Its made of stainless steel and the 2½ inch bend that connects to the muffler merges into two 1¼ inch pipes that take a 90° bend before going into a tapered re merge back into the 2½ inch final tail-piece. Of course It would have been better had it been practical to run 2½ inch all of teh way but I happened upon the 1¼ inch pipes at my local trash and treasure and they enable a good free flowing characteristics without making the cars ground clearance too low for everyday use.

All of this was done because, as cute as a side exit pipe is, it does tend to boom in your ear when the question is asked and as I get older and more deaf I think that its not so wise to have that bark so close to my ear. That said I am happy to report that the pipe has given the exhaust a really nice mellow tone with just a hint of menace…

Cheers Comrades

Old reliable: Motorist Mike Harrison, 74, still owns a 1931 Bentley Coupe, which he bought 54 years ago

It is possible to circumvent the consumer treadmill if you have some basic skills and a the ability to resist the constant suggestions in the glossy ads that you really need that new car or the new WIZZ-BANG super toy, heck you could even go as far as I did and build a new car for yourself. but then you could find as I have that a small part of the whole that in itself is insignificant , causes you a great deal of heart ache. You see when I rebuilt my sports car I bought this lovely new old stock speedo that was totally consistent with the styling cues I was following. To use it I had made a special speedo cable and when I connected it up I discovered that the inner was just a few mils too long so that the inner could not turn this resulted in the plastic drive gear in the extension housing breaking and of course that means the speedo will not work . The part is not available from Toyota (the transmission is from a Ke70 Corrola) nor can the transmission people I have spoken to supply one. On top of the difficulty in getting the part, there is the matter of fitting it. To do so requires the removal of the engine. So I have been looking into other ways to make do until I can get the part and the energy to fit it .

I bought a bicycle speedo but rejected it as a solution because Idisliked it. The best stop gap may in fact be to get one of those dreaded Satnav devices. From what I can gather many of them give you a very accurate measurement of your speed as part of their display. I have strong reservations about their potential to dumb down the abilities of the travelling public just as James May does:

Now, the May household actually has another household, a small flat in another part of town. We bought a new cooker for it, but on the day it was supposed to arrive, a man rang to say he couldn’t find us because our address wasn’t in the satnav.

What was I supposed to say? Fair enough, we’ll just make do with dry bread and olives. We really fancied a cooker but if you can’t find the door, never mind. Don’t want to be a nuisance. The flat was built in the Fifties, and it’s not as if no one found it prior to the TomTom.

The thing is, the address officially puts the building of which it is a part on one road, but the entrance to the car park and garden bit is actually off another road, running at right angles. This isn’t hard to work out.

So the reason for this ramble is to ask about the experiences of my readers with these little devices, if you own one or have one installed in your car has it killed your ability to read a map? Have they been reliable? Or have you consigned them to the bottom of the desk drawer and gone back to the easy to use maps made out of paper?

Cheers Comrades

]]> http://iainseven.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/old-and-new-solutions-to-knowing-where-you-are-and-how-fast-you-are-travelling/feed/ 0 iainchall http://iainseven.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/great-stuff-from-jim/ http://iainseven.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/great-stuff-from-jim/#comments Sat, 17 Apr 2010 21:35:38 +0000 Iain Hall http://iainseven.wordpress.com/?p=251 ]]>

These notes document how I wired up a 2 speed wiper motor as found in a 1971 US specification MG Midget. As wiring can and does vary between models, as well as previous owner modifications, any modifications you attempt to make to the wiring of your car based on these notes are entirely at your own risk. Beware, Electrical faults can cause fires.

I haven’t dismantled a wiper motor, so I don’t know for sure how the motor is wired up internally, but several hours of studying a worksop manual and the wiring diagram of a 1971 US spec. Midget with 2 speed wipers and a lot of trial and error eventually revealed the secret of the wiper motor auto park circuit. We are now talking real Lucas Prince of Darkness stuff here!

