Today I mostly .....

[spikey dapikey]

After using a hammer, a bigger hammer, a ball joint splitter, a BFH and a blowtorch, the track rod end has now been replaced

Just need the doughnut to arrive, and hopefully most of the damn vibration will be gone

[Zelandeth]

Set about cleansing (physically and electronically!) a handmedown laptop for my parents to replace their old Satellite Pro A60EN which packed in a few months back.

Compaq Presario CQ60, looks like it should do just fine for their very basic needs. Windows Vista Home Basic has been nuked, and Ultimate installed (the license has been sitting unused here for nearly a year, might as well use it for something). I would throw 7 onto it, but that would involve actually getting hold of a copy - and I'm not about to put pirated software on my parents computer.

Vista should be fine for their purposes anyway, for all it drives me around the bend. So long as they can get at Wikipedia, listen to their music, look up guitar chords and browse their photos, it'll do just fine. Oh, and play solitaire.

Just need to figure out how to get the keyboard clean now as it's pretty manky...

[RobbyD]

524068_492751384113975_848598885_n.jpg (24.93 KiB) Viewed 19857 times

ripped out my tranfer case, gonna put it on the lift to do the gear box. started it up with the shift boots off so i could see down to the underside, i have no neutral right now, the output shaft from the gear box spun constantly, good thing the whole tranny is going to b replaced. also, going to pick up ball joints and some bolts for the rear suspension from the wrecker today or saturday.

[RobbyD]

this thread in a nutshell

yNDbF.jpg (47 KiB) Viewed 19857 times

[excossack]

Removed about 150ft of unused CAT5 cables from under the server room floor and they were certainly buried under:

Mains cables
3 phase cables
fibre cables
other misc cables such as coax and old mainframe cables

Had a visit from one of the external maintenance companies to look at one of the UPS's on a leisure site. The UPS would not come out of standby mode. The fix was simple when you know how. Remove and reinsert the electronics module while holding down one of the buttons. Reset and hey presto wallop, one working UPS!

[excossack]

I got given a Buffalo Terastation, with 4 x 250 GB SATA HDs
Now time to play and see what I can do with it.

[excossack]

That's a good start, I was thinking more like customising it to add things like, web server, DLNA etc

[RobbyD]

got two hours of sleep after hanging out drinking beer all night for the 4th, now im standing a 24 hour watch. bought some cheap gl4 from the big box store and going to mix some seafoam into it to get the tranfer case and gear boxes, then theyre getting royal purple.

[excossack]

Purchased a domain name from Blackfoot hosting

[Zelandeth]

This evening I mostly:

Sat myself down in a corner with some decent music on the headphones, stuck my old laptop in front of me, and let my muse run wild, in starting to re-write the mess of a novel that I put together more years ago than I like to think about.

Difference is that this time I actually have some idea of how the bits of plot in the 300 odd pages actually link together and who the various characters are. Also some bits of stereotypical science-fantasty things which I'll be removing as they fell under the general heading of Convenient Plot Device (TM). Couple I still have to decide whether I'll retain given that I actually did have the ideas long before I read them elsewhere!

Will I ever finish it? Probably not. Still, I'd like to make a stab at it.

What's it being written on? An old Toshiba T5200, a 386, Windows 3.11 and Word 5 (Id take 2.0C to be honest, but this machine came with 5 on it when I got it) are all you need to write, and it doesn't throw half the distractions at you that modern machines do. Stable platform, decent keyboard and a display that seems right to me as it's what I grew up with...even if it does show the world in 8 shades of orange...

[happiness stan]

Hurrah! Thanks to Mr Haynes and my dad with his big collection of weird bendy spanners I have successfully changed the alternator on the Zafira and the old one definitely had knackered bearings. Also there seems to be no logic to the putting together of a car. For example to remove the alternator undo the big bolt at the bottom (six inches long) but you can't pull the blighter out because they only leave you four inches between the engine and the inside of the wing. What they have got is a hole in the wing which you should be able to pull the bolt into to get it clear of the bracket, unfortunately it's an inch and a half away from where you need it! So you have to also undo the bracket holding the alternator on and wiggle the whole lot until you can get the head of the bolt level with the hole, then the space to remove the alternator up and out of the car is about half inch narrower than the thing itself, cue more wiggling. Is this normal or just normal for Vauxhall?
Then I went home walked to the shop for juice and ice cream, lit the BBQ as a thank you to my dad, cooked, did the washing up, got some small people ready for bed, read half a chapter from the wizard of Earthsea (to the small people), watered the garden and now i've sat down.......

[RobbyD]

got the goblin on the lift, pulled the tranny out, rattle canned the chnnel for the power train, to help seal it up, cleaned my new components, and began install. work remaining: driveshafts, transfer case, 2 starter bolts, replace oil and filter, tansfer case alignment and chain tightening, some light driving to get everything evaluated, and to get tho the wrecker to get the ball joints and bolts for the links.

[RobbyD]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/98578300@N ... /lightbox/

the red boxes highlight boken mounts, the left side the crossmember and case were broken, and bolt was MIA, right side, no bolt and hole was out of alignment, and everything is dirty and gross i know

[RobbyD]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/98578300@N ... /lightbox/

the bearing for my new to me axle is leaking oil slowly, its between the black bracket and the bracket that mounted to the dif, better than no axle though,

[GvidoR]

Today I mostly...

Made a huge mistake to wash my car in the sun, then had to wash it again.
Took the chrome badges off at the back.
Got rid of rusty number plate screws.