Thousand Dollar Supercar

I think you need to fit a hazard light function so the trafficators flap like wings.

Does he wreck them for parts? I wouldn't mind a set of brass pedals to replace my silver-painted iron ones, and a rare circular keyhole surround (mine is lost and I've stuck a plastic fake brass one on, which protrudes too much). I know I could easily buy a $1 piano to get some brass pedals, but then I'd have to collect and dispose of the thing.

Everything's going according to plan. About as well as you'd expect! I had it tuned just last week and one or two strings slipped immediately. It's a big ask for a piano to survive nearly a hundred years in playable condition. Some selective refurbishment has been done, but the hammers and strings are original (save for the few I broke playing boogie woogie as a kid). Here's some of the stuff that's wrong: The bass bridge (circled in the photo) is shearing/collapsing in the bichord (two strings per note) section, allowing the bridge pins to move under the sideways pressure from the strings, affecting the tone. See later photo. Apparently the bass bridge has rolled, affecting the downbearing. The bridge is a cantilevered design, suspended in space and only attached to the soundboard at a point slightly closer to the soundboard's centre. This allows the bridge cap to be positioned closer to the bottom of the piano to maximise string speaking length, while having the string vibrations conducted into the soundboard at a more central point where the soundboard vibrates more freely. I think. The downside is that the bridge cap's not directly supported, so the cantilever can be crushed back against the soundboard under pressure from the strings, until the string downbearing is insufficient, affecting the tone again. The pinblock is wearing / tuning pins are getting loose. Due to wear from being tuned and due to the wood aging, the tuning pins get looser in the pinblock over time and they don't hold their tuning as well. In my piano there's also no more scope to hammer the pins further in to make them grip better. The hammers are wearing. See later photo. The felt hammers of a piano develop deep grooves over time from hitting the strings. It doesn't help if the felt is 99 years old. The felt gets compacted and hardened, and the contact point of the hammer gets flattened and enlarged, all of which affects the tone. Various bushings in the action are wearing. The hammers wobble left and right and the piano clatters like a typewriter. Some treble bridge pins are loose, creating false beats (an out-of-tune sound which can't be tuned away). What's the fix for all of this? Take all the strings off (to get at the bridges) and throw them away (because they're 99 years old, dull/oxidised/rusty, and would probably break during reinstallation) Take the tuning pins out (because the strings are off) and throw them away (because the worn pinblock no longer grips pins of this size firmly enough) Break the bridges off the soundboard Make new bridges from scratch and stick them on Install new larger tuning pins Make and install new strings Rebuild the action with new hammers The fact that new strings and bridges would have to be custom made would mean there was an opportunity to get super nerdy and redesign the piano using modern analysis and materials. Piano Barry warning. The scale design of a piano refers to the speaking lengths of the strings, their wire diameters, tensions, the copper wrapping of the bass strings etc.. Scale design is a mathematically complex task which probably took forever back in the day, but which now can be done more accurately with computer modelling. These days there is a greater selection of string wire thicknesses to choose from, and they've figured out the percentage of a wire's breaking strain which gives the best tone. So the impression I get is that they feed the piano's parameters into a computer and it corrects the homework of the original designers, allowing the piano to be rebuilt better, stronger and faster than new. It'd only cost six million dollars a bit more than a new piano. Here's the bass bridge for "interest": And here's some worn-out hammers for your viewing pleasure: Sir Herbert Marshall would not approve: The plan is to have the existing hammers reshaped early next year, along with giving them some new bushings to reduce the typewriter clatter. It'll be like polishing a rusty car / rearranging the seats on the Titanic.

