I now have a Fuji X100. Early Christmas present to myself!

I actually had a Fuji X100 many years ago, I loved it, and I wrote about it in some length. I ragequit it a few months later when it repeatedly misfocused while photographing the winners of an event at a tiny track in the middle of nowhere because I can be a little capricious. I sold it to a guy I met on a train for about £250, taking about a £100 hit for what I paid for it, because I wanted it gone as fast as possible and did I mention I can be a little capricious.

I always semi-regretted selling that camera. It was somewhat old then (and is now a decade old!), but it almost always got awesome photos under any kind of nasty and/or dim artificial light, if the subject did not move too fast. And, other than Fuji's later cameras that took the X100 design and added more letters to the end, there is still nothing quite like it. (Unless you count Leica's digital offerings and...well, they're quite the thing, but I'm not paying that kind of money.)

Well, let me backtrack there. The combination of being small, being of little weight, having a fixed fast lens of "perfect normal" focal length, and looking superb under artificial light...rather describes today's flagship camera phones.

Which I have no interest in! Because I don't want to buy into either Google's obsessive tracking and the Android vendors' unwillingness to provide timely security updates, nor into Apple's lack of a fucking headphone jack (nope, I'll still never regard this as normal, and you won't talk me out of it). I've dealt with the phone manufacturers being fucking awful by compartmentalising, and having multiple phones for different purposes. Including one just as a camera! My long term plan is to switch to the pure-Linux PinePhone when the software matures, but that's not now. And the camera on the PinePhone is not all that good and seems like it will always be (which is to take nothing away from the people who are working hard on the software end of this).

I have my Nikon SLR gear of course, all of which is old and tired and malfunctioning and in a couple of cases falling apart, due to years of abuse and being used in the very dusty Norfolk Arena. I always hated lugging that stuff around. It's nice to once again have a camera I don't mind carrying!

Oh, and merry Christmas to all of you, and all of your people. :)

Today, I decided to take a look at the Gaz rear suspension that I removed a few days shy of two months ago.

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I know, it looks like shitty old suspension and maybe that's because it is. But this was a nice and rather expensive bit of kit in its day. Back in 2007, when my brother owned the car and had some intention to get it back on the road after a failed MOT, he replaced the rear shocks with two of the custom-made Gaz shocks seen here. These cost £250 for each shock absorber back then (about £300 inflation-adjusted).

Before the K-Sport "biting the bullet" episode, I had the idea that maybe I would also get Gaz to custom-make some front ones too. I decided not to; even at the non-inflation-adjusted price, that would have been £500, minus the desperately-needed new springs both front and rear. Each corner also needed new top mounts (which would have been another very expensive custom job) and even that would have left me unable to adjust preload and ride height separately as I can on the K-Sport setup, so they had to go.

That made me sad, because I knew these shocks, as old as they are, had maybe 100 miles of driving on them, if that, and that it was top-quality stuff in its day (and still is). So today, I decided to give them both a bit of a cleanup to see what they looked like. Top is before, bottom is after:

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Tools used: Brillo pads! I'm not kidding. If you need to remove tarnishing or crap from any metal, a slightly damp Brillo pad is your best friend. The steel wool is only slightly abrasive, and with the built-in soap and a bit of water they glide over whatever you are trying to make pretty. On top of that, I used some electrical contact cleaner (for when I needed to quickly blast away the soap residue to see where I was with the cleaning), paper towels, and a little WD40 to lubricate the threads on the shocks to make it easier to get the bottom nuts on.

It's a tribute to Gaz that even after 13 years of disuse and only a hundred miles of use that they are still in really rather good condition. There's a tiny bit of pitting on the shafts but otherwise these shocks are close to perfect and still feel great today!

I don't know if these will make any amount of money that is worth my time to list them on eBay. I am not worried if they don't. They're just too nice to go onto the scrap pile, and I would rather see these go on a car again rather than being recycled.

Onwards!

