Thousand Dollar Supercar
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Posts posted by Thousand Dollar Supercar
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4 hours ago, 87creepin said:
What’s with the super high timing belt change? Quad cams?
Quad cams on a transverse V6 which was originally designed for longitudinal / RWD applications. It's recommended to change the tensioners and sometimes the water pump at the same time. I haven't watched the following tutorial video, but I see it's nearly 50 minutes long and the description says "..this one isn't for the weekend enthusiast and its a very hard job to do".
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2 hours ago, DoBro Jesus said:
Someone should Bai this.
156 busso wag.
https://www.facebook.com/share/bHzUv2mnxpW1SSRa/?mibextid=kL3p88
Nah, it's an auto, nobody should ever have bought it.
Probably for sale because the owner just learned the price of a timing belt change.-
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Is that this Escort from Nats 2012? What happened to it?
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2 hours ago, ThePog said:
...he lost his shit and told me loudly and in the thickest Scottish accent that...
"If ye don't tek yer meat, ye can't tune any piano! How can ye tune yer piano if ye don't tek yer meat?"
I have a tuning hammer that I bought online, and I could probably do an OK job with the aid of an app, but I'll save that for when I move out of Auckland to where there aren't any tuners. Until then, I know I cannae match fahrty yeers of expeerience in any wee, shepe or farrim.
Barglaralarrum.
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I'm behind schedule on this and I haven't posted anything because of no progress.
I put the piano in the middle of the room and set up some microphones. I found that you could hear the rattling of these wire screens on the rear of the piano:
I took them off. The next problem was too much typewriter clatter from the piano's action when recording with the upper front panel removed. I know I should expect unwanted noise from something ancient, British and worn out, but the level of rattling was a bit much to be excused as character. With the upper front panel back in place, the mic doesn't pick up the clatter as much but I lose a bit of clarity.
So the technician took the whole action away to replace the bushings responsible for some of the clatter, and to reshape the hammer felt to remove the grooves and compacted areas.
I got the action back last week, but now it's a matter of working through which new bushings are too tight or too loose, fixing the already-broken bits we found, and fixing the newly-broken bits which resulted from working on something so old. So far the tone and the dynamic range are a bit better. An old piano like this is never going to set the world on fire, but I encountered four other old pianos over the course of Nats and they were all miles worse than mine. The bar is low. I have been tasked with playing the piano and making notes on what's still not right for the technician's next visit in April.
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On 08/03/2024 at 22:02, Bling said:
Which corners are we talking about? Ones that differ from other cars or?
It feels like some are a bit minimalist for the money. The interior of a Tesla Model Y is basically a screen, seats and a wheel. Everything's made up of as few pieces as possible - you get the feeling that putting badges on the car was almost too expensive.
I'm not disputing the fact that the Model Y was 2023's best-selling car and I am a grumpy old man.
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13 hours ago, h4nd said:
the commutator did rather catch my eye.
I had a chat to my man Goggle, and he offered this:
I just cant help but a nagging feeling that the someone might have scarpered with a bit of your spinny thing.
but well, it's running fine, so I'm probably just imagining it. So sorry to have troubled you, old bean!
Hmmm… I did notice the commutator was worn but I didn’t notice that bit. I’ll have a look at higher-res photos when I get back from Nats.
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Boring update: I finally changed the rear subframe mounts.
Here's the one I had been most concerned about. I had expected to find it in worse shape once it was off the car. Hardly worth worrying about really.
This rubber-to-metal bond is the only thing that seems to keep the IRS assembly attached to the car. There is a radius arm connected near each rear hub which twists the whole IRS assembly in its mounts as the car leans in the corners, creating a
passive rear wheel steeringdrunken snake effect. Wikipedia says this "...may result in significantly improved handling". May?
Anyway, the mounts can fail from age or too many burnouts, and then you definitely won't have significantly improved handling.