The headlining in the Jag started to sag badly, so I took the whole thing out. The backing is made of Weetbix covered in crumbling foam, and it's impossible to reuse at this point. The previous owner of my car was an upholsterer and his repair didn't last, cos nothing will stick to this flimsy mess. So now I have no headlining and no interior lights. You can get replacement headlinings which have the Weetbix backing shell replaced by fibreglass or something, but the shipping from the UK is crazy. On the Jag's last WOF inspection, they gave me a warning that they didn't like my aftermarket driving lights coming on with my high beams. Having the lights work that way made sense to me, but whatever, I figured I'd change them around to run off the front fog light circuit to keep the WOF man happy. Although my car didn't come with front fog lights from factory, it still has the dedicated fuse for them, and the dedicated SPARE fuse for them , and the headlight switch still has positions to activate them. So I figured I could just find the fog light plugs behind the bumper and they would already be functional / already be live when the headlight switch was set to the correct position. Right? Nope. After an hour or two of poking around, I found this stuffed in behind the headlight switch: It's an adapter for cars without fog lights, and its purpose is to stop the headlights from turning off when you turn the headlight switch to the fogs-only position. The adapter also prevents the fog light plugs from becoming live, because it breaks the connection to the fog light circuit. You know, that same circuit which is nevertheless fitted with a fuse and a spare fuse. You can see that the fog light circuit is discontinued in the photos below. So I just removed the adapter completely. Now my fog light circuit is live. The aftermarket driving lights in my car were conveniently run off a relay rather than directly off the high beam circuit. I added a switch to toggle that relay's coil supply between the high beam circuit and the fog light circuit, in case a different WOF man takes a different view of how my driving lights should work in future. The relay and switch are sitting inside of one of the headlight recesses: So now I have a way to drive around with just my driving lights on during the day, like a plonker. Then I actually went for the WOF, and failed because of a split steering rack boot. I replaced it all by myself, because I am a totally legit home mechanic. Currently on the Jag's to-do list: Find another solution for the headlining Get the auto looked at (I'm pretty sure it's slipping and getting worse, so I'm afraid to use full throttle now) Stop the drivers window sticking Fix the radio (some speaker wiring must be shorting somewhere, cos no sound comes out) Install the new rear subframe mounts Install the new rear trailing radius arm bushes I'm becoming more of a Jag man as time goes on. Check out my Jaaag fragrance collection, which lives in the car: "Jaguar: Ultimate Power" (a couple of sprays on the car makes it go faster), and of course the Smell of Success. Apparently, success smells like creme brulee / vanilla / caramelised sugar, whereas the Jaguar fragrance ironically smells like lemons.

