Jaguar XJ6 Tidy Up

Ok, so its not actually as bad as all that.

Car up bumper and OSF wing off and ready to go:


The front bumper mounts are a bit of a mess, but easily replaceable


Crustyness


Slight issue, cant get the fecking wheels off, 1 of the wheel nuts has snapped in half, the bit with the flats came off leaving the rest glommed on to the stud. Need some of those bighty sockets (im sure they have a proper name).


More crusty


Brains!


Took these before I went at it with the grinder, what I found was a pretty horrible garage repair. Plates welded over rusty metal, covered in 15mm of under seal, never ceases to amaze me how shitty some of these repairs can be.

Was planning to crack on today, but i have manflu, joy. BTCC it is then


So it was pretty much a typical garage repair job.

"Theres a hole in my car mr garage"

"ok sir, what we'll do is slap a plate over it without cutting away any rusty metal and then cover it in an inch of underseal, that way it will look ok but continue to rot from the inside out".

Tossers.

The earth post for the ecu was a bit close to some scabby bits, will have to weld a bolt on on possibly the same piece when the replacement patch goes in.



Cant get close enough with the angle grinder to clean the bottom edge up, a set of damaged nut removal sockets is on the way to get the wheel off, once its clean more may need to be cut away.

The Results of my digging:


Garage patch goes half the way along the floor against the sill, at first I thought the car had a double skinned floor before I worked out what the mongrels had done.


And a big pile of rusty crap:


Joy, well things are progressing at least.

Rather amusingly when I pulled the ECU out (as it was close to where I need to weld), it had "xj sport, good, £45" painted on it, if i had to guess id say the monkies had welded up the patch from the outside, without even taking the carpet up or disconnecting the battery and fried the original ECU in the process.

Jaguar XJ6 Tidy Up

Yay the rain stopped long enough to give the car a click wash (not a clean, just washing off the dirt to see what's what.

Rupert

After the kids christening the last car Nigel my wife has got in on the act, meet "Rupert" bunch of clowns the lot of them.




The wheels clean up well although one is missing a center cap and one is a little more scabby than this:


Door kick plate missing on the passenger side and a disturbing coloured carpet


The headlining has sagged and there is what looks like egg yolk... I'm not doing a top gear CSI because i dont want to know what it really is, to me its egg yolk


I'm sure I had a PC this colour back in the 80's.


Drivers bolster needs some attention


Shock top, bush has mostly gone:


The business end:

With what looks like some weeping under the cam covers, hopefully that's what the seller was talking about.

The cable to the kickdown seems very loose but it worked ok on the way home, investigation needed.

And the strange square block off the air intake must be some sort of resonance chamber, it doesn't lead anywhere.

Slam panel needs a little love:

Maybe its not a slam panel as the bonnet opens the other way :/

And Jaguar had movable Aero years before the Ferrari 458


But the air filter was new, the engine & transmission oil nice and fresh, coolant and squirters all topped up.


Paintwork and rusty bits.


Bonnet:




Arches:



And my jobs and parts list:


Time to hit eBay.

Jaguar XJ6 - Getting it home and once over.

Well the Eagle has landed, so to speak.

A gentle jaunt to Norwich this morning to an area behind Rose Lane and there she was. eBay makes life easier, the money was already settled and paid by the time I got there so it was make sure the tyres were road legal and had some air, and nothing was likely to get me pulled, sign the v5 and away. The chap selling it did the big LED TV screens for Big brother, superfact!

Anyway on to the car... total bargain, it started first turn of the key with a nice burble, followed by a rattling heat shield. job #1. And idled smoothly and we're off. The ride was great and driving it is just effortless, exactly what I was hopping for (but not really expecting) the brakes work but they're... what's the phrase? 'laid back' at best, quite a lot of pedal travel before anything much happens. Cruising back through Tombland oil pressure good, water temp good, almost half a tank of fuel in it (sweet!) I played with all the switches and everything (except the Air-con) just works, flick the stereo on, even the electric aerial works, (Tuned to Radio 2 naturally) and the first song Graham Norton plays... "Soul Bossa Nova", apt.

Over the first pothole there's a bang from the front right job #2. I haven't climbed under it yet but it had an advisory on ball joints, mebe that, mebe wishbone bushes, will have to see. And that's about it to report for the run home, the kickdown sits you back in the seat enough to know something is happening and drives dead straight not pulling either way, quite and (other than 2) rattle free its just a big comfy old hector.

I've had a quick poke round since getting it home, the arch rust is beginning but should be easily delt with, doesn't seem to be very prevalent, there is one nasty patch inside the O/S/R Door which (job #3) hopefully wont need more than cleaning up and coat of good old FE-123 applied before some paint. A cracked indicator lens needs replacing (job #4).

Under the bonnet it all looks nice and tidy, a little weep from the power steering pipes to check (job #5) no sign of the oil leak the guy selling it mentioned but I'm sure I'll find it more easily when it's cleaned up, apparently they're prone to cam cover weep, so that'd be a nice easy fix.. Some flaky paint on the hinge at the front (job #6) Hammerite time. There is some loose rust coming from around the O/S shock top which could be something to do with job #2 clonk over potholes.