In this shot, the two subframe mounts have been removed:
You can see the IRS cage thing, the tricky double shocks and springs, the light reflecting off the inboard rear brake disc, the skinny anti-roll bar terminating at the base of the RH spring (not present on all XJSs)....
You can also see that I managed to change the mounts without disconnecting anything such as the exhaust, brake lines, roll bar, driveshaft, radius arm etc. I did one side of the car at a time, using a jack and an axle stand.
New mounts fitted (this is on the opposite side of the car, to mess with your head):
Now that these mounts are done, I'm not gonna be THAT guy:
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Assuming the bulbs are genuinely blowing, I think ajg193 is on the right track.. Surely the most likely reason for bulbs to keep blowing is too much voltage. If that's the issue, cleaning and tightening connections would only make it worse and you need to look at the source instead - something could be wrong with the alternator. That would be stressing your whole electrical system including the battery, the headlights etc. The front indicators may appear to be surviving perhaps because they're a different model of bulb, they've got a bit more voltage drop in their wiring, their lamp housing design is better for cooling / vibration etc.
AFAIK the alternator voltage should be regulated to not much more than about 14V DC.
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Oooo.. I built a couple of model cars as a kid, and an aerosol of colour-matched paint came with my XJ-S..
But if I can't get around to working on my real car, what business do I have building a model of its V12 sibling?
@fuel here's one for you: https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/marketplace/toys-models/models/cars-trucks/classic-cars/listing/4575944007
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Ford Model T carriage lantern:
(hopefully those images allow remote linking)
Looks pretty similar. There seem to have been a few variations. Looking at the NZ Model T club photos, often the lanterns don't seem to have that red side light.
http://modeltford.co.nz/media/1588/img_4080-copy.jpg
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As much as I'd like 5-year WOFs on my 36-year-old unrestored 'collectible' vehicle, that's maybe a bit much.. it's a long time for things to rust and decay and start leaking. AFAIK under the current rules, if I decide to park the car up in a collection, I can just put its rego on hold and only pass a regular WOF when I want to start using it on the road again. Seems fair enough.
I did sign ACT's pre-election 'petition' against continually lowering speed limits though.
Wake me up if they start talking about ULEZ, prohibiting the repair of older vehicles, banning internal combustion etc.
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1 hour ago, 87creepin said:
they make a compelling case not to use fake gauges
As far as I can see, their compelling case is just "Please be careful enough because those may disadvantage a person who purchases those".
They go on to inadvertently show that the fakes are often slimmer and have extra features in the gauges / extra models in the range. This information is just thrown into a big unstructured page, and Defi don't really attempt to make the case for their own product's superior value or quality or attempt to explain the harm that counterfeit products can do to a market.
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The reason there was a lawsuit is because this guy:
Apparently, if the judge's ruling doesn't get overturned, stand by for Tesla to re-register itself in a Red State, and/or to put a revised Elon compensation package to another shareholder vote. Maybe they'll double the amount of disclaimers and disclosures this time, maybe knock some $$ off and substitute the voting control Elon's after, and the shareholder vote should pass easily just like it did the first time.
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Do they simply think he's a dickhead, or has he become a political figure who is now subject to culture war / left vs right partisanship? I was surprised to hear that my sister's family have just bought a near-new Tesla Model Y rather than picking a competitor EV for political reasons. Maybe they figure that by buying used, they aren't giving money to Elon.
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8 hours ago, MikeR said:
Just wanted to congratulate you on a great project and useful stuff you are sharing. Love the laconic style too
(bought a 1992 XJS 4.0 recently, so consuming all I can !
r's mike (Sydney)
Welcome to the forum. There can be some weird humour here because many of us know each other from the real world - 20 years of sporadic club events.
If you're likely to be doing much of your own maintenance on your Jag, you'll have picked up that I've found Kirby Palm's "Experience In A Book: Help For The Jaguar XJ-S Owner" (a.k.a. The Barry Bible) to be useful. It's a free PDF you can download online. @dmulally sent me a 1992 XJS electrical system PDF too.