Uh-oh, it's time. This thread will be long and tedious and you probably shouldn't read it. Eventually there may be some videos but I need to bury them behind off-putting Barry stories. Four score and nineteen years ago, before the internet, computers, CDs, cassettes, before NZ switched to decimal currency, before TV, vinyl, WW2, the Great Depression, the popularisation of radio, before the majority of NZ families owned a car or even had electricity in the home, it was still the golden age of the piano. My great grandfather on my mother's side had just upgraded to a shiny new British piano (Japanese pianos weren't a thing yet, and German pianos had fallen out of favour in recent years for some reason). Somehow the receipt from that piano purchase survives to this day: More recently we also unearthed this photo of Great Granddad playing said piano: OK, so he's only "playing" the piano using a push-up pianola. These were a mechanical contraption that sat externally in front of the piano, somehow read scrolls of music via pneumatics and played the piano keys the same way a human would. A human was still required to power the device by pumping foot pedals, and then to take credit for the performance. They could also adjust things like volume and tempo on the fly via hand-operated sliders. Here's a random photo of a push-up pianola being used with a grand piano: When you think about it, this is a ridiculous amount of complexity, weight, cost, physical space, maintenance, effort etc just to reproduce music. Anyway, although using a pianola doesn't qualify one as a musician, my grandmother told me that Great Granddad would put a great deal of focus into adding expression via the pianola's levers. She recalled one instance where he finished a performance and heard applause coming from outside his window - someone walking down the street had stopped to listen. That's it, that's the highlight of the first part of this piano's life. From there, the piano's life was presumably pretty standard - a lot of sitting in the corner. My great grandfather had six children and the piano wound up with his youngest, my grandmother. Possibly the earliest memories of my life are of visiting my grandparents' house, where the piano sat in a back room down the hall. I would go down there, bash on the keys randomly, come up with a convoluted name for my amazing impromptu composition, then head to the front room where the adults would be talking and try to get their attention: "Did you hear that? It was called... um....um...." (invariably I had forgotten the name of my composition by then) The piano then passed to my parents while I was still young, possibly because my dad (who isn't from the piano's side of the family) showed some interest. Here's a top tip for any parents of young children: Tell the kid that if they go to bed early without any fuss like a good boy, their dad will play them a song on the piano as they fall asleep. This will mess them up for life. So I inherited the piano when I got my first house. Here it is at my place ten years ago, with a duvet jammed behind it: It's a Marshall & Rose upright, made in London in 1922 (best guess based on the serial number). That manufacturing date should have given it long enough to take a slow boat to NZ prior to its purchase here in '24. In car terms, you could liken this piano to something like a Rover P6 - an above-entry-level product, manufactured by a still-independent British company who would later be swallowed up by a conglomerate and produce less-unique products until the conglomerate went out of business for British reasons. Just as Rover would outsource the odd driveline component (a transmission here, an engine there), this piano uses a complete action assembly (the internal moving parts) from an outside supplier. The candleholders are aftermarket accessories which I added - basically they're the piano equivalent of fitting a roof rack and an external spare tyre to your P6 to make it look more 'classic car'. The piano's finished in burr walnut veneer hidden under darkened old varnish. Believe it or not I cannot find another exactly the same online. My plans for this thread are: to bore you all silly by rambling about piano stuff to document my project to record ten songs to celebrate the centenary of the piano's purchase. I've picked one song from every decade of the piano's existence (judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into), and I plan to record one a month between January and October of 2024. Whether I find time to achieve this, let alone in video format, and whether I go through with making the results public, time will tell. The goal is that January will be the 1920s song, February the 1930s etc, and I will regret this very much.

I figured that would depend on the resistance of the bulb and the current required to pull in / hold in the relay , so I didn't mention it. I think flyingbrick's idea of essentially putting the bulb in parallel with the relay coil should work?

In order for the fan override switch to be able to force the fan to run, you'd need the thermal switch to be normally open, and the dash/fan light would have to be on whenever the fans were NOT working. I think. I did have some gin a bit earlier.

"Would you believe it? After about 100 years of orangey-red neons we now can get blue and green ones! You'll buy one out of curiosity!" HOW DID THEY KNOW? I was not aware of these and my project does not incorporate any. =( This weekend I've been doing a terrible job of refinishing the cabinet. Life would be easier if I was Renaissance Man, but unfortunately I am easily defeated by some bits of wood. I should have just put some wax onto the original finish to hide the scratches and called it a day. Instead my house is all full of dust and the cabinet hasn't been improved. I kept finding that I hadn't taken enough of the old finish off before recoating. I think the old finish contained a bit of stain, so when I went over the wood with waterborne clear varnish, it looked blotchy: The clear varnish also isn't quite dark enough to match the front panels, and I don't want to touch those because of the knobs etc sticking through them. So I've sanded that side panel again to have another go. It's OK to keep redoing the sides of the cabinet over and over because they're thick, but the top lid's a different story. It's thin and the wood is damaged from the sun, so I can't keep sanding it indefinitely. It's also warped because it's hollow / not solid wood, so when I hit it with my electric sander, the stain doesn't get removed from all the low spots: If I try to put clear varnish on it from that state, the dark patches look even darker. (this is me developing the art of furniture restoration myself from scratch by trial and error, because there's no such thing as the internet or night classes) I've attacked the lid some more to try to dig down to clean wood, and now I'm trying a solvent-based oak-stain-urethane on it. Who knows if it will match the original finish of the front panels. Who knows if it will even match the front doors, which I've already given several coats of waterborne clear varnish. =\ On the upside, I've been able to start fitting castor wheels underneath the cabinet by precariously hanging it over the edge of the table it's sitting on. On the downside, the vibrations from my sander caused a decanter to fall out of the cabinet and spill Wild Turkey all over the floor, and I couldn't do a floor suck because of all the sanding dust.