The backroads were rather fun this weekend. For whatever reason the tractors around here have been busy this weekend, and deposited a ton of mud onto the wiggly roads around here. Which is fine, because that's where our food comes from and all. The tiny 4wd Mazda was bothered by it even less than I was. I'm amazed at how well she handles on greasy roads!

This weekend's blasts were mostly about debugging a whole lot of squeaks and rattles coming from Mazda Amy's interior trim. I bought a huge box of assorted varied trim clips that might help with this.

Onwards!

This is a quick recommendation for the XP-Pen G640 drawing tablet, for those fellow Linux users who like to do a bit of a scribble. It costs a penny shy of £40 as I write this, and it works flawlessly out of the box on Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 with no drivers or any other fiddling required. Just plug it in and go.

This is a great little tablet for doodling, whiteboarding in the working-at-home era, pwning noobs on Skribblio and generally messing about. For all I know someone might even buy one of these, download Super Street's car colouring pages^[1], fire up MyPaint and burn a few hours in the evening when lockdown gives them nothing better to do.

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I shall give a necessary disclaimer that I occasionally doodle stuff just for myself (it helps my concentration in read-only tasks, and when I am in deep thought) and that I am not an artist at all. If I was I might want something like a few dedicated buttons for commonly-used operations like undo and erase. And I'm sure that in many other ways, someone using this for actual artwork would find this vastly inferior to things costing several times as much money. But for me, this cheap tablet works great!

[1] Alternative source as Super Street have, for GDPR reasons, blocked the whole of Europe from accessing their site. :(

Edit (March 2021): Change of plan. I decided against having any kind of stereo in my car. Without cutting up any panels, I would never had a stereo that sounded really good, and also because hearing the engine is far too important to me. The latter isn't just because I like the noise, though I do; it's because I need that feedback to instantly know when something is not right with is. This head unit has been sold and was posted off for its Forever Home in a Porsche 928.

This is a Blaupunkt Vancouver SQR 45 head unit. As I am told, it was originally fitted to some expensive, high-end German cars. I believe, but do not know, it would have been fitted to the Porsche 944, and possibly the Porsche 911. Hopefully, someone coming here via a search engine will be able to correct me some day.

I got this for free, some years ago. Via some chain of events that I'm probably better off not knowing about, it ended up in my mum's 1988 Suzuki SJ410. A few years ago this Blaupunkt was, while still functioning, acting a little erratically, so it got replaced by a much more modern unit with a CD player, USB, and all those other things that people in the 1980s did not know they needed. This head unit was going to go in the bin. I thought it was too nice to go to landfill, and that some day it'd be a nice addition to Mazda Amy (which lacks a stereo), so I saved it.

Then some time passed, and with my car mostly working as it should, I decided I should actually do something with this stereo, so I got in touch with Bal from Retro Car Audio UK who did a refurb to bring it back to life. This cost me £285, which for most people doesn't resemble "cheap". I would not want this work to be done cheaply, because you get what you pay for. And this work was done on a rather rare head unit that I have seen selling for £200+ in working condition (not "refurbished by a pro and works exactly like new", as anything is when Bal is done with anything), I think the price was extremely reasonable. I could probably make a small profit selling it, though I don't plan on doing that.

The failure sheet, quoted directly from Bal, was this:

Power supply stiffening circuit malfunctioning

Radio PLL synthesizer circuit failure

Capacitor failure throughout - I will replace all electrolytic capacitors.

Cassette mechanism needs a full service

Volume pot oxidized

So it goes. Hey, Lewis-logic says it was a free stereo! Just like that time I bought a "cheap" Mazda 323, ha ha...

Anyway. It's here. It's lovely. Bal has done an extraordinary job. There are some practicalities I need to work out, though.

