Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[AVGresponding]

Yes, they threw Vauxhall under the bus too; now it's owned by that pan-euro-atlantic-pacific shite-box maker Stellantis, and will no doubt be murdered and all remaining manufacturing facilities in the UK will be offshored.

I thought that had already happened or was already at least substantively planned and announced, although I'm quite prepared to admit that I haven't been paying attention.

You may well be right, istr the last stuff made here was the Vivaro van, and they maybe did announce its imminent demise/offshoring. Bloody scandalous is the murder of our car manufacturing industry.

[25 CPS]

On cars. MOT pass. No issues. Dealer did it. Did some additional checks on it, topped up the oil and washer fluid and cleaned it inside and out. Latter was all free  .  They send you the report via email with full video of them doing it linked.

Full £54.85 but worth it IMHO over cheaping it out for a tenner saving.

Still done bugger all miles. Just hit 35k on a 2014 car.

$65 USD for an annual inspection? Fucking robbery. NYS annual inspection is fixed at $21 USD assuming no repairs to make it pass.

Yeah but if you drive a piece of trash they just register it out of state so there's no charge so the whole system is pointless there. So $21 is robbery 

Most states do have annual inspections. Two that I can think of that do not are Connecticut and Illinois.   

CT has a $20 "emissions" test which is basically this: They plug in a OBDII scanner and confirm that the ECM doesn't have any current codes and that it returns a positive for all applicable "Systems Readiness Tests". In English, this means that you didn't just park the car and clear the codes; it's been driven long enough to do the readiness tests and not throw a MIL. In many vehicles, that's as little as 5 minutes/5 miles. 

Pass, and you're good to go for 2 years.

However... my experience has been that states which don't have a annual safety inspection tend to be a bit more gung-ho on cops checking/ticketing for safety issues like bad lights, wipers and tires, and especially loud exhaust.

Such "fix-it tickets" can get very expensive very fast.

mnem
*toddles off to... somewhere.*

It's funny you mentioned loud exhaust.  I just got off the phone to book the truck in for muffler work since it's got an exhaust leak that widened up from a faint sputtering sound to a rumble and I want that quietened down before it turns into a full out thundering roar like a freight train that the previous truck was before it got traded in and went out in a blaze of glory.

I think your time in Ontario took place after DriveClean got killed.  Depending on model year, it was either take the vehicle in for an ODBII scan or put it on a dynamometer and exhaust gas analyzer.  The 97 Dodge Grand Caravan I had that got stolen needed the dynamometer but the 1998 model did not and that made it a pain near the end of its life since fewer and fewer places could do the dynamometer test for older vehicles.  One of the scams to skirt it was to have an old all wheel drive that required the dynamometer but couldn't be put on one since they could only handle two wheel drive cars.

Things got strange before Doug Ford scrapped DriveClean.  Hybrids and early electric cars didn't produce any exhaust at idle since they don't idle in the traditional sense.  There were newspaper articles about that.  Then, you could "pass" if your vehicle still didn't meet emissions but spent above a certain threshold on repairs towards correcting the problems causing that.  And in the situation of my previous truck, glitchy computer would throw ODB and codes and TPMS even though most of the fuel and evap system had been replaced and were good so it would flunk and I'd end up throwing away more money chasing phantom problems, hit the threshold and good for another couple of years.  The last time it had to go through this, the shop ended up massaging it on a road test to get it into the ready state after clearing the codes, then doing the DriveClean scan immediately after in order to get it to pass.

It was a relief not to have to go through that again after they finally scrapped the emissions testing for passenger vehicles and go after heavily polluting commercial and industrial vehicles.  My truck with the glitchy water damaged computer wasn't the problem but there's any number of out of tune diesel trucks and construction equipent out there blowing soot that the government wasn't concerned about.

Right now, I've got most of the road kit out of the used truck I picked up back in December and won't be loading it back up until after the exhaust is fixed on Monday.  That gives me some time to rethink what goes in the truck and how to arrange it in the cabinets in the back.

[AVGresponding]

How about this then? Supercharger and V8. Thing went like a cut snake, was the only one of it's type in Japan at the time. 