Interesting.. Someone needs a bollocking for the subtitles saying 'Alpha Spyder'. I have sanded the cabinet's top lid back again using an electric sander this time, and today I was planning to skim one or two more areas of the lid with the coloured wood putty. I think the remaining chips and dents are few enough in number that it would look weird filling them with pewter instead. It would be like I accidentally splashed molten solder onto the cabinet and couldn't get it off again. I wonder how the pewter thing would look on my Jag's centre console veneer which is riddled with cracks: I'm hoping that what I learn from mucking up this radiogram cabinet can help me tackle my great grandfather's piano next. It's burr walnut underneath heavily darkened varnish, and it could probably look great if I just paid thousands to someone competent...

When it's finished. The radiogram has been stranded on top of a table in my back room for the last half dozen years. I literally cannot move it - I live by myself, it's heavy and too big to get my arms around. I can't really take good exterior photos of it in its current location, and the exterior isn't changing much anyway. I'm trialling various badges above or below the display window, and I'm considering ditching the original knobs in favour of these shiny ones: I've cut more pieces of mirror to line the backs of the booze cupboards (originally there was just a single piece of brown chipboard over the whole rear of the cabinet). Over the years I have bought a couple of decanters (for class) and various skull-shaped vessels (what class?). No genuine old crystal decanters though, in case the lead leeches into my booze if I use them for long-term storage. I must hunt down some decanter tags. One day when the project is done, I'll bribe someone to come and help me carry it out to its designated spot in the living room for some beauty shots and videos. Then before I get the camera out, I'll celebrate by trying absinthe for the first time.... ....turning on whatever tunes seem appropriate... .... getting hammered and tripping out to all the pretty lights.

I'm going to attempt some cosmetic refinishing of parts of the cabinet, for example the upper surface of the lid was pretty rough: The rear edge of the lid was chipped (see RHS of photo), so I bought some coloured wood putty and tried to strip/sand/fill/varnish the lid. Results not great so far. Character marks still exist under the varnish, surface of the varnish is still rough. Haven't given up yet. I also wanted to improve the original plastic radio knobs, but this is AFTER cleaning and trying to polish them on a bench grinder: The plastic still looks oxidised / dirty, but it doesn't want to polish to a shine. I may substitute new knobs with blingy brass trim. I've been refitting various panels to the skeleton of the radiogram, untangling wires or cutting corners and bodging things until they fit. One of Barry's 100-year-old radio faceplates now helps cover the hole for the main magic eye, while also providing a viewing window: I may try to tidy that up further. The important part is that you can see the valve doing its thing: For the last ~2 years, my control panel has been floating loose so I can flip it over and do some wiring, then balance it on its side to operate the switches, hoping nothing shorts out.. Exciting update - it's finally mounted back in place, which wasn't easy. And even now that the control panel is full of messy electrical stuff, nothing gets too munched or shorts out when the actuator lowers it down flat! (this was mostly good luck rather than good management) Aaaand when you open the lid of the radiogram the controls raise up automatically OMGmylifeiscomplete. Yuss.

I finally got hold of one, identical to the stolen image above. It will be a better match for the brass door handles on my radiogram. Here it is in place of the chrome surround which was visible in my Nov '21 and Jan '22 posts: Other recent shopping hauls include a bunch of postcards of old ads for alcohol and sci fi, plus a few small radio badges. What else have I been doing besides buying stuff? Bugger all except maintenance - this project is now so old that it's starting to break down of old age before it's even finished. Two of the dodgiest analogue / moving coil meters gave up the ghost, and so did one or two little backlight bulbs (I'm using bulbs instead of LEDs cos it's more hipster). So now this 'MILLIAMPERES' meter is new: (probably for the best - the old one in my 7/10/22 post might have had radium paint and I should stop trying to fix it just in case) This one is new too: The surround I've stuck over it is to help with my improvised illumination. Another thing I replaced was the accessory relay with the burned contacts, because having that relay interfere with firing up the project was getting annoying. So I'm still really at the same point - I've got some unappealing tidying and mounting/assembly tasks to do. These tasks are complicated by years of ad-hoc wiring additions made without much consideration for final assembly. Maybe I'll finish them some day. =\

