mile to fool your brain (if done well, astonishingly convincingly) into thinking you're playing a real table. This is an area where the devil is in the detail. Firstly is that pinball tables are clunky, noisy mechanical things with powerful solenoids which operate most of the major functions - and you can only convey so much of that through a set of speakers. Well we've got a nice big box here, why don't we just build actual table flipper/kicker/pop bumper solenoids into it and trigger those at the appropriate moments in the simulation? That way near as makes no odds the same tactile feedback is transmitted through the body of the table to the player. This is made orders of magnitude easier by virtue of the fact that a few people who are *way* smarter than I am have already done the hard work in creating an IO controller which plugs into a USB port and allows you to drive all this lot from a computer. The same controller allows you to use real hardware for the flipper buttons, which again is something that always feels "off" when using a keyboard - or even microswitch based options. The illusion is further created by sticking another smaller screen up above the main one where the backglass and dot matrix display would be on a real table. Done well the overall effect is very convincing. No it's never going to be absolutely 100% as good as the real thing, but it's far closer than you'd think.
It should be an interesting project, albeit not a cheap one. Biggest obvious expensive bits are a computer that's man enough to run the whole show and the big playfield display. The table simulation take more horsepower than you might think (given that it's essentially a physics simulator) especially for more complex tables. We're also outputting the graphics in 4K resolution, and it NEEDS to be a solid 60+ frames per second without any stuttering or the whole illusion just falls apart.
The other big bit of expense actually is likely to be the cabinet itself. One of the best ways to make it feel like a real table to play is to use as much proper hardware as possible where it comes to things that you actually look directly at and touch. Also, it turns out that there's a reason that Williams/Bally basically didn't change their physical cabinet design after the early 90s and that Stern are essentially still using the same design today - and that's because it's a really good design that was arrived at after 50 odd years of refinement and evolution so there's absolutely no point in trying to reinvent the wheel. However before you've even looked at the structure itself that does mean that you've ended up with several hundred quid's worth of assorted "bits" of table. No one part is all that expensive really, but there sure are a lot of them. A company over in the US actually makes "flat pack" cabinets to the aforementioned Williams design which include pretty much everything you need to start building a system around - for $1500 (and shipping for a parcel that's the best part of 100kg from the US...Though if you're over there and wouldn't need to add probably another 50% on top for shipping/duty etc and if you're (like me) not at all competent where woodwork is concerned that's actually not a terrible deal. I ran some numbers a few days back and if I was to go out and buy all new hardware for that style of cabinet I ended up with a balance somewhere around £850. Yes that was both based on all new parts and I didn't do a huge amount of shopping around - so you could probably knock somewhere around a third off I reckon with a bit of work and patience. Still a fair old whack though, and still leaves me actually without a cabinet to attach anything to.
It's not hard to see why in the US when people really started building these things that stripping out old tables for it wasn't uncommon - especially given that they're a lot cheaper over there, especially older electromechanical tables. Though that has lost favour in recent years with the new reproduction cabinets becoming more popular. I've never liked the idea of pulling apart an existing table for something like this unless it was something that never had a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting restored. Such examples weren't really something that you really saw in the UK - those which were realistically beyond reasonable restoration usually had similarly knackered cabinets that I'd have been as well starting from square one anyway - though possibly could have been used to create templates I suppose - though as I've mentioned before, woodwork isn't my strong point. Which is why this had been sitting on the back burner for a while. Until a week or so back when I stumbled across a relatively tidy looking cabinet for sale on eBay at a not totally unreasonable price. It had already been completely gutted of the playfield, all the electronic boards etc, but the cabinet itself looked to be complete aside from the playfield glass itself. It's a bit sad to see it in that state, but the odds of stumbling across someone who has this exact table and has all the bits needed for it and is just looking for a cabinet, in the UK are slim to none. So it's pretty much ideal for my purposes. While still not cheap by any means - the vast, vast majority of things on that eight hundred quid shopping list I mentioned above are present and correct - plus the cabinet itself is there. So it's probably more than chopped the bottom line of that shopping list in half. I've dropped an offer to the seller - we'll see if they're willing to negotiate on the price at all. There are actually a couple of parts on there which I don't need which could probably be sold on - the backglass being one which actually looks in really nice shape.