Yeah, all very impressive I suppose, but personally it's not for me. If I won the lottery the only muscle cars in my collection would be old school ones, none of this retro-fashionable bollocks. I also have a somewhat sceptical view on these modern ludicrous power figures. People are bad enough drivers as it is, without giving them the means to upgrade their demise from "unfortunate" to "unbelievably destructive". Here's a good case in point, with fortunately only an embarrassing and expensive ending:

[Specmaster]

Hmm, that's odd, because my car also has a turbo and I can honestly say that I have not noticed any lag in it cutting in at all.

Turbodiesels are better in this regard than turbo petrol engines, partially because any diesel has a flatter broader torque curve so there's less of a  low spot and it's  less noticeable, and one also just doesn't expect the throttle response from a diesel that one does from a petrol engine. Plus you're used to a car with a 0-60 time of 10 seconds or longer (I'm not sure exactly which model you have), whereas I'm really talking about sport models more in 6 to 7 second bracket where these things are much more noticeable.

0 to 60 of 10 seconds, where did you get that from, I can assure you that the quoted figure for my car is 8.6 seconds to 62mph. That figure not such a long ago would have been cloud-cuckoo-land for such a large and heavy car, and would have been certainly the level expected of a sports car. It is a testimony to modern engineers that such times today are indeed possible, even without resorting to mnem's sticking a big V8 in the engine bay, or indeed Anders weight reduction techniques that Colin Chapman was so good at (along with chassis tweaks), and still being economical and low emissions. Likewise I'm not sure that a car that measures just 4.8 metres long can be called a land yacht, there are plenty of cars longer and nowhere in the world is  that more true than America. It is true that American cars are nowhere as large as they once used to be, but they are still pretty big when compared with European cars.

[Specmaster]

How about this then? Supercharger and V8. Thing went like a cut snake, was the only one of it's type in Japan at the time. 

Yeah, all very impressive I suppose, but personally it's not for me. If I won the lottery the only muscle cars in my collection would be old school ones, none of this retro-fashionable bollocks. I also have a somewhat sceptical view on these modern ludicrous power figures. People are bad enough drivers as it is, without giving them the means to upgrade their demise from "unfortunate" to "unbelievably destructive". Here's a good case in point, with fortunately only an embarrassing and expensive ending:

When idiots stuff huge great engines like that into a car, that means it broaches the bonnet (hood for you Americans) line like that, it is a recipe for a disaster as forward vision is massively restricted, and is to be considered an accident just waiting to happen.

EDIT
I have a TomTom add-on satnav mounted right at the bottom of the windscreen, in the middle of the dash and in no way does it impinge on my forward vision. But for a number of years, the MOT tester at my dealers has made some written comment about its location, saying that it was obstructing forward vision. I can only assume that he must a very short person.

[Cerebus]

0 to 60 of 10 seconds, where did you get that from, I can assure you that the quoted figure for my car is 8.6 seconds to 62mph.

Like I said, I didn't know which model you have, and 10 is the middle of the range for the "Superb".

So, 8.6? The last time I had a car that slow was the 1980s. 

Likewise I'm not sure that a car that measures just 4.8 metres long can be called a land yacht, there are plenty of cars longer ...

And 'twas not me that described it as a land yacht, but 4.8 metres sounds pretty much at the upper end of car lengths, 95%ile or thereabout. In Euro-NCAP terms it would be E-segment "executive cars" the next size up from D-segment which is labelled as "large family cars". The British Parking Association recommends 4.8 metres for the length of a parking space (2.4 wide) and that includes an allowance for access to the boot, space between vehicles and so on, so your car is too big for a "standard" parking space. So Land Yacht? Probably not. Land Gin Palace? Maybe.

[factory]

The car I just mentioned is French  (Citroen)

Got a Citroen as a replacement car after an accident in winter 2010. It had a full metal gear shift knob and it felt it was bound to permafrost through a heat pipe...

That’s a feature. The gear stick goes into an ice cube tray full of large nuts.