^ Some shady character.... Nats '23 in the South Island was approaching. I sent the Jag to get the wheel bearing races changed and the front brakes seen to as well. Apparently the calipers were seizing, which might explain why I felt the brakes had been easy to lock and slightly slow to unlock. Now I have new discs and pads and rebuilt calipers. While the Jag was at the shop for this work, Auckland got flooded, but fortunately the Jag escaped. I was running out of time till Nats but still had more 'grand touring' issues to address. The driver's wing mirror glass was still too wobbly despite my best attempts, so I gave up and screwed the mechanism from a modern Japanese car into the Jaguar wing mirror housing. Shhh. The mirror glass now protrudes slightly rather than being recessed, but it no longer shakes around. I'll have another shot at this problem at some point. The passenger side windscreen washer jet was only producing a useless dribble. Upon investigation I noticed that the factory washer nozzles are heated to prevent them icing up! This doesn't matter if they're corroded and useless. I temporarily substituted the nozzle from a garden sprayer and it's far superior. I topped up the diff, and while under there, I noticed this rear subframe mount is starting to come apart (yellow arrows): This is the left rear one of four mounts which hold the rear subframe to the chassis. After Nats, I ordered a new set which have since arrived but I haven't fitted them yet. I decided I needed to make some visible modification to the car for Nats, to make it appear that I'm a legit car guy and not a chequebook racer / Sunday driver. I figured I could have a go at the dashboard veneer - grind off the lacquer then put Danish oil on it, same as I did for the centre console. Before: Unfortunately the 'after' photos (not included) don't look so good. I was in too much of a hurry and I burned the veneer with the stripping disc, ground through it in spots and tried to hurry the drying process too much. So now my dash looks a bit funky. I Reassembled it anyway and drove from Auckland to Marahau and back. On the way down from the ferry to Marahau, I rambled to my poor passenger Johnnyfive that the XJS could have done without IRS, RWS, LSD, inboard rear discs etc.. Then my favourite part of Nats turned out to be racing back over the hill in the above photo, chasing Yoeddynz's Imp and a bunch of motorbikes and making good use of those technical features. I was glad for my new brakes that didn't lock or fade, new tyres that let go progressively, diff that allowed me to plant the boot mid corner, handling that often seemed to allow me to turn harder than the limit at the cost of having the rear break away.. On that last point, I kept imagining I had more oversteer in one direction than in the other, due to that rear subframe mount which was surely tearing itself further to bits.. I got back home with no exploded coolant hoses, no exploded diff from oil starvation, not even that much engine oil consumption. Fuel economy never got better than 10l/100km on the trip, and I discovered the car would stumble and misfire more after several hours of driving. Add that to the list along with a sagging headlining. One more fun fact - I weighed my wheel/tyre combos, because who doesn't enjoy a bit of Dave Science(tm). 'Performance' 17x7.5 wheel only: 11.1kg plus 10.2kg 235/45R17 Bridgestone Potenza tyre: total 21.3kg Jaguar OEM 15x6.5 wheel: 8.4kg plus 12kg 235/60R15 Linglong tyre: total 20.4kg plus 10.9kg 235/60R15 Nankang tyre: total 19.3kg So I save 2kg per corner by reverting to the combo with the best road manners.

Here's a dramatisation.

Ooo, someone's selling XJS V12 manual conversion parts in your neck of the woods, in case yours have seized up or something.. https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/motors/car-parts-accessories/jaguar/listing/4105559969 I wonder how someone can be unable to drive stick any more but still able to get in and out of an XJS.

