Ray!

Well, I finally got around to making the rear door table for the Patrol, after lots of planning and sourcing of materials. The total build time was around six hours, but there was also a bit of waiting for glue to dry and running around for bits and pieces, so the whole project took about three days.

I wanted to make something slightly different to what others have made, so that the look is as close to factory as I could reasonably achieve with my limited workshop facilities (read basically none). This project was literally created on a Black and Decker foldout work table, and the kitchen and dining room tables (what I wouldn't give for a proper workshop.

Here's the final result and I'll post the stages in a separate post. The only thing that I'm not satisfied with is the closing mechanism (currently a spring drawing together the wires that support the table); I'll be looking for something neat that I can use for a better lock. I'm also still tossing around what I want for the top of the table. The splashback is intentionally white so that it will reflect light onto the table. The total cost of this table is $91.51 in materials and consumables.




This is what it started with, a sheet of 3mm thick aluminium:



Then it was off with the existing liner to trace out the shape and mark the holes for the plugs:



Once the shape and holes were marked (I used a pin vice first to mark the holes through the vinyl, so that it didn't leave any marks on the liner, and then centre punched the pin marks), then I outlined the cutout for the table:



Once the holes were drilled and the centre cut out, I was ready to start the lining. Cutting out the centre piece was the most frightening thing, as one slip and it was start again. I used a 4" grinder with one of those 1mm thick cutting wheels to cut out the table. A note for those who may try this, when using one of these thin cutting wheels, don't try and cut through immediately, just gently move the wheel along the cutting mark, using a piece of staright steel or timber as a guide, and let the weight of the grinder work its way through:



Time to test the farme on the door to ensure I got everything right. Spot on:



Time to position the hinge and table on the frame. This was just a test to ensure that everything fitted correctly:



The final stages involved gluing the matching vinyl to the frame and table. This took a bit of planning, as again, I didn't have any second chances to get it right. Yes I could have cut more vinyl, but then there was a huge mess of contact glue to clean off. This is how the frame came out and the table was much the same, so not point in additional shots:



I stuffed around with various loking mechanisms, including velcro, but eventually ended up with this:





It all works a treat.

Cheers

Ray

You turn the bolt in the centre of the hubs (with the tyre lever or a socket) so that the arrows align withe the locked arrows.

Cheers

Ray

In auto mode, the way the hubs work is that there is a series of bearings that act to lock the hubs when the axle turns. This allows a degree of freeplay that when subjected to shock loading can cause impact damage. When the hubs are manually locked, the bearings are locked in and can't move whatsoever and the hub effectively become one solid unit like a fully manual hub.

If you've ever seen or used one those bearing operated ratchet spanners, which have oval bearings that lock in one direction and run freely in the other, that will give you an idea of roughly how the auto hubs in the Patrol work. This type of mechanism is inherently strong, but not as strong as when the bearings are fully immobilised.

Cheers

Ray

Missing me yet?

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Ray

Missing me yet?

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Ray

I'm not sure exactly what you agree with; the part that individuals aren't responsible for their own weight, aka health?

I also don't think this is a media beat-up. It's another wedge being pushed into society, where do-gooders feel that people need to be looked after, because they believe they can't look after themselves. And of course to do this, government needs to fund the do-gooders that will be required to do all of this looking after.

Cheers

Ray

Who's bashing, this was quite funny. Well, for some at least.

OK, just to bring a smile to your dial:



Cheers

Ray

I’ve seen a bit of excitement lately about SSDs vs Hard Disk Drives on many of the tech sites/forums, especially since the price of SSDs have been falling and capacities have been increasing, though nowhere near the $/GB factor of traditional spinning platters. I've also been hinting at backup and recovery options in some recent posts and noted Linux as being a good option should things go wheels up on your PC. However, that only provides you with a way to recover data and not your operating system (OS) and programs that you may have installed on your PC.

If your PC goes wheels up, you may be able to recover your OS, but you're usually going to have to re-install all of your programs from scratch. And if it's a complete hard disk failure, then it can be a painful process, one which I've experienced twice so far in 30 years, which is twice too many. So what can you do? The solution is actually quite easy and not all that expensive considering the pain that you can avoid. Hard disk drives are pretty cheap nowadays, so you can afford to have at least one spare, acting as nothing but an image of your working system. I did just that the other day with my PC hard drive, as I have several 1TB hard drives lying around, so rather than let them languish, I thought I'd use one of them to create and store a complete image of my main PC. There are many ways to do this and even Windows gives you an option, but they aren't quite the best. I also wanted to do the same with my Gigabyte tablet, as I'd hate to have to rebuild everything from scratch, but I didn't have a spare 7mm form-factor hard drive.