The UK edition 323 GTX had the stereo as an option in the "Lux" version of the car (that edition also including a body-coloured bodykit and alloy wheels). This stereo system only had two tiny speakers in the dashboard. The Rallye edition never had a stereo, but retains the two places where speakers would have been. Now, this car is extremely loud, because of its minimal sound deadening and 3" straight-through exhaust, and might get even louder in the near future via a tubular manifold and probably an obnoxious, totally illegal external wastegate. I'm not convinced that two tiny speakers are going to supply sufficient loudness, even with today's speakers being vastly superior to anything that existed in the 1980s.

But, I will not cut 6x9 holes in the parcel shelf I spent years trying to find (though I did briefly troll my brother, who acquired it for me, into thinking I would do just that, which was fun), or cut speaker holes in my even rarer original door cards. I need something stealthy. I think I can use the space under the front seats for a couple of compact subs, and maybe use the coin/random shit holder below the diff lock switch in the centre console for a small mid speaker.

There's also the small matter of getting the head unit to fit into the hole where a stereo should be. This may require home-brewed brackets!

Something that is not a practicality concern is the lack of an aux jack. Cheap tape adapters that you can buy for so little money that they may as well come free in your Corn Flakes are, by all accounts, remarkably good. Technology Connections from the YouTube explains why:

And because I like physical buttons, because I have a huge MP3 collection, and because I like not farting around with my phone while I am driving (it goes in my glovebox, on silent, and yours should too): this is probably going to be paired with a 5th generation iPod, running Rockbox. Or maybe I'll start a tape collection instead!

I'm also not totally happy with the backlight of the LCD on this one being green, when the illumination for the rest of the dash is consistently yellow/orange, but I'll park that one, for now.

Ah well, I'll poke around things this weekend. One expensive thing at a time.

Onwards!

So the alignment is done, and the figures in the photo showed that I didn't do a terribly bad job with my bottle-jack alignment. But, lacking a level surface, let alone all the tooling and knowing what the fuck they're doing that a real garage has, I took my car to Autoleys in King's Lynn.

They normally work on BMWs, and it was quite fun bringing down the tone in their car park with a shitty-looking 1987 Mazda 323, but bringing down the tone wasn't why I picked them. It was the first place I found that would do alignment that didn't involve me driving on main roads. Not that I don't trust this car or anything, given that I'd already sorted out the horrific bump steer and the dangerous understeer, but.

Anyway, this got done. I found a way to kill two hours in King's Lynn while Autoleys did what they did. And this car is better than she has ever been. I only write about this today, rather than on Wednesday, because I've had a chance to take her for a proper hoon two days in a row. Which means I can talk about how good the K-Sport suspension setup is now!

So, I've got my ride height exactly where I want it now:

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Which partly happened by accident; from a previous episode, I took some dimensions from my collapsed former front suspension and used that as a baseline for my new suspension. Turned out that when you put not-collapsed brand-new front suspension following the old dimensions, the ride height is where I want it. No sump-smashing. There are no more "lows", but there are no also more scary noises when I hit a bump too fast.

I must say that the K-Sport suspension is awesome. It was horrendously expensive and I am happy with every penny I spent on it. The K-Sport suspension combined with good Toyo rubber means this car runs out of cornering ability long after I run out of bravery. Because this setup is okay with back roads and their corners at any speed, that also means that there are a lot of bits in the interior that are rattling at speed and it's quite hard to debug those rattles. That merely annoys me; maybe I'll find someone to ride with me and help me with that some time.

This chapter concludes with this: Everything is great. My car is still my favourite car in the world except that part where she's now both burning oil and leaking it from the front crankshaft seal. But that, is a thing to be solved another day.

Onwards!

This week's problem: extremely low engine idle speed. It wants to sit at about 200-300 RPM, which is so low that it stalls or near-stalls the engine. This happened out of nowhere yesterday. This, only takes a few minutes to fix with a screwdriver.

So, instead of solving that problem I got a Bad Obsession Motorsport sticker for my horn push! And doesn't it look good.

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It's actually lovely quality (it's very thick), and I reckon that's given me about another 15 horsepower. Or maybe it hasn't, but it's definitely a good idea to represent the greatest angle-grinder engineers in the world.

Onwards!