That was my favourite part of Nats. Although your Imp looked a bit bouncy on the straights, the flip side was how easily it sped through corners while staying flat and keeping within its lane. Definitely a sports car. The Jag needed rather more of the road, despite sportier suspension and 100kg less weight in the nose than a V12 XJ-S has. With its brand new not-very-sticky tyres it would surf the bends like a speedboat, but at least now it was somewhat progressive and predictable/manageable/non-lethal (at lower speeds, in the dry). Probably as good as it gets? I enjoyed giving it the beans from halfway through the hairpins to deploy the Powr-Lok diff before the Imp got away... Once the Imp has flat 6 power, I'll be in trouble. I was glad for the full brake rebuild on the downhill side with the motorbikes, but I was still using engine braking (and air conditioning braking) just in case.

Motoring writer Harry Metcalfe just completed the build of a V12 Jaguar XJC with a manual conversion. His V12 originally ran the early injection system which was problematic and daft*, so the car's now converted to an aftermarket ECU and later Jag injection from the 6.0 V12s. He's also running a shorter diff. With a couple of intake and exhaust mods and dyno tuning, the rebuilt standard engine makes ~350hp. *the original system apparently simultaneously fires the injectors on groups of 3 adjacent cylinders, which would be at different points in the combustion cycle. I guess it just fires the injector group multiple times, so each cylinder gets fuel during its intake stroke. No wonder the fuel economy was terrible.

My tyre situation was: Factory wheels: 3 x sketchy 10-year-old Linglongs which would probably never wear out, 1 x unrepairable Linglong, 1 x unusable spare Aftermarket wheels: 2 x good Potenza RE003s, 2 x cracking 10-year-old Potenza RE002s, no 5th wheel to use as a spare, rolling radius does not match factory wheels. Swapping between sets of wheels confirmed that the car doesn't drive as well on the 1-inch-wider aftermarket wheels and their lower-profile tyres. I think these wheels are at least partly responsible for the car wanting to fight you and to swerve drunkenly at speed. Maybe their offset isn't right. So I decided to go with the factory mags for Nats, and to get four new retro bogan tyres with raised white lettering for them. As mentioned previously, the only tyre choices in this size are of the harder-than-a-whore's-heart / real-men-smoke-Eagers variety. On the plus side, this gives me a viable spare tyre in the form of one of the Linglongs. +1 to motorway smoothness, now up to an unbelievable 9/10. +1 to annoying the classic car snobs, because raised-white-lettering tyres on an XJ-S look like this: The Gingerbeard Man is more photogenic than me, and his car's tidier, so just imagine the discount version of this photo.

The Jag still hasn't dropped a valve seat after I overheated it, so I guess I got away with that little incident. I have been driving it around more often to try to find issues ahead of the epic quest to the South Island, and so I can spend my credits on various power-ups to help me on that journey. I got a transmission service, which did not help the auto's whining/scraping noise or the rough shifting in and out of 1st gear. The tech said there were no filings in the transmission drain pan, and I should expect this noise to gradually worsen rather than to result in a sudden failure. Meanwhile the tingling sensation in the steering from 80kph had been getting worse. I ordered front wheel bearing kits and they sat on my desk for ages until the noise and vibration became a bit scary, at which point I forced myself to have a go at actually installing them. This was the first time I've done front wheel bearings, and I don't have much in the way of proper tools. I used a piece of deckchair framing as a breaker bar extension, vice grips instead of a brake pad spreader, a claw hammer instead of a seal puller etc. When I removed the first bolts which go through the steering arm and the brake caliper into the hub, two 'washers' fell out from somewhere unknown. This is relevant later. The bearings were pretty worn, which was encouraging. Unfortunately it started looking like this task was not straightforward: The front discs have pronounced lips on them (I got a warning last WOF), so I guess they need machining or replacing. I couldn't get the old bearing races out (they were too stubborn for the hammer-and-screwdriver method which I'd previously used on my Alfa's rear drums), so I just reused them. At least one of them is looking a bit dodgy. This (see photo): Apparently the wheel bearings like to spin on the stub axles and wear grooves into the undersides, as seen here. The XJ-S Barry Bible recommends getting new stub axles and loctiting the bearings onto them so this doesn't happen. By this point I'd decided I was just doing a temporary fix and that I'd get someone else to do it properly later. I slapped the new bearings in and put it all back together. I put the random mystery washers under the bolt heads. When I went to put the factory wheels back on and go for a test drive, I noticed one of the Linglong tyres had a rivet embedded in the shoulder. I pulled the rivet out of the tyre and aaaall the air escaped. I got out the factory spare tyre and discovered it was undersized (215/60 instead of 235/60), so I swapped all the aftermarket wheels back on instead. This produced motorway smoothness of perhaps 8/10 - a new record during my ownership! Unfortunately my bearing change had clearly thrown the wheel alignment out. It turns out that the random mystery washers were actually spacers for the steering arms, and that I'd put them back in the wrong spot causing toe out. I reluctantly spent the time to jam them back in the right positions. Now it's good again. So after a few days getting greasy, I achieved: uncovering problems I'm unable to deal with wasting my new bearings on a dodgy repair that won't last puncturing a Linglong tyre so I can't use the factory wheels wasting valuable time to get professional work done on the car before Nats Fun and games.