To that end, a search through the local PC hardware sites (http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php, http://www.cplonline.com.au) gave me some options. I could get a suitable 500GB hard drive for $100, which was way overkill as far as capacity went or a 128 GB SSD for $130. So I thought I'd try out the SSD, since it was more than enough for what I needed and wasn't that much more than a regular hard drive, but what to get? By the way, I did a search on eBay and no one had prices that could match the two stores. A lot of research narrowed down the selection to three options, an Intel 520 120GB, an Intel 330 120GB or a Samsung 830 128GB SSD. The Intel 520 was reportedly the best SSD on the market at the moment, ie speed and reliability etc; with the Intel 330 close behind, but with performance hobbled to some degree to keep the price down. The Samsung 830 wasn't as fast as the Intel SSDs, but not far behind the Intel 330 and all reports I could find gave it a very high score as far as reliability. The Intel 520 was about $50 more than the Intel 330 and Samsung 830.

One thing I found from my research is that consumers SSDs, then cheapest variety, have tended to have quite a record of failure compared to regular hard drives; surprising really, considering that there are no moving parts. What apparently is the Achilles ’ Heel of SSDs is the controller and most SSDs use a SandForce controller, Intel included with the 520 and 330, and the controller can cause all sorts of issues causing the dreaded BSOD and even complete SSD failure. The SandForce controller is a generic controller sold to many SSD manufacturers and it's up to them to make sure it works properly with their SSDs. But these manufacturers don't necessarily work closely with SandForce, so their efforts at solving issues aren't always effective. But what Intel has done is work very closely with SandForce and modified aspects of the controller to improve the reliability so that they are confident about its long term performance; only Intel has access to these modifications. Samsung, on the other hand, make all their own components and so they all work in concert and don't rely on third parties.

Another aspect of SSDs is the need to regularly ‘clean’ the drive of ‘garbage’ that accumulates during read/write operations. With the Intel SSDs, and just about all the others that use SandForce controllers, this cleaning is done on the fly, which may reduce the overall performance of the SSD, but keeps performance consistent all the time. With the Samsung, the cleaning is done during quiet periods, which means that in intensive operations, the performance can drop significantly if cleaning is not able to be done. This can be a concern in data centres and where you are really making the SSD work for long periods of time on intensive tasks; something to consider when choosing an SSD. However, since my tablet was not going to be used in intensive tasks, I decided to go with the Samsung 830 128GB SSD for some reason. Maybe I was just a bit worried that despite the work that Intel had done with their latest SSDs, and favourable reports, they haven’t really proved themselves regarding long-term reliability. Anyway, the SSD arrived yesterday and it was time to clone the OS.

In order to clone a drive, you need to be able to connect the drive to the main PC and what I used was a SATA docking station that I’ve had for some time. This device enables you to insert a 2.5” or 3.5” SATA hard drive and connect it via a USB cable to any PC, a simple and elegant solution. The cloning process is actually quite easy, depending on what you use and my recommendation is to use software designed for this purpose. The Samsung came with an option to download Norton Ghost, which I had some reservations about, but decided to try anyway, since it was what Samsung offered. I thought that Norton Ghost would be on the disk provided, but it was actually available as a download, which I accessed through the Samsung SSD Magician software that I’d installed (more on that later). After downloading and installing Norton Ghost, I started the cloning process only to discover that what I’d downloaded was a 30 day trial version, but with the ability to do the clone. Also, as soon as I opened the program, it wanted to make all sorts of changes to my tablet. My suspicions had been vindicated. So I did a complete system restore to get rid of Norton Ghost. That fully confirms all of my previous views that anything that comes out of Symantec should go straight into the bin.

Anyway, I had a program already installed called Paragon Hard Disk Manager (http://www.paragon-s...me/hdm-personal), which allows for the migration of everything from one hard drive to another, as well as many other functions, and is what I’d used to clone my PC hard drive. I should have used this from the outset, but then I wouldn’t have had my confirmation of the Symantec rubbish. I also have another similar product, Acronis, which came with a laptop that I’d bought years ago, but I never became wedded to Acronis, as it had what I thought was a very obtuse interface. A lot of people swear by it, I just swore at it. Anyway, I discovered Paragon and when I bought it in 2010, it was pretty inexpensive and even the latest version is reasonably priced.

