Today I mostly .....

Any topics of general interest (not lada related), post them here.
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Zelandeth
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Zelandeth » Sun Sep 20, 2020 8:26 pm

Aaron wrote:
Sun Sep 20, 2020 11:32 am
I'd be tempted to go with the invalid car theme and stick something reminiscent of my grandmothers front room in there.
The thought did occur to me! However I want to actually be able to live with the thing...plus have you seen how much "retro" or "vintage" materials go for these days? I'd wind up spending an appreciable portion of the value of the car for a couple of metres of carpet...

-- -- --

This morning I went out and grabbed a new pot of wax to replace the one buried somewhere in the back of the garage, then got to work.

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I'm not a professional automotive detailer, but I think this has come out looking reasonably presentable.

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In addition to the obvious polish and wax action, the glass has all been cleaned inside and out and the outside of all the windows (but NOT the windscreen) have been treated with Rain-Ex. I don't like this on windscreens as it has without exception just resulted in wipers that smear and judder so I keep it well clear. It's great for the other glass and mirrors though. It's only a theory, but I reckon that the way it makes water just bead and run off helps keep the windows cleaner for longer as well. I've never actually conducted any proper tests to see if that's true or not.

Hoping that if my schedule co-operates tomorrow I'll get her dropped back off with her owner. If not (and it's looking like it will be quite a hectic day) that will be pushed back to Tuesday, and I'll take the opportunity to apply an extra coat of wax.
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Aaron » Sun Sep 20, 2020 9:35 pm

That is a very clean looking citroen.

I'm discovering the joys of having a small motorbike to tinker with. Especially as I can hide in my shed away from the family.
No matter how little time or energy I have I can always find some little thing to do. Today it was polishing the exhaust pipe.


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I've also been spending too much time online looking parts. The simple and cheap solution to most of the cosmetic issues is cheap new parts from Germany. You can practically buy a whole new bike.
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Zelandeth » Sun Sep 20, 2020 10:47 pm

Aaron wrote:
Sun Sep 20, 2020 9:35 pm
That is a very clean looking citroen.

I'm discovering the joys of having a small motorbike to tinker with. Especially as I can hide in my shed away from the family.
No matter how little time or energy I have I can always find some little thing to do. Today it was polishing the exhaust pipe.
That looks lovely!

Very much the same reason I enjoy the Invacar as a member of the fleet. It's something that I can hide away in the garage and tinker with even when the weather is awful, and that most jobs are pretty approachable on it.
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Zelandeth » Mon Sep 21, 2020 9:07 pm

We had a little bit of excitement this morning while I was putting the Xantia in for the MOT in that the 2CV decided that mashed against the floor was a good place for the throttle pedal to sit - irrespective of whether my foot was on it or not.

Didn't take long to figure out why...

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That's the throttle return spring which should be hooked up between the throttle linkage on the carb and the fan cowling up front.

Cable ties were deployed to get me home.

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I did experiment with the spring a bit to see if I could bend a new loop in the end, but irrespective of whether heat was used or not it just kept snapping off...and a new spring is only £3.50, so it's not worth spending too much time on really.

So we went back to the cable tie solution for the time being, albeit slightly more tidily routed than the original one.

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After that the car was driven back over to and reunited with its owner.

I believe the next patient that we might be seeing here is an early AX which is refusing to idle properly at the moment.

Despite the slight excitement with the throttle setup on the 2CV flying to bits the Xantia has *finally* gone successfully through the MOT so is once more roadworthy. With the 2CV back at home I was able to fit everything back off the road. If it were still here something would have had to be moved outside or put behind the Jag on the lawn. The plan is to extend the driveway or to put a grid down to give us more space - not least because currently getting in or out of the garage with a car is a major faff.

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I noticed when getting into the Xantia this morning that the rear wiper blade had completely disintegrated...but knew I had a genuine replacement in my parts stash so swapped that over. Wouldn't usually be worthy of note but for the fact that it's actually got a Citroen logo printed on it.

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I do wonder how much of a markup that added!

I do have the trim for the end of the arm but it's not a very good fit so lives in the glove box as I've always been afraid it would vanish if I left it on the wiper arm.

Had honestly forgotten how rapid this car is once the boost arrives...

Few things still on the to do list for it.