In the video which Hand posted, the narrator literally thanks Barry at Amp Maker around 16:55. I imagine that any valve amp which has a 12VDC input instead of a big AC transformer must be using a step-up voltage converter to produce the high voltage which the valves require. This seems to be what my nixie and magic eye tube kits do. It goes without saying that big transformers are more hipster. My brother once had the valve radio from our bach house modified to take an auxiliary input. The idea was that you could play music from an iPod etc through the radio's amp instead of being limited to whatever stations the radio could still receive on AM. If that modification was done in such a way that a line-level signal was required, I guess you could still play a guitar through it by using something like an overdrive pedal to act as the guitar preamp? I could ask my brother where he had the modification done to the radio, but it was years ago - the Barry who did it might not be in business any more.

Yeah that could do it. Lead acid batteries don't like being discharged below a certain voltage and they don't like being left flat. There may be various techniques you could use to try to rejuvenate them, but if they're old and mismatched, replacement would be ideal. What peak voltage does it produce, and is it grunty enough to boost the batteries up to that voltage? Terminal voltage under no-load conditions isn't a reliable indicator of battery condition - the one which is 'fine' could have a high internal impedance so its voltage drops away under load, and the one at 11V could just be flat. Testing the batteries under load (once they're charged) is the easiest way to get an idea if they're OK. Don't mix different brands/sizes/ratings/ages of batteries in series (I'm assuming your bus batteries are in series, but I have no idea if this is likely to be true or not). When you apply a charging voltage to the series string, the voltage won't get distributed evenly between the batteries due to their different characteristics, so some batteries will get cooked and others will be undercharged. Don't use a fully-charged battery to charge a flat battery. I can see two problems - the initial current could be too high (nothing to limit it), and then the final voltage will be too low. I don't know the first thing about buses, off-grid domestic solar/battery/inverter systems etc, but Stu's charge controller sounds like a sensible solution.

If you have a carburetted car and you find yourself inadvertently inverted, ..it's OK because your engine won't keep running - carbs rely on gravity. On the other hand, a fuel-injected Jaguar is so reliable that it would definitely keep running in such a situation. Jaguar therefore equipped the XJ-S with this: I just tested it today. Pull up the knob and the car stalls. Yusss. The knob stays up and the car won't start. Oldschool anti-theft immobiliser. "I am going to poo on your car!"