Citroen can’t do gear boxes I will admit 

Their gear change rods/mechanism are a load of shite too, aftermarket parts don't fit properly either.   

The 0 to 60mph  is irrelevant for me, the only road on my daily commute with a 60 limit is a narrow twisty lane, it's unsafe to go above 40, unless you want to crash into cycles, people or oncoming traffic (dickheads driving in the middle of the road through blind bends), the big main road got reduced to 50, every other road is 30 or 40.
Also don't have enough gears in the petrol Citroen van to make 60 economical, think it's a 1.4L version.

Interesting Wales have decided to reduce residential areas to 20, from sometime next year and Scotland are interested in doing the same.

Anyway that's enough autoshite  from me for a month, or three.

David

[factory]

Regarding the hp 3476A DMM, if you're interested in what hp was thinking to make such a meter, I attached an explanation of what they were thinking about. It came from the Hewlett-Packard Journal, Feb 1977, p.21

(zipped pdf too large to attach)

Just googled the 970A. That's one ugly fucker  :-D

That one was clever in that it had an inverting display, so you could use it pointing away from you, or pointing down like a probe, and it would still be readable (the slide switch just below the display in the image flipped it).  I seem to recall reading somewhere (the HPAK list maybe?) that the biggest problem with them was their adhesive tendencies - they apparently used to stick to people's fingers and disappear from workplaces.

-Pat

The plastic used seems to age really badly on those too, not sure I can open the battery compartment on mine without breaking it.

David

[bd139]

Probably got Philips to supply the plastics then 

Sorry meant to contact you. I’m slowly working on extracting those bits for you. Should finish by the weekend if nothing else explodes in my face 

[factory]

Regarding the hp 3476A DMM, if you're interested in what hp was thinking to make such a meter, I attached an explanation of what they were thinking about. It came from the Hewlett-Packard Journal, Feb 1977, p.21

(zipped pdf too large to attach)

Here's a pic of the custom IC:


And an overall one of the entire board:


It is affixed solder side up to the top part of the clamshell enclosure.

-Pat

Both of mine seem to be a later revision, one is so late that the serial number sticker is missing, bloody cheapskates for not stamping them on both. 





Some more pictures are attached below, all taken a few years ago.

Probably got Philips to supply the plastics then 

Sorry meant to contact you. I’m slowly working on extracting those bits for you. Should finish by the weekend if nothing else explodes in my face 

That OK, there's no immediate rush for them, not had much time to play with TEA either, have been quite tried with work & the heat the last week or so.

David

[mnementh]

Just got an e-mail from some subcontractor company saying he is interested in my profile, but not sure if that's a scam or not because the name of this company " Care Technology Consulting " rings no bell and their web site fails to load, with that weird error below that I have never seen before.... could people try to connect and tell me if they manage to get a website, or do you get the same error as I do ?! 

Thank you very much.

If they are legit but can't even get a website to load yet still advertise it in the e-mails they sent out to people, I am not sure I would want to work for them... the HR dept. would probably not pay me because " Sorry our payroll S/W fails to load, we apologize for the inconvenience... ".

http://www.caretechnologyconsulting.com/

EDIT : forum fails to display the thumbnail pic or let me link / embed it in this message... it only lets one download the picture that's all. Oh well.... here is what the error says :

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or '}' in /home/caretech/www/wp-includes/pomo/entry.php on line 61

Care technology consulting really cares about technology so much that they can't fix their shitty web site.

So yeah I wouldn't bother.

I dunno that it's relevant... from what I've heard and read back when I was batty over the SR-71 and spent days staying up into the wee hours reading the recently declassified bits of their service history, the business Vince works in tends to cater to mega-corporations and defense contractors (aerospace manufacturing).

One of the things I picked up on in the course of that research was that those entities all generally tend to deal with each other on a "it's who you know" basis. Having a modern public face would not really be that high on their priority list... in fact, discretion tends to be a valued stock in trade.  It was part of the reason so little of the history of these amazing aircraft was widely known. 

