Today I took a day of leave as recovery from the weekend I just spent training on the James Craig. I figured I would still be pretty tired and not having to get up too early would probably be a good thing.
With half a day to fill and it raining a bit too much to get the brakes finished on the Land Rover I decided to get the desk inside where I keep my radios & computer tidied up.
This is more or less what it looked like before I started to clean up. Actually probably worse as there has been a fair bit of time for junk to accumulate since that photo was taken.
I also turned the desk around. This means that I can access the back side where the 12V power supply is. And it also lets me plug & unplug anything into mains power depending on what my current project is.
This is what I have now. If I put my laptop away then I have a huge desk that can be used for whatever project I have at the time. This extra bench space will be very useful with the couple of electronics projects I have in the back of my mind coming up.
I have had a door for my Land Rover since I bought it, however it was not installed, nor did it have enough bolts to just put it on. So on the weekend I fixed that.
In this photo you can just see a hand holding the door on. Before you could use the top hinge to locate it and hold it in place. This didn't really do much other then prove the door fitted. But it was a start.
The nuts I found were too small for the holes that have been drilled in the frame of the door. So I had to make up a backing plate to stop them from pulling through. This came from a piece of scrap angle I had sitting around. A few minutes with the grinder and the drill and it was ready to go.
It is still a mess inside. But that isn't as obvious now with the door shut. I'm not sure if it's supposed to, but the geometry of the hinges means that it half wants to open itself. Not a bad thing, but interesting.
Unfortunately for now this is my latch. I don't quite have a complete lock mechanism for the door so while I sort out how to lock it properly this will do.
This was a nice, fairly quick project that has definately helped make the car more weatherproof. Hopefully soon I will have the brakes sorted and then I can move onto the next part. Possibly the lights which are missing.
I've had some trouble in the past with getting a white buildup around the negative terminal of the battery in my rodeo ute. I have always been able to get it going again, but it has always been some fiddling around when it gets bad.
When this happened the second time I bought a new battery terminal and put it in the car. Ready for me to install it. However because the problem didn't come back I didn't end up getting it installed.
Yesterday I had the same problem. I park on a slope at work and there is enough electricity getting through the terminal to hill start it, which I did. However when I got home there wasn't even enough getting through to run the central locking. So I had to fix it.
This is the old terminal. Just an extension of the crimp that gets bolted around the battery post. It looks pretty rubbish for a factory part, but I guess it's worked for the last 10 years.
This is the new part. I just cut the strap off the crimp and left the main body of the crimp alone so all of the little wires would stay in one bundle. According to the packet this terminal is lead which is the same material as the battery post so there should be no compatibility problems there. What will be interesting is if the problem goes away, or if it moves to where the wires meet the new terminal.
In the process of helping Mum & Dad move out to a new property we decided to take my ute and go for a tour, right up the back. Apparently to ground up the is pretty boggy and we managed to get my ute stuck in there. The ground was solid enough until after you drove over it. Once you did that and disturbed the crust then all the loose soft stuff below would just let you sink.
Then when we came back the next day with another ute it got stuck as well.
That lighter coloured mud was oozing out from under the wheel while we were standing there talking about what to do next.
This may have had something to do with why we got stuck.
We ended up getting a set of recovery tracks. (Not this brand but similar) and all of a sudden we were out. These things worked so much better than we thought. Even my 2wd ute with an open diff was fine. Until I reversed a little close to a tree for comfort and had to stop again.
The first one goes free.
We put some old carpet in front of the cars so that they had something to help stop them sinking through again. It seemed to help, particularly in the first bit getting up speed again.
We were stuck pretty well. There were a few diff shaped divots in the ground as well.