When cloning an SSD, using a dedicated program designed for this can be important, as an SSD works differently to a regular hard drive so it’s important apparently to match everything from one device to the other, including sectors or whatever from one drive to the other (Google cloning hard drives to SSDs and you’ll find out). There are differences in how both work devices work and if they aren’t matched properly, you can get all sorts of problems. Anyway, the cloning worked flawlessly and when I swapped the two drives in the tablet, it fired up as if nothing had changed. And that’s exactly what made me wonder what was going on, things should have been blistering fast for start-up etc, but they seemed to be much the same as with the normal hard drive. So once everything was confirmed to work, I opened the SSD Magician software to see what it would do.

The SSD Magician offers a range of disk and OS management and optimisation functions, so I went through all of these and selected the recommended options. I also did another Windows performance test and all that increased was hard drive data transfer rate figure from 5.7 to 7.7, everything else obviously stayed the same. So with further testing by opening and closing programs, shutting down the tablet and restarting once again, I can say that the SSD hasn’t measurably sped up many of the functions on the tablet. Some programs do open faster, such as Lightroom and Photoshop, but these are really are the most intensive of programs one can use and are usually quoted when SSDs are compared to regular hard drives. One program that does work a lot faster is Memory Map, not so much when opening, but loading maps is significantly faster, so I guess in these types of operations you can see the improvements.

Why doesn’t the SSD significantly improve performance like you so often hear? Well, I think it’s due to several factors. Firstly, the tablet isn’t a speed demon from the outset, so the hard drive isn’t the performance limiting factor that it can be on very high performance desktop PCs. Secondly, the original hard drive wasn’t a complete slug and by using Ready Boost, I was able to get pretty good performance out of the drive and associated operations. Thirdly, some things simply won’t work faster with an SSD, as they are dependent on accessing stuff on the net or network.

So is an SSD worthwhile? In a desktop environment, all the indicators are that SSDs can be very beneficial, especially if you put your OS and programs on the SSD and data elsewhere, but in my example and similar situations, you’re not going to get mind blowing results by installing an SSD. Power consumption, ie improved battery performance may improve, but I haven’t had a chance to measure this. If you need a lot of hard disk space, then a regular hard drive is, in my view, the better way to go, especially if you have space in your device for only one hard drive. I certainly wouldn’t have contemplated this even a year ago, as SSD prices were incredibly high compared to regular hard drives, but in this case it was worth a try.

Cheers

Ray

Wind power generation is actually very cost ineffective and only survives because of subsidies. Hydro is one of the most cost effective and sustainable energy sources available and with Tasmania's vast supplies of water, it seems kind of stupid that they aren't providing more power to the mainland. But then again, stupid is spelt G_R_E_E_N_S.

Cheers

Ray

Short drives will usually kill the fuel economy on diesels, as well as cause other issues, and addons like roof racks don't help. I average around 12.5/100km with my auto, but can get lower if I drive it easy. I always try to do a reasonable distance whenever I go out, so that everything fully warms up.

Cheers

Ray

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/07/this-weeks-top-web-comedy-video-the-dark-knight-and-60s-robin/

Cheers

Ray

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/07/this-weeks-top-web-comedy-video-the-dark-knight-and-60s-robin/

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Ray

I've used the OME 2" springs with the Comfort Shocks for years now and have found that combination to be excellent for ride and handling. I've had the OME standard shocks in the past (the ones they always try to install with the 2" kit) and found them to be extremely harsh. The Comfort Shocks have softer valving in the compression stroke, so you don't get the jolt (lift) on bumps like you do with most other shocks. I've done a 100,000+km on my current setup and still going strong.

Cheers

Ray

There have been any number of studies about dogs and their relationship with humans, and some say that dogs aren't really all that smart and that we anthropomorphise and simply project on to them what we wish to see. Other studies suggest that dogs change our own behaviour towards them, to the dogs benefit (which I can somewhat believe) but, that said, I think there's a lot more between the ears of a dog than the wish to work out how to get more food in their belly.