[] Reset Activa system ride height, as unsurprisingly with the whole front end pretty much having been apart it's gone awry and the offside front is sitting about an inch lower than it should.

[] She's due a timing belt.

[] Rear brake discs & pads.

[] Do *something* about the paint.

We'll get moving on this lot soon hopefully.
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Zelandeth » Tue Sep 22, 2020 10:15 pm

Having been out for a proper drive now I can vouch for the fact that these have hugely improved the Xantia.

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For a start the slight vibration at 70 has totally gone. Secondly the grip (which was already impressive because Activa) is now absolutely ridiculous. Thirdly they're massively more compliant than the old Michelins which they replaced. It's made the ride far better and vastly reduced the tendency for the car to crash over sharp ridges in the road surface (which has always been the biggest weakness of the oliopneumatic suspension).

Will be curious to see how it is once we've got a new set of spheres on as I know the rears in particular are very tired.

I had forgotten how annoying the creak from the offside front was though...really might need to put some energy into seeing if we can resolve that. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the car is so quiet and refined otherwise that it puts many moderns to shame...it just makes the strut that does a passable impression of a creaky door in a haunted house seem so much louder.

Something I was particularly pleased to see at the MOT though was the result of the emission test. We've got pretty much every bit of paperwork for this car from the original bill of sale onwards, and we're pretty certain that this is the original 26 year and 140K mile cat.

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Oh...and this was running on six month old fuel as well.
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Zelandeth » Sat Sep 26, 2020 5:23 pm

This afternoon I made a horrendous mess in the garage while pulling out most of the old rubber floor mats from the Invacar.

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This took a lot longer than hoped as while it was falling apart, the bits that were still stuck to the floor were VERY stuck to the floor.

As expected given I could see daylight through it, the metal underneath the offside kick plate was largely missing.

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I'll make sure a little plate goes in here to bridge the gap. I did note that a few bits were hanging down there into the area of the door runner, I reckon this may have had something to do with why that door jams so frequently.

Quite a few of the rivets aren't actually attached to anything because they've dissolved, so I'll replace most of them. I'll be adding a bunch across the floor panel anyway so it's held still against the chassis as currently it's totally free to move aside from at the edges. That's going to involve drilling several dozen holes from underneath... that'll be fun.

Then we can start getting the new flooring installed and she will start to look a good deal tidier inside.
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Zelandeth » Sun Sep 27, 2020 10:50 pm

Well I think we might have found a large reason for the floppy floor. A significant number of the rivets weren't actually secured into anything because they were smaller than the drilled holes, some others were only secured to the floor panel itself, and several others had dissolved. I reckon about 20% of them actually secured the floor panel to the chassis. Oh, and most of those were loose.

After a brief period messing around with the rivet gun I lost patience and just grabbed the bag of nuts and bolts.

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Just this has added about 70% to the rigidity of the panel. A lot of the rivets holding the body overlap to the floor seem to be just as bad, so I'm going to drill out and replace them all with stainless bolts. Just need to pick up some new big washers for the body mounting bolts.

While it's a bit tedious this shouldn't take too long. Currently there's no attachment to the floor panel aside from the edges. My intention is to have it bolted to each of the chassis rails/braces. Here's what's under the floor for those who haven't seen underneath an Invacar floor (courtesy of KPL when I pulled the original rotten floor panel was removed).

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If there are still problems with any areas being floppy I'll probably attach a couple of lengths of ally bar diagonally underneath just to stop the panel from being able to flex so much. We're keeping things pretty simple though. Not wasting months on this.

The seat needs to come out next though as it's just going to make everything far easier. This isn't going to be a "take the whole car apart for six months" job though. I've been enjoying using the car too much for that, but I decided that I needed to sort the flooring situation after I did actually fall over getting out last week and very nearly took my eye out on one of the hooks on the garage wall because the flooring was so slippery.

Even when it wasn't trying to kill me the flooring was really scruffy though and was bugging me. While I'm not too precious about the outside I do like my car interior to be tidy, and having this sorted out will definitely help my enjoyment of the car. Very curious to see if it helps take down the noise level at speed at all.

The original kick plates are quite rough so I'm probably going to replace those, I've got some nice aluminium extruded pieces (they're actually stair tread plates) which will do the job nicely and as the return is a little less deep will make cleaning/greasing of the door runners less fiddly. Think I bought those back when I first got KPL for this very purpose as they were completely missing on that car.