Be careful treating my build thread as 'useful stuff'.. I'm a dodgy and not-very-enthusiastic amateur, this is my first Jag and I've been finding things out the hard way. This thread is just a diary for entertainment purposes and should not be considered mechanical advice.
No doubt someone well versed in these cars would have a hit list of proactive replacements they would immediately perform on an under-maintained, high mileage XJS, and they wouldn't get stranded out of town, stumped by known issues etc the way I have been.
FYI we run a system on oldschool.co.nz where only the car owner posts in their build thread. This prevents discussions cluttering the threads. Each car has a corresponding discussion thread, and the discussion thread for my Jag is here:
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1 hour ago, Bling said:
Just get in touch with Steve Millen, the SMX is only 6 figures.
https://www.my4dsc.com/the-official-stillen-smx-nissan-maxima-only-120-built-20-5mt/
Aww yeah. They were so fast that the spoilers would always deform from the downforce.
I don't know drag racing or EVs, but are we at the point where an EV conversion is a cost-effective way to get a boring AF 10-second car?
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I'm running Nankang N729 235/60R15 on the Jag, which is barely on the right side of half the power and twice the weight of your Gemini. I was going to get them reverse-fitted to hide the raised white lettering if it said 'PRESTIGE' instead of 'RADIAL' - apparently this was the case for certain sizes of N729s at certain times.
For a standard classic car, I guess how a tyre handles power is irrelevant - the tyres will always age out before they wear out. In a classic which does low mileage and doesn't have stability control, it would seem to make sense to sacrifice treadwear / noise / efficiency etc for grip, but for whatever reason, that doesn't happen. Treadwear on my N729s is 400.
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1 hour ago, myk00l said:
https://nocams.co.nz/collections/tyres/products/20560r13-bf-goodrich-radial-ta-rwl-86s-tyre?variant=39260006219860 $395 each, but yeah, they must know they are THE look for wealthy classic car guys whose XY GTHOs / XC Cobras are worth silly money.
If you want Raised White Lettering for less, apparently Nankang do their 'Radial' N729 tyre (as featured on my Jag) in 185/70 R13, though the NZ importers don't seem to bother listing that size. When I bought mine (from http://nocams.co.nz ), they told me that the N729 sizes vary as to whether they say "RADIAL" or "PRESTIGE" on the sidewall, depending on whether the mould for a given size of tyre had been updated. Fortunately my size was not prestigious.
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5 hours ago, MIRAGE-MAN said:
Not sure if the choke is electronic. There is one wire going to the tip of the carburetor.
My first car was a Cordia, and the one wire on its carb was for some sort of fuel cut solenoid. I hooked up a cunning series of switches to this carb wire as an anti-theft device. Every time I forgot to disarm this system, there was enough fuel left in the carb for me to start the car and make it a few houses down the road before stalling.
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Go go gadget curtain:
You can use the control panel to turn on and off various elements of my pointless box of lights to create different looks.
Here's your basic 'starlight headliner' look:
The slight glow from one of the orange neons is a
bug'feature', as is the fact that I positioned the Southern Cross constellation too close to the rear, causing its southernmost star to spotlight the 'Radion' logo above the TV.
Turn on the analogue meters and the dancing Nixie tubes:
Add the plasma globe, the TV (which normally can't be turned off - I unplugged it for the photos) and the neons:
I deliberately positioned one neon bulb close enough to the plasma globe to show the induced glowing:
Turn the globe off, put on its blue LED, turn on the incandescent bulbs behind it:
I grabbed each variation of these vintage filament bulbs while they were still easy to come by. Now they're being replaced on the market by LED 'filament' bulbs, which just aren't the same.
A side effect of these features is that the heat production / power consumption of my creation is a bit more than ideal, just like a real valve radio.
Here's where the old micro system lives, in the side of the cabinet behind a cover that slides upward:
Its display is very dim these days. If it ever looks at me funny, I'll replace it with something which can do CDs, Bluetooth and USB. For the time being, I use an aux cable.