I may be completely wrong in that understanding... but that was what I made of the "gestalt" of aerospace in general. I have no idea how much that has changed since; Ifni knows the area where I am now used to live & breathe aerospace. Now, not so much. 

mnem
*sander-ily*

Yeah you are completely wrong indeed ! 

You might be right if I were a top level design engineer working in area 51 in the US, working on a top secret military contract for the latest flying saucer tested at night in the desert..... but I am not on that side of the business at all ! Robert might be though... more than me for sure.

No, there is nothing secret working at Airbus here. It's just a big factory / assembly line / workshop, albeit huge because we happen to make airplanes not wheel barrows., so it requires a lot of space...
but just a factory. So lots of workers busy in the workshop putting the A/C together as fast as they can to make all the white collars in the open spaces right next to the A/Cs, happy with the numbers they see in real time on their Excel spreadsheets and SAP extracts.

There are lots of subcontractors in both the workshop and offices/open spaces, trying to make a living by offering to do all the shit jobs Airbus doesn't want to do, for as cheaply as possible to get the job. All the subcontractors are well known, because well, everyone of them is required to wear shirts, jackets, safety caps bearing the logo / name of who the hell it is that they are working for. So every time you stumble upon someone in the workshop or offices, you instantly know if he works for Airbus proper, or some contractors, and which one. Also, subcontractors on their desk, have to put a little sign that again shows what contractor they work for, their full name, their job title and phone number.

Also, in order not to mix cats and dogs, Airbus issues BLUE background badges, that one is supposed to wear at all times and make it visible (around their neck usually) to Airbus employees, and RED background badges to all the subcontractors... so that you can spot them from a mile away and stop chatting in case one of them is approaching and you were discussing stuff you don't want subcontractors to hear about.

No, nothing secret at all about subcontractors at an Airbus plant !

Yeah, I kindof know that scenario. One of my clients when I was a Lenovo ASP was a USAF installation. Standard security (aside from every bit of my "Little Bag of Dirty Tricks" searched and all phone/computing devices/media locked in a locker, etc) was that I was escorted at all times by a well-recognized department officer, and all the while I was moving through the facility whenever we went through a doorway or approached a cubicle area he'd announce "White Badge coming through".  I was then observed throughout the duration of my service work, and any parts removed during repair would be inspected for any form of media before I was allowed to leave.

As for the "Secret Squirrel Society" hijinks... I wasn't talking about you as a tech... I was talking about the kind of people who might hire you. What I gathered was that they tended to operate on a "it's who you know" basis, and that for them, a modern public face might not necessarily be a high priority.

mnem
 

[med6753]

Regarding the hp 3476A DMM, if you're interested in what hp was thinking to make such a meter, I attached an explanation of what they were thinking about. It came from the Hewlett-Packard Journal, Feb 1977, p.21

(zipped pdf too large to attach)

Here's a pic of the custom IC:


And an overall one of the entire board:


It is affixed solder side up to the top part of the clamshell enclosure.

-Pat

Both of mine seem to be a later revision, one is so late that the serial number sticker is missing, bloody cheapskates for not stamping them on both. 





Some more pictures are attached below, all taken a few years ago.

David

I spy a blue Philips crapacitor in both versions. 

[mnementh]

Yep. Rocking the 0.99L 3 cyl here 

Sounds like a V8 if you stick kangaroo juice in it.

I think you've been drinking too much of the kangaroo juice. Nothing sound like a V-8 except a V-8.

I have no problem with folks keeping the heavy metal of yesteryear alive... I'll always be a motorhead, and there still is no replacement for displacement. But this is a different world; these toys of yesteryear have to be treated as toys, not as a way of life if we are to survive as a species. We cannot afford for those lovely beasts to be anybody's "daily driver" any longer.

mnem

Aaaaand this has always been utter nonsense. This is why Colin Chapman's designs blew all the primitive displacement based ones into the weeds.

The only thing adding displacement is good for is going fast in a straight line. For anything else, weight reduction is the real answer. Hence how Mini Coopers could beat 7-litre+ yank tanks in the early days of touring cars.

And it's equally arguable that your line of reasoning is just wankers spankin' it because they can't get their hands on a real car.

