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

[myglaren]

You might get this one at a discount.

[elma]

Just offer them £500 Zel, if they don't take it try again in a month. It works for me about half of the time and the worst that happens is they say no and get angry at your stupidly low offer. I can't imagine there is a massive demand for them, I wasn't even aware of them until the e vehicle thread.

[Zelandeth]

Actually looked at it again and the ad is actually from Jan last year! My brain hasn't quite caught up with the fact that it's 2017 yet!

Biggest challenge is probably going to be that they simply have largely disappeared now. The vast majority must have been leased by Local Authorities and the like, and I imagine a lot met their makers pretty soon after those leases expired. Ours disappeared around 2007, and they were on 02 plates. While I know a few were sold privately, there can't have been many surely...

Looking at things realistically, I need to get rid of a car before I can really consider getting another one here to be honest anyway...

They strike me as being one of those cars which if one comes up for sale it will either go for peanuts because it appeals to such a niche market, or you'll find two EV enthusiasts both decide they want it, and it'll wind up going for silly money.

[xantia_v6]

You need to take battery replacement cost into consideration. I was thinking about a little electric van a few years ago, and the ones that were for sale were right at the end of their battery life, or had leased batteries.

[Zelandeth]

Not been much going on lately car-wise, having had to deal with some health issues in the family has left me with relative little time to do too much. Most of the odd few minutes here and there have been used to get my bedroom and the attached office back into something resembling a functional state.

Starting to get there now. It's been quite an interesting challenge here figuring out how to make the best use of the space in such a small room.





At least it does mean that the Amiga finally has a proper, permanent place on a desk now. It'll probably move over to the main one at the left hand side when I eventually get around to buying a Scandoubler for it so I can use a modern monitor...You'd think that having owned the thing for the best part of 20 years that I'd have stopped spending money on it by now! Apparently not.

In a few weeks things should get back to something resembling normal, at which point I hope to make a start on the injection project for the Lada. Think I've got pretty much everything I need actually here now...save for a bit of free time!

[CitroJim]

That's a great looking office Zel

I trust all is now well on the family health front...

[Zelandeth]

We're getting there. It's just been one of those things which we've had more than time to see coming, but were essentially powerless to do anything about. The person in question has suffered from anxiety, panic attacks and periodic depression issues for many years due to problems they had during their childhood days. Perpetual borderline exhaustion and frustration due to spending between four and six hours every day commuting to Oxford and back certainly weren't helping things - and we'd been trying to get help from the medical side of things from the NHS for a couple of years, but they simply weren't interested. ...Until a full blown nervous breakdown happened on the way to work in the middle of December (which due to the circumstances brought with it a whole host of other shorter term but quite serious headaches) - now suddenly they're interested and have been happy to provide the medication we've been beating their door down for the last two years and have got us on the waiting list for proper therapy sessions - even if there is something like a 28 week waiting list. Point is, now we've gone down that road and have it documented we can also get help from our private health care - but they won't touch things unless you can demonstrate you've already gone through a bunch of steps with the NHS...kind of defeats the purpose of having it if you ask me.

As with all mental health issues, it'll take time for things to resolve fully but I think that now we're moving in the right direction. Long-term plan is obviously also to look for work closer to home as the Oxford commute is just unsustainable - at least until the train line gets reopened (if that ever happens anyway), as we're all sure that this has been a major contributing factor.

As they've obviously been signed off work since the event I've been doing a lot to try to keep tabs on how things have been going day-to-day which has been keeping me busy. As I'm used to having the house to myself through the day this has actually been a surprising source of stress for me, though I'm just doing my best to put that to one side for the moment as it's only a short-term issue on my part, and other folks need my help at the moment.

That's a very brief summary of what's been going on for the last few weeks - Obviously I can't go into real details on a forum like this, but it gives a bit of an idea of why I've maybe been a bit quieter than usual of late. ...and why I've still not had a chance to drop by your place with that turntable. I've not forgotten about that.

Hopefully over the next few weeks things will actually start to return to something resembling normality.

[CitroJim]

Gosh Zel, I know almost exactly what you have been up against there and know how bloody difficult it is - especially getting the required help... I know from both sides of the fence as it were...

You are made of stern stuff - lesser people would have comprehensively cracked under that lot. Good on you for hanging in there and doing all you can...

It will be good to see you but only and I mean only when things your end are fully sorted, settled and running on a nice even keel again...

[mickeymoon]

Having suffered similar issues myself a couple of summers ago (I had mine driving through London on the 15th July 2015), I wish you and the affected person all the very best in getting a resolution. It's definitely possible if I can work so far towards one.

Sent from my SM-G925F using Tapatalk

[Zelandeth]

Quiet evening yesterday and I finally managed to get one of my minor side-projects done. Not car-related, but the old computer stuff seems to get a fair bit of interest, so it's close enough...