In our previous house, we had a kitchen that was about three time the size of the one in our new place and we'd established a line in the tiles which was 'in the kitchen and out of the kitchen' for our dogs; quite arbitrary and somewhat imaginary, but the dogs knew where it lay. Our two hounds are indoor dogs (if anyone hasn't noticed) and they grew up in our previous house until about six months ago and they are now nearly four years old. When we moved into our new digs in the country, one of the first things we did was set rules as to when and where the hounds could go in the new house.

The kitchen was one of the first places that had a go/no-go zone and it literally took no time to establish where foot (or paw in this case) could be set that constituted the 'kitchen'. When their food was being dished out, the kitchen was a go zone, but when our food was being prepared and dished out, it was a definite no-go zone. I can honestly say that it took no more than two commands of 'Out of the kitchen' and pointing out the boundary, that both hounds learned the rules. And if they sometimes forget (or pretend to), it only takes a sotto voce to remind one or the other of the transgression (which doesn't happen often) and they back off sheepishly. That's just one example, but a pretty important one.

It just reinforces to me that there's a lot more to dogs than what many give credence and while we may dote on them and they play on our emotions, there's a lot of smarts at work as well. People who have never owned dogs, just don't know.

Cheers

Ray

Abbott is not keen on getting him on board and has made that patently clear, so Queensland would be pretty stupid if they don't take note.

Cheers

Ray

That will need an investment of between $10,000-15,000, not including my consultancy fees (to get what a 3.0lt will get with $3000 or less). It may be better to enjoy the leisurely pace that lasts a lifetime.

Cheers

Ray

There's still around 15% who should move to Windows 7, I don't know why they haven't.

Cheers

Ray

I'm not sure that a piggyback system is the ideal way to go with petrol engines. Units like the Wolf, Motec, Haltech etc replace the entire ECU and allow you to set and manage every parameter of the engine. The Wolf3D that I installed in my TB42E allowed me to tune the engine to perfection (from memory at 250 RPM increments), though I did have to build a complete new distributor from the original carby model, as the EFI model wasn't compatible with the Wolf system. I also had to build the entire wiring loom for all the sensors, injectors etc, as none of the systems were plug and play. Nowadays I believe that they all just plug in. Just about all of them are now laptop tunable, compared to the somewhat clunky interface modules available in those days. I actually used a spreadsheet to log all settings, adjusted and graphed the results from hours of road testing to get optimal results.

Despite all of that, power was slightly improved over the carby engine and driveability was a lot better, but fuel economy wasn't that much improved. I thought I'd be getting significant improvements with the EFI over the carby, but with the carby mods that I'd done on the previous engine, the improvements were marginal at best with the EFI. So if anyone says that you'll be getting 20% fuel reduction with a piggyback system, take big steps backwards, because nothing will provide those sorts of fuel improvements, moreso because you're running LPG and petrol (both require different tuning).

A Scangauge is a great investment, but it won't work with a TB45, but I believe that the ECUtalk will and provides a lot more info than the Scangauge.

Cheers

Ray

The planet will have been saved.

Cheers

Ray

Well, filled this Patrol up:



A bit of wood collecting today.

Cheers

Ray

You'll find that will happen if you take their standard setup for a 2" lift. You have to insist (beat them over their thick skulls) that they install the Comfort Shocks, as the installers will instinctively reach for the standard shocks and install them. I had this happen to me and when I drove out of the shop, I went about 500m, turned around and went back to the shop and told them I wanted the Comfort Shocks installed. When they checked, the installer had put in standard shocks. For the life of me, I can't understand why they don't try and promote the Comfort Shocks more, as they'd have a shed load of happy people recommending them far and wide.

Cheers

Ray

I've used the OME 2" springs with the Comfort Shocks for years now and have found that combination to be excellent for ride and handling. I've had the OME standard shocks in the past (the ones they always try to install with the 2" kit) and found them to be extremely harsh. The Comfort Shocks have softer valving in the compression stroke, so you don't get the jolt (lift) on bumps like you do with most other shocks. I've done a 100,000+km on my current setup and still going strong.

Cheers

Ray

I've used the OME 2" springs with the Comfort Shocks for years now and have found that combination to be excellent for ride and handling. I've had the OME standard shocks in the past (the ones they always try to install with the 2" kit) and found them to be extremely harsh. The Comfort Shocks have softer valving in the compression stroke, so you don't get the jolt (lift) on bumps like you do with most other shocks. I've done a 100,000+km on my current setup and still going strong.

Cheers

Ray

Who cares! It tasted devine.

Cheers

Ray

Who cares! It tasted devine.

Cheers

Ray