Anything you can do to a tiny engine you can do to a big engine and get even more power. Simple physics.

You don't have a right to judge how people like to play, or their choice of toys... don't be a dick, man.

mnem
 

You're completely missing the point, not sure if deliberately or not, but w/e.

The Point: Weight reduction improves EVERY aspect of a car's performance. Putting a bigger engine in it, or for that matter keeping the same engine and increasing the power by boring/stroking it, ONLY improves (assuming you have the traction and gearing headroom) straight line acceleration and top speed. That is simple physics.

I have not at any point criticised or judged other people's method or means of playing, that's entirely in your head. I put it to you that it is not I that is "being a dick".

That is exactly what you were doing. There is nothing wrong with wanting NOTHING MORE than to go fast in a straight line. There is nothing wrong with wanting to strap your ass to the biggest chunk of horsepower you can muster, and just PUNCH IT.

You were passing judgement on that, and denigrating that form of play. You were being a dick.

EDIT: And speaking of MISSING THE POINT ENTIRELY: My point was explicitly that musclecars are a toy and need to be treated as such. You're the one had to jump on them being huge and wasteful, as if that matters more than a fat heap of dingoes' kidneys when we're talking about toys.

mnem
Try putting a 460 into a VW Beetle some time. The thrill is visceral, and partly because it is dumb and dangerous and puts you out of control.

No, just no. You're reading between the lines what you want to believe, and not what I said. Standard Mnem.

I pointed out the fallacy of the statement "there's no replacement for displacement", nothing more. I think you'll find that people who get their kicks from driving fast in a straight line for around 10 seconds ALSO get serious on the weight reduction, if they are competitive. I have NOTHING against this pastime, even if it's not for me.

As for musclecars being "just toys", this is a stereotypical view normally only seen outside north America, and if I'd said that I would have been in the wrong and could have been justifiably called on it. I know people in the UK that daily drive a muscle car. I bet a lot more do it in the US and Canada.

I also never mentioned them being huge and wasteful, again. you're imagining things that just are not true. Did you not notice I posted a yt link to a CLASSIC MUSCLE CAR when disagreeing with the statement "there's no better sound than a supercharger"?

If you're going to pick a fight with someone, at least do it for something they actually said or did, not just what you imagined they said or did.

I'm sorry; I can't hear you over the sound of you backpedaling...

TL/DR: You picked this fight, and it was over a point you evidently don't even disagree with. I've had my belly full; I'm gonna go sand a fucking table. At least something productive will happen today. 

mnem
vroom.

[factory]

Regarding the hp 3476A DMM, if you're interested in what hp was thinking to make such a meter, I attached an explanation of what they were thinking about. It came from the Hewlett-Packard Journal, Feb 1977, p.21

(zipped pdf too large to attach)

Here's a pic of the custom IC:


And an overall one of the entire board:


It is affixed solder side up to the top part of the clamshell enclosure.

-Pat

Both of mine seem to be a later revision, one is so late that the serial number sticker is missing, bloody cheapskates for not stamping them on both. 





Some more pictures are attached below, all taken a few years ago.

David

I spy a blue Philips crapacitor in both versions. 

Erm it's a blue Sprague 500D in both, also are those trim pots the shite ones, that the plastic top drops off from?

P.S. last picture didn't upload properly. 


David

[med6753]

Massive snip

 

[med6753]

Erm it's a blue Sprague 500D in both, also are those trim pots the shite ones, that the plastic top drops off from?



David

I stand corrected. But since I'm sitting I sit corrected. 

[Specmaster]

0 to 60 of 10 seconds, where did you get that from, I can assure you that the quoted figure for my car is 8.6 seconds to 62mph.

Like I said, I didn't know which model you have, and 10 is the middle of the range for the "Superb".

So, 8.6? The last time I had a car that slow was the 1980s. 

Likewise I'm not sure that a car that measures just 4.8 metres long can be called a land yacht, there are plenty of cars longer ...