I'm probably not going to get much time to work on the cars this week. Sadly a friend passed away from cancer at the end of last week so we're pretty busy both looking after their other half and generally helping out with the resulting admin and trying to get their house back in order. They've not really been able to put any effort into housework for the last six months so it's in a bit of a state. Obviously looking after them is priority one though, sorting the house comes later. Not a huge amount we can do until Tuesday when all the hospital gear is picked up anyway, so we might get a bit of time tomorrow...we'll just have to see.
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Zelandeth » Mon Sep 28, 2020 6:09 pm

Here's one of our periodic wanders off into the world of obsolete technology which happen now and then around me...

Hello there...

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We've got yet another system to join the vintage Toshiba portable computer family.

Well...sort of.

I used to have one of these back around 2000 which I used for a lot of my school work. It sadly failed at one point due to capacitor issues on the power supply board (which these machines almost all suffer from at some point, likewise on the display backlight inverter board). It was stripped down with a view to being repaired however due to a communications breakdown (read: my father ignoring everything he was told) when we were clearing out the loft several key parts ended up getting binned.

These machines seem to change hands for alarmingly large sums of money in good order these days, so when this one popped up for £50 I grabbed it. Especially as it has the optional hard disk, most T1200s had dual (720K) floppy drives.

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This is important as apparently the non HD equipped machines lack several other bits, so you can't just slot the drive in. I'm hoping that once I make one good one out of the two (my original has a largely un-yellowed and almost unmarked case for a start) that I'll be able to recover some documents off my old one's drive. The 20Mb drive uses a proprietary JVC/Ricoh interface so there's no real way to get data to/from it without one of these laptops (or a handful of other, even rarer machines). Not the last time Toshiba played this card...the original T3200 uses a 40Mb drive with a similarly oddball proprietary interface, made by Fujitsu in that case.

I will definitely be swapping the keyboard for mine...that is just nasty...

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Though a trip through the dishwasher for the keycaps would probably make the world of difference.

Unsurprisingly this one doesn't work...just showing an amber light on the power supply. So at the very least that will need to be recapped. Hopefully that will be enough to get it going...time will tell.

Be a nice little productivity machine if I can get it working reliably. It's based around an 80C86 processor (a low power CMOS based version of the 8086), has 640+384K of memory to work with and importantly over the other machines of this era I have, backs these specs up with a hard disk and a screen with a decent backlight. The lack of that is by far the biggest blot on the Amstrad PPC512's copybook.

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My original one was still running the original battery which was ancient even when I was using it, yet that with a bit if careful power management (you can manually power down the hard drive and drop the clock speed (down from 9.5 to 4.5MHz if I remember right) it used to get me through a full secondary school day and the 45 minute bus ride to/from the place without breaking a sweat.

... I've never had a modern laptop which could do that! Never mind one from the mid 80s.

What do you bet that a clean, working example now turns up locally at a reasonable price?
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Zelandeth » Wed Sep 30, 2020 9:37 pm

I appear to have managed to fail to take a photo of my progress today...but not a huge issue given there's not much to see!

All of the rivets to the left of the seat in the floor of TPA have now been drilled out and replaced with stainless bolts. The vast majority just disintegrated the moment I touched them with the drill so clearly weren't doing much useful.

The difference in rigidity of the floor panel with only that done is huge...you can still make it move, but it has resistance and doesn't just flop around. Thumping it with a first now makes a solid sounding thud rather than a hollow rattle.

I definitely want to make a point of changing all of the fasteners involved here as they're all clearly shot. So the seat needs to come out next as there are half a dozen buried underneath it that I can't get to any other way.

Goes without saying that I'll be looking closely at a few of the other body mountings where rivets have been used in case they're in as bad a shape - though the water being trapped under the floor mats for years probably made the issues here so much worse.
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Zelandeth » Fri Oct 02, 2020 10:25 pm

With everything going on just now I'm only getting the odd few minutes here and there to do anything relating to the cars. Despite that the structural improvements to the nearside of the Invacar floor have been finished and I've started cutting the carpet to fit.

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You can start to get a feel for how it's going to look now I think.

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These are the new kick plates that might be going in.

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I'm still undecided...whether they get used or not will probably depend on whether I can get the originals back to a vaguely presentable state...currently they're awful.