So yeah, you get the idea.
(hail Satan)
That's pretty much it. Slight variations thereof. I have run out of attachment space for this post anyway. I'll make a video at some point, and afterwards I'll probably only consult my pointless box of lights whenever I need a drink.
Open bar!
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I've gotta throw up some photos here, so that I can post them on Facebook afterwards (oldschool gets the scoop).
A reminder 'before' shot from 2012:
The wood originally had a darker stain which did make the grain stand out more, but the HDR photographic effect is further exaggerating its stripiness.
Now (below), the external changes to the cabinet are pretty minor, and the wood is a lighter shade (which wasn't intentional - I'm not a fan of light oak).
The central panel with the knobs is the only one which still has its original finish, so it stands out as being too dark (especially after I waxed it).
Power it up...
This 'mysterious glow' effect (basically a convenient way to use up the last of my icicle LED lights) can be switched off:
Here's another 'before' shot, with the radio and speakers stripped out:
After:
You can see my Nixie tube clock has found a new home in the top of this cabinet. I made up this clock from a kitset in 2015. I originally intended to house it inside the centre of the cabinet where the radio used to be, but not only was that an impractical place for it, the clock was also too bulky.
If you turn on the switch to the right, the gears to attempt to spin. That mostly works.
This is the upper shelf of the left side cupboard:
You can see I've covered the ceiling with some copper mesh backed with blue velvet, to hide the holes where the record player originally was. All of these photos are taken from favourable angles / there are plenty of rough edges.
My newest purchase for the cabinet is this lighter:
It functions as either Jim Beam (with its oldschool lighter insert) or Jim Laser Beam
(below):
I haven't been brave enough to stick my finger in yet.
More pics to come. =)
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On 17/12/2023 at 13:04, Thousand Dollar Supercar said:I'm becoming more of a Jag man as time goes on.
Check out my latest Jag-cessory:
It's someone's scody old lighter, covered in 'brown lizard' and tobacco stains.
But wait, when you clean it up, what does the engraving say....
Yep, it was once owned by Mister J.A.G.
How good will that look next to my keys on the bar of the local TAB.
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1 hour ago, rotormotor said:
My S5 Rx7, looking a big dash mount tacho as you do and 4 others ..2 in pod on A pillar and 2 in the bezel the replace my ashtray so 52mm.
Couple of temps, boost and oil pressure me thinking.
OK, so more Fast & Furious then. How about manifold pressure?
(says the guy who added a bunch of gauges to his Alfa Romeo)
Thousand Dollar Supercar's old piano
in Other Projects
Posted
Interesting.
A guy from my industry randomly decided to retrain as a primary school teacher, but he didn't last long in the field. I used to flat with a primary teacher years ago, and I remember her making strong vodka jellies to take to school and share around the staffroom at lunchtime - presumably those helped the teachers get through the day.
I had David Jenkin assess my piano years ago. I found it interesting and I was sorely tempted to throw money away on a rebuild, but instead I bought a new piano for some reason. Now I have two pianos, because of course I can't get rid of the old one.
The piano tuner I use now is someone I was forcibly transferred to when my previous tuner basically said he was too busy. She's not the norm for the industry as she's about a decade younger than me.
More than a decade ago I was already finding it difficult to book piano tuners - they were busy, which meant they would tell me their one and only available time slot a month or two in the future, and I'd have to make that work. Then they'd decide to specialise in tuning expensive Steinway grands and stop accepting jobs for old British uprights.
She was able to bring forward her return visit to finish the hammer bushing replacement to earlier this week. So that work is mostly done now, but it has an annoying short-term downside - as Tim Finn would say, what I need is a positive action, but there's a fraction too much friction.
Ooo, and I noticed this written on the back of the action:
I think it says "Palmer. 15th afternoon Recentre Ease Regulate". Palmer was my great grandfather's last name, and ironically he must have been getting the same work done to the action as I've just had done.