Like most Amiga users, I've got a knee-high stack of dead original Commodore power supplies. The old 25W units were at best fragile in the 90s, and could just about keep up with a stock A600. An A1200 though was stretching them, even before you added things like a hard drive and/or accelerator card. I think by some miracle I do actually still have one somewhere that works. However my A1200 has both an accelerator card (Blizzard 1250 68030/50MHz to be precise - cost me a small fortune when I bought it!), and a hard drive...so other power sources were the order of the day.

It's been running off an old AT PC power supply via a ridiculously over-rated (I think it's actually immersion heater supply flex), which was providing power via the floppy drive power connection header on the motherboard. A complete hack-job which also required a hole to be hacked in the back of the case, but it worked!

However I needed the AT supply back (for the PC which actually needs one, as I'm fed up of using the Turbo button as the power switch), and I was fed up of tripping over the cable. So, I grabbed a dead Amiga PSU, a spare ATX PSU (where the heck do these keep coming from? There must be ten of them here), and set to work...

There are a few approaches you can take. The most common one I used to see back in the day was simply to stuff the relevant wires into one of the Molex connectors and cover the whole lot in unreasonable amounts of electrical tape. Hardly elegant, and prone to falling apart at the worst possible moment. Alternatively you could use appropriate connectors and splice things together that way...but it's still a kludge. The best solution I reckon is actually to desolder the original cabling from the power supply and solder the Amiga PSU lead directly onto the PCB.

This does need a little research because the Amiga power supply lead uses a different code for the conductor colours.

If you're looking at the power connector with the pins facing you and the notch in the shield at the top (most of the connectors are actually marked "top" by the way), they are...

Top row:

Pin 1. +12V. Brown wire. (ATX: Yellow).
Pin 2. GND. Black wire. (ATX: Black.).

Centre:

Pin 3. -12V. White wire. (ATX: Blue).

Bottom row:

Pin 4. Screen. Yellow wire. (ATX: Black).
Pin 5. +5V. Red wire. (ATX: Red).

...if you're using a supply from a Dell PC please double-check your voltages as they're known to use non-standard supplies (which blew plenty of motherboards up in the early years of the 21st century when people tried to upgrade!), and I've not a clue what voltages are what colours in those things.

While you're taking things apart, it's worth internally shorting the green power enable wire to ground - unless you're planning on doing something fancy like a remote power switch anyway.

The end result though is something like this.



So we now have a PSU rated at (in this case) 570W, rather than the original 25W...Much more than capable of dealing with the original hardware, and pretty much any upgrades that you're likely to throw at it. In this case it's screwed to the underside of the desk, well out of the way. The switching is done from the mains socket thanks to plugs I got from B&Q a couple of years back which have built in switches.

If you're not using random stuff that was just laying around, I'd probably look at using a MicroATX power supply as I've seen quite a few of those which are fanless, so would be silent running. As it is this one is quiet enough at such a low load anyhow.

[CitroJim]

Nice work Zel Your revelation that Dell used odd supplies also applies to some HP stuff too... Compatible with nothing at all!

[Zelandeth]

Will keep that in mind! Know Compaq did that back in the AT era with their 3/486 machines as well, but at least they had different connectors so you couldn't physically fit a standard supply - Dell however used a standard ATX connector so you could plug a normal one in which would result in a sickening pop and the unmistakable smell of fried silicon as soon as you switched the mains on.

Think IBM used odd supplies on some machines as well in the 90s. I've got an old PS/ValuePoint 433DX/Si floating around here in its component parts (it will get rebuilt at some point) which uses a none standard motherboard power connector.

[Zelandeth]

I have no idea what Photobucket are mucking about at...Seems that half my images are showing as having been removed in forum posts and on my page when not logged in - yet as soon as I log in they appear as normal on my page...Still don't show here though.

Not a clue what's going on. Only reason I use the place is specifically to avoid problems like this... Especially after imageshack went and nuked several hundred photos a year or so back, which single-handedly destroyed half the how to posts and such over on the Lada forums.

...May just start using my own server if I can't resolve this issue easily.

[CitroJim]

...May just start using my own server if I can't resolve this issue easily.

I have for years now Zel. So easy to do and also, don't forget you can now upload images direct to the forum so no photo-host now required for most of what you want to post here image-wise...

[Zelandeth]

So I find myself bundled into the back of that bloody Golf again. Thankfully only an hour's trip this time rather than seven...But nevertheless, how can something this popular be so uncomfortable?!?

Really looking forward to the replacement for it arriving in a couple of months...Even though I can't remember what it is! I know it's not a Golf (something bigger I think, remember Audi A6 Avant being mentioned at some point), so I might actually have some leg room in the back. Still not even going to bother hoping for padding on the seats or suspension that works though.

Will probably wind up using my own server for images, Jim. Main reason being that a large portion of them wind up being cross posted both on here and on some other forums, so a service attached to the forum isn't ideal - plus I'm aware that a fair percentage of my waffle is utterly off topic and the last thing you need is me wasting your hosting space and bandwidth with it. May start using it more though for things which are actually properly relevant rather than my usual waffle!