What I found was that the auto park wire on the wiper motor could only be connected when the slow and fast speed wires were off. When you supplied power to either slow or fast, you had to disconnect the auto park lead otherwise there was a certain point in the wiper motors cycle where the auto park lead temporarily shorted to ground. I would imagine that if you left it permanently connected the auto park switch/mechanism inside the wiper motor would eventually destroy itself.

Using a cheap OFF/ON/ON toggle switch and and a relay (Hella 3057 12V 40/15A) it’s relatively simple to get both wiper speeds and the wiper auto park to work. The switch I use looks reasonably close in appearance to the original Lucas dashboard switches. I didn’t have a spare headlight switch to try with this circuit so sorry folks, I can’t tell you if it would work or not. (If anyone does try this let me know and I’ll update these notes accordingly.)

I solder all of my connections, covering the joints with heat shrink spaghetti, then for neatness finish by binding up the wiring with electrical tape. I have a pet hate of those quick crimp wire connectors as they can corrode and cause poor electrical connections.

On first inspection this circuit looks like it can’t work, but does as you’ll see in my explain a little later.

I’ve tried to include the wire colours that appear in the workshop manual wiring diagram, if you can get part of the original wiring loom with the wiper motor, this makes it easier.

RLG – Red Light Green, NLG – Brown Light Green, ULG – Blue Light Green, GK – Green Pink.

Also note, I haven’t drawn the Wiper Motor connections in the above diagram as they actually appear on the motor (as a double row), but instead to make the above diagram easier to read.

The pin connections on the Wiper Motor are as follows:

1 – Earth 2 – Auto Park switch 3 – Fast 4 – Auto Park  +ve supply 5 – Slow

HOW DOES IT WORK

Flicking the toggle switch to the first position (slow operation), power is applied to the relay, closing the contact and supplying power to pin 5 on the wiper motor (via pin 87 and 30 on the relay). The Auto Park connection on the Wiper Motor (pin 2) is not connected to anything while the relay is energised.

Flicking the toggle switch to the second position (fast operation), power is supplied directly to pin 3 on the Wiper Motor. At this point you might expect the relay to turn off, but in fact the relay remains turned on by current leaking back out of pin 5 (slow) of the wiper motor (via pin 30 and 87 of the relay). The Auto Park connection on the Wiper Motor (pin 2) is not connected to anything while the relay remains energised.

Flcking the switch to off, causes the relay to turn off, this connects pin 2 of the Wiper Motor to pin 5 of the Wiper Motor (via pin 87a and 30 of the relay). What I think happens here is that power is connected to pin 4 of the Wiper Motor, this must be internally connected to pin 2 via a switch, which allows us to continue to supply power to the slow pin 5 of the motor until it reaches the park position when pin 2 turns itself off.

POSSIBLE ENHANCEMENTS

Although I haven’t done this yet, one obvious enhancement that can be easily made to this circuit is the addition of intermittent wiper operation.

The simplest way would be to connect a momentary push button switch from the +ve supply to the slow wire of the toggle switch (or pin 86, or 87 of the relay). Just press the button for a single sweep of the wiper blades.

Taking this one step further you could add a simple electronic timer circuit to turn the relay on at say 10 to 15 second intervals. You would probably want to replace the toggle switch with a rotary switch that had multiple positions so you could then setup the switch  to have: Off – Intermittent – Slow – Fast.

This article may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes only, and full credit given to the author, Eriks Skinkis.

Damn fore shortening with wide angle lenses!

I love this angle

Evening splendour

The windscreen is angled back to 45 degrees

Long and lean and easy on the draw....

the hood scoop looks so much better than the previous bulge

I was undecided about the nose cone colour but eventually chose silver.

Cheers Comrades

i HAVE PAINTED THE HOOD SCOOP SILVER SINCE TAKING THIS PICTURE

LONG AND LEAN

THOSE SEATS ARE VERY COMFY

ARMCHAIR COMFORT

SO CLOSE THAT I CAN ALMOST FEEL THE WIND IN MY HAIR

KEEPING IT POLISHED WILL TAKE LOTS OF WORK

Some pictures of my progress.