I'm basically making the left carpet, right carpet (which is *mostly* just a mirror image) then will cut an infill to go in the middle.

Nothing is being glued in place yet. Before that happens I need to rotate the car 180 degrees so I can do the same knackered rivet replacement on the offside, paint the seat base, find a rubber boot for the gear selector linkage where it passes through the bulkhead and thoroughly degrease the entire floor and front bulkhead. Depending on how things sit I may apply some foam underlay. I think that this will really make a huge difference to the feel of the interior.

As the seat can only be moved a few inches to either side I'm also doing away with the sliding capacity. Two bolts will be going through the rear of the frame to secure it in place. As the latch is at the front of the frame the rear of the seat tends to shift an inch or so every time you change direction, and it's quite annoying. If someone wants to undo it in the future it will just require a couple of bolts to be removed. Should make the driving experience a bit more pleasant. The seat wobbling around really doesn't instill confidence, so I'd really like to stop it doing that. I reckon this is probably more of an issue with my seat than it would be with the original as this provides a lot more lateral support than the original one would have.
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Zelandeth » Sat Oct 03, 2020 5:26 pm

This is actually starting to look like I've got any idea what I'm doing...

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The joins will be far less visible once things are actually glued down. Plus the bar across the middle isn't bolted down at the offside yet hence the bump there.
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Zelandeth » Sun Oct 04, 2020 11:02 pm

New offside outer "sill" made up from some ally sheet and bolted in place.

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I tapped the edge at the overlap flat with a hammer, though as this will be under both the carpet and sill kick plate I'm not really too bothered about how it looks.

I then went on a similar rivet replacement mission as I did on the nearside before giving everything a thorough wipe down then starting to get the carpet glued in.

After an hour or so getting distinctly high on carpet adhesive fumes we were three or four pieces away from the floor being done.

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Closer look at where it's following the contour of the front bulkhead to show how well it's formed.

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Yes I fouled up the bit by the steering yoke bracket...an infill will be cut to disguise that oops.

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Sadly three or four pieces short of being finished I ran out of time! Annoying having to stop so close to being finished, but that's how it goes sometimes.

Should get it finished tomorrow and get things put back together tomorrow. Have a few more bits to fit as trim but they're a bit less of a faff than the floor where you're working around the seat base.
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Aaron » Mon Oct 05, 2020 1:29 pm

I must admit, I had doubts about carpet tiles, but that looks really good.
Aaron, Grantham <br>
Riva1600SLX (floorless example, sadly not a spelling mistake)
Citroen (surprisingly quite good) C3
Nissan (it's only for towing the caravan) X-trail
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Zelandeth » Mon Oct 05, 2020 6:27 pm

I think it's fair to call this is looking a bit more welcoming.

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Here's a "before" photo for reference.

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It's astonishing how a bit of trim can change the feel of the cabin.

The offside kick plate still needs to be secured, but I need direct access to that side of the car for that so it needs the rain to stop for five minutes.

There will be a few more bits to go in. To name one I'll be lining the door cavities in matching carpet, and the roof will get some at some point. That may well be a lighter colour and be actual automotive carpet though so it's easier to shape though...and will likely wait a while as removing the roof will make lining it massively less awkward.
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Re: Today I mostly .....

Post by Aaron » Mon Oct 05, 2020 9:17 pm

I would love to report that i am making great progress with my vehicles but...

After my wife encouraged me that I should finally get round to restoring the Lada - she then said "if you are going to spend time and money on the Lada, I want chickens". So i'm not really allowed to work on it till I've finished building the coop and run. (i did manage to start it yesterday while she was out, i had to replace a section of fuel pipe that may have been nibled by mice and swap the fuel pump, but it was very satisfying to hear the engine. Starts and runs quite nicely - but wont tick over).

I have been hiding the the garage playing with the bike when I can get away with it, but that has proved frustrating. It has a small front faring that I removed years ago to repaint. I have tried repeatedly to refit it but I can't get it to line up neatly round the headlamp. I may have to modify the brackets (or make new ones) but I shouldn't have to as it definately used to fit.
Aaron, Grantham <br>
Riva1600SLX (floorless example, sadly not a spelling mistake)
Citroen (surprisingly quite good) C3
Nissan (it's only for towing the caravan) X-trail
Simson S51

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