The cabinet aside the two main components most important in terms of making this mess work will be the playfield display and the PC that will be built into it to run the show. In a somewhat counter-intuitive seeming approach these are actually likely to be among the last parts I buy. My reasoning here is simple - that for a given spec these are items which are only going to get cheaper - especially as I'm likely to be buying the parts there second hand as I don't need the newest and shiniest kit and these are things which are common consumer grade equipment for which there should be a good number of choices available on the used market. I *might* at a later date if this turns out to be something that gets a lot of use consider upgrading the main playfield display to an OLED panel, but that would be a long way down the road from where we currently are.
With a bit of luck this is something that parts will start trickling in for over the next few weeks and months and I can start figuring out exactly what I need to buy, what I need to make and what the headaches are likely to be. It should be an interesting project at the end of the day, and I'll be curious to see what the bottom line ends up being - I'm betting a whole lot less than any real table that's on my list, and gives me the option to mess about with pretty much anything that somebody has made a recreation of digitally, covering both traditional electromechanical tables of the 60s and 70s through to solid state tables of the 80s and 90s near enough to the present day. Should be an interesting project. Given this is something I've always enjoyed dating back as far as I can remember it's less likely than a lot of my projects to be something I run out of interest in halfway through.
Current fleet:
07 Volvo V70 SE D5, 88 Renault 25 Monaco, 85 Sinclair C5, 84 Trabant 601S, 75 Rover 3500, 73 AC Model 70.
CitroJim wrote: 26 Apr 2025, 17:28
Excellent I'm absolutely rubbish at pinball but love the machines. That place is really rather wonderful!
I think everyone is terrible at pinball without a fair amount of practice. Especially if you're just batting the ball around the table without knowing what you're actually trying to do. Pretty much any table there's a sequence of things you're trying to do and ways to rack up the points big time.
Depends a lot on the table as well. Some are fairly easy to grips with, whereas others are utterly evil. Firepower is probably my favourite rage table - meaning that it's one which I really enjoy playing but absolutely tries my patience as it takes zero prisoners and has the world's most hungry left hand outlane. It's a really unforgiving table which definitely requires some degree of skill and learning how to pull off several shots. It's wicked fast too so if things get out of control they do so in a hurry and it tends to go south rapidly. However when you've learned your way around it, and do manage to string the shots you need to together it flows so well and is immensely satisfying to play. I also really like the art style on this table.
This makes it a bit of a marmite table - probably why it's by far the cheapest on my wishlist. Though cheapest in this case still means five grand or so, so I won't be buying one any time soon!
Current fleet:
07 Volvo V70 SE D5, 88 Renault 25 Monaco, 85 Sinclair C5, 84 Trabant 601S, 75 Rover 3500, 73 AC Model 70.
Sorry Zel but I didn't have anything constructive to add so resorted to to whatever that is called!! However you do realise that we may have to call you Tommy from now on?
I used to be indecisive, now I'm not so sure!
I used to ride on two wheels, but now I need all four!
mickthemaverick wrote: 27 Apr 2025, 11:55
Sorry Zel but I didn't have anything constructive to add so resorted to to whatever that is called!! However you do realise that we may have to call you Tommy from now on?
Oh I'm not that good! Not by a long shot!
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Spot the difference?
Yeah, have finally started doing something about the large chunks of paint that are missing.
Few examples.
I'm not interested in making an invisible job of it, I just want the car to look cared for and presentable from ten paces. So we're not going overboard. Bit of paint in the right places will make a big difference though and make the car look more presentable.
Current fleet:
07 Volvo V70 SE D5, 88 Renault 25 Monaco, 85 Sinclair C5, 84 Trabant 601S, 75 Rover 3500, 73 AC Model 70.
Example of how much difference a little paint can make.
Primarily the rear panel I'm pointing at here.
This sticker will have to go.
I usually dislike stickers and similar things on my cars, but when they've been there this long I'm always a bit conflicted - this one though is shedding bits of silver foil every time I lean against the car putting stuff in the boot and is looking really shabby, so it'll have to go.
It's going to be an absolute pig to remove though as there's absolutely nothing structurally speaking left of it - except the actual adhesive of course!
Current fleet:
07 Volvo V70 SE D5, 88 Renault 25 Monaco, 85 Sinclair C5, 84 Trabant 601S, 75 Rover 3500, 73 AC Model 70.