This year I successfully got the Jag to New Plymboes, its first proper Oldschool meet: It went fine the whole way there, fine all weekend, fine half of the way back... Then I overtook grandpa's Yaris and one of the Jag's cooling system hoses decided to explode in the middle of the overtake. Fortunately the Jag has a coolant level warning indicator for just such occasions, and I was able to coast the short distance to Otorohanga. The hose which blew was a big one that runs from the back of the water pump along the side of the engine block. The failed hose wasn't an original part, suggesting this is a high-stress area of the cooling system? Anyway, the failure was on a long weekend but I still got into Mitre 10 for some repair tape ten minutes after their closing time. I thought I was saved. It turned out that the blown piece of hose was too close to the block for me to tape it up in situ, so it needed to come out. The hose was a mission to remove (which I did with the tools from my boot, in the parking lot of a petrol station), and it needed to be bent to get it out and back in again. This must have meant that my tape repair was weakened by the time I wrestled the hose back into place. It only held water until I was a minute or two out of town. I waited a bit long before pulling over, then I filled up the system with the water I'd brought with me and started heading back to Otorohanga. I tried to come up with what I hoped would be the kindest strategy for the engine - cruise at best economy rpm but fast enough for the injectors to shut off when coasting; switch the engine off down hills, stop once or twice to allow the engine to cool a bit... I booked myself into a motel and booked a day off work. While the engine cooled, I turned it over on a few occasions for good luck. Next morning I went to see the local garage. Of course nobody in town has a hose large enough for the Jag.... Oldschool reminded me that @The Dudelives in Otorohanga. I met up with him and he took me around every likely shop then out to Repco in the next town. A hose for a Holden Statesman was obtained, and I cut and fitted it back at the local garage. I think the garage were happy to let me do it myself, because the hose location was not very accessible and it took me ages to get the new piece to seal. I got back to Auckland OK, and ever since then, I've been a bit nervous that SOMETHING must have been damaged. Can I really get away with overheating a British alloy straight six and not blow a head gasket / warp the block / soften the alloy / spin the bearings or something? If so, should I replace anything as a precaution? Answers on a postcard. On with the impossible quest to make a Jag into a good car, I guess. I pulled the windscreen wiper switch out again to have a proper go at fixing it. XJ-S wipers don't like to park, and this switch is one of the reasons why. The Barry Bible says that step 1 is to drill out the four rivets which hold the switch together: At this point, the switch comes apart and all the bits inside fly out before you get to see how they were fitting together. Inside the switch there is this board with pieces of copper glued onto it: The board moves up and down against pins in the switch as you move the wiper stalk. Usually what happens is that the copper pieces come unstuck from the board and just float around inside the switch, so you just have to glue them back on. I did that, and reassembled everything before testing it. The problem was not fixed. I think that my switch was also too worn, and this wear meant that the parking connection wasn't being made. In the photos below, the rotating arm should be pushing the sliding circuit board up far enough to make contact with the parking circuit: I think the reason that's not happening is due to crappy tolerances and/or wear on all the plastic, particularly here: I corrected for this by cutting a random piece of metal to act as a shim: I then cable-tied the switch back together - Barry would be proud. It works, even though it's too tight at the moment, like using a column-change gearshift rather than a wiper stalk. It'll loosen up. Or it'll break. Now that the wipers park, I can see how badly they park. They change direction mid wipe and do another wipe or so for good measure before figuring out where their stop point is. Why can't the Brits figure out wipers? Even the Italians can do it better despite having relatively no rain. Also, whatever you do... Those are structural screws. If you remove them...

Yeah, unfortunately it does look a bit like that. I guess I made a Power Metal button then - hit the switch and take a drink whenever you hear Dragonforce or the Thundercats theme.

I couldn't resist buying a bunch of 100-year-old radio faceplates from Barry. I thought I could put this one to use: I chopped off the recessed central part to leave just the border, gave it a polish, then crossed my fingers.... It almost fits. Sort of. Maybe in the dark you won't really notice. Unfortunately I won't be hitting my deadline on this project, for two reasons: Work is sending me overseas I couldn't leave well enough alone and I decided to implement my hidden Satan worship button. Satan emoji! When you press the hidden switch, it's gonna plunge the interior into darkness, turn on some red ambient lighting and light up this cheesy inverted cross: By using a diode, I've made it so only the rear of the cross's two parallel plates turns on, giving it that 'silhouetted in fire' effect. Heh heh, cool. The upside of having to go overseas is that I'll save a little bit on restocking the cabinet with booze. New extended completion goal for this project is the start of November.