The interior is beige on beige on beige, drivers bolster is ripped, and the headlining is saggy which is par for the course from what I read, other than that it just needs a damn good clean as the beige ranges from pale to alarmingly yellow. The bottom of the drivers door card is detached (job #7) and the bulb cover is missing.

And finally the paint on the bonnet is a bit discoloured and has lots of little bubbles on it, bad paint job? or heat? either way it needs cutting back (job #8).

Hopefully the drizzle will stop tomorrow and I can get out, give it a good clean and whip the O/S/F wheel off and see what's what with the clonk and take some pics.

All in all I'm chuffed, when Nigels tax runs out at the end of the month I'll swap, Sorn him (might final get round to fixing the drive shaft Russ diagnosed months ago) and run the Jag for 6 months and see how painful the fuel is.

Jaguar XJ6 3.2 Tidy Up

Ok, get the tartan blanket, Wurthers original and hat on the rear parcel shelf jokes at the ready.
I've always fancied a Jag, from the era when they still looked like Jags, so when one with what looks like relatively tidy bodywork appeared on eBay, in Sheringham I thought now is the time.
So on Saturday I'm off to fetch (from Norwich as it turns out, not Sheringham) a Dark Blue 1997 XJ 3.2 Executive. Won on eBay for the princely sum of £380. I may be slightly mad, but I figure at that price, if it's a dud it can go back on eBay in bits to make my money back.
Pics and Tales of Joy or Woe to follow shortly.... Wish me luck.

WiFi and Windows Server 2012

I'd tried 3 different Wi-Fi devices with my Windows Server 2012 before it clicked that they couldn't all not work. USB pens, PCI-E cards and the like.

So for those of you banging your heads against a wall wondering, why if the device is detected OK, the drivers are installed OK and everything appears fine, you cant find the page to connect to Wi-Fi networks under Windows Server 2012...its because its not installed!

Arghhh.

At no point does the O/S pop up and go "This functionality is not installed" it just sits there blankly (listing the networks for the Ethernet card if you've got one).

So if you want WiFi on Windows Server 2012:

1)Launch Server Manager
2)Manage/Add Roles and Features
3)Select Features from the left hand side (You may have to click Server Roles first, weird interface).
4)Tick and install Wireless Lan Service
5)Reboot
6)Fly

Hopefully this will help a few others avoid the desk munching I've been doing.

So I can confirm the TP-LINK TL-WDN4800 works fine under Winblows Server 2012.

MythTV and Recording from a SkyHD box.

At the moment my setup is as follows, a MythTV box runing Ubuntu Linux 11, with to Hauppauge Nova-S Plus S1 PCI Satellite cards. and 2TB of space.

It records (Mostly in SD since the BBC swapped to the S2 standard) quite happily day to day but I like to record the F1 to watch in the off season, so since this moved to Sky (boo hiss!!!) I need a way to get the recordings from the Sky box and on to MythTV.

3 Options present themselves

Option 1

Use Compisite out on the SkyHD box to the Composite in on one of Nova-S cards.
Upsides:Free
Downsides:Poor Quality

Option 2

open the SkyHD box take out the hard drive, nab the encrypted gp file, decrypt and ta da
Upsides:Free, HD
Downsides:Labourious

Option 3

use a HDMI in type recording device
Upsides:Easy, HD
Downsides:Not free, what if Sky switch on the HDCP encryption?

To begin with I'll go with Option 1 and see what the quality is like:

Capture Via Composite from Sky HD Box

Not bad, watchable. But this is where i start to run into problems with sound. While the picture works a treat /dev/video0 there is no sound. Debugging the sound was a total pain in the whatsists and this blog entry is really here so I have somewhere to log the steps I went through.

Step 1, list all the audio in devices:

maff@mythbox:~$ arecord -l

**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****

card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: ALC889 Analog [ALC889 Analog]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 2: ALC889 Analog [ALC889 Analog]

  Subdevices: 2/2

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

  Subdevice #1: subdevice #1

card 2: CX8801 [Conexant CX8801], device 0: CX88 Digital [CX88 Digital]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

card 3: CX8801_1 [Conexant CX8801], device 0: CX88 Digital [CX88 Digital]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

maff@mythbox:~$

And this is where the fun and games begins, you can see the two sat cards CX8801 and CX8801_1. CX8801 is always /dev/video0 and CX8801_1 /dev/video1 however some times, say every other boot, the sound in is HW:2,0 and some times HW:3,0. Weird. Ok how about I plug the sound into mic in on the PC, thats unlikely to change. HW:0,0

To test this, a quick arecord remembering to specify sample rate of 48000 as this is what MythTV needs:

arecord -D hw:0,0 -r 48000 -f S16_LE -c2 foobar.wav

and play it back:
vlc foobar.wav

success!

excellent, so back the mythtv-setup bash in hw:0,0 in the card config, save back to mythtv and....

silence.

arse.

so whats the difference, arecord can get audio from hw:0,0 but not mythtv, turns out Mythtv needs an ALSA prefix in order to work so should be set to ALSA:hw:0,0 and finally sound!

Awesome, hopefully next time it craps out and goes silent I'll now have somewhere to look and find out what I did.

Bigpower is down!

Worry not, I'm on the case.

Maff