And 'twas not me that described it as a land yacht, but 4.8 metres sounds pretty much at the upper end of car lengths, 95%ile or thereabout. In Euro-NCAP terms it would be E-segment "executive cars" the next size up from D-segment which is labelled as "large family cars". The British Parking Association recommends 4.8 metres for the length of a parking space (2.4 wide) and that includes an allowance for access to the boot, space between vehicles and so on, so your car is too big for a "standard" parking space. So Land Yacht? Probably not. Land Gin Palace? Maybe.

I'm not going to be drawn into a long debate here, but I'd just like to point out the following:
By your own admission, you have had mid-engined cars, which by default are sports cars surely?, you also stated that you had a MGF (which was introduced in 1995), length of 3.9 metres, (assumed you had the biggest engine, 118 Kw) kerb weight of 1060Kg 0-60mph time of 6.9 seconds.

Mine is only 900mm longer, 125Kw but has a kerb weight of 1634Kg and is designed to carry 5 people who are 1.93m tall, so that was the car that I needed and no more to transport my family, of which 4 of us are 1.93m in height.

Given that your MGF had to move just 9Kg per 1Kw to my 13Kg per 1Kw so its not to shabby for a Skoda and 8.6 seconds 0-60 is plenty fast enough for all my needs, it can leave most cars in its wake at traffic lights.

[mnementh]

How about this then? Supercharger and V8. Thing went like a cut snake, was the only one of it's type in Japan at the time. 

Yeah, that's a Kenne Bell MOPAR kit; looks like the 170mm. Roughly equivalent to a 6-71; should easily be able to get 1100HP or more out of a properly-built bored & stroked small-block. Modern programmable EFI system are fecking amazing; they can run so much leaner and so much more HP/liter of fuel than we could get back in the float-bowls & jet-plates days. They can lean right out to the point of detonation and then back into the safe zone in a few revs of the engine, before you could even hear the difference by ear. And do it at any load demand, at any throttle position.

Little bit of over here.

mnem
Nitromethane: It's what's for dinner.

[mnementh]

Hmm, that's odd, because my car also has a turbo and I can honestly say that I have not noticed any lag in it cutting in at all.

Turbodiesels are better in this regard than turbo petrol engines, partially because any diesel has a flatter broader torque curve so there's less of a  low spot and it's  less noticeable, and one also just doesn't expect the throttle response from a diesel that one does from a petrol engine. Plus you're used to a car with a 0-60 time of 10 seconds or longer (I'm not sure exactly which model you have), whereas I'm really talking about sport models more in 6 to 7 second bracket where these things are much more noticeable.

0 to 60 of 10 seconds, where did you get that from, I can assure you that the quoted figure for my car is 8.6 seconds to 62mph. That figure not such a long ago would have been cloud-cuckoo-land for such a large and heavy car, and would have been certainly the level expected of a sports car. It is a testimony to modern engineers that such times today are indeed possible, even without resorting to mnem's sticking a big V8 in the engine bay, or indeed Anders weight reduction techniques that Colin Chapman was so good at (along with chassis tweaks), and still being economical and low emissions. Likewise I'm not sure that a car that measures just 4.8 metres long can be called a land yacht, there are plenty of cars longer and nowhere in the world is  that more true than America. It is true that American cars are nowhere as large as they once used to be, but they are still pretty big when compared with European cars.

I thought you once said you drove for a bus company back in the day? That's what I was ribbing you aboot.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

CT has a $20 "emissions" test which is basically this: They plug in a OBDII scanner and confirm that the ECM doesn't have any current codes and that it returns a positive for all applicable "Systems Readiness Tests". In English, this means that you didn't just park the car and clear the codes; it's been driven long enough to do the readiness tests and not throw a MIL. In many vehicles, that's as little as 5 minutes/5 miles. 

Pass, and you're good to go for 2 years.

However... my experience has been that states which don't have a annual safety inspection tend to be a bit more gung-ho on cops checking/ticketing for safety issues like bad lights, wipers and tires, and especially loud exhaust.

Such "fix-it tickets" can get very expensive very fast.

mnem
*toddles off to... somewhere.*

It's funny you mentioned loud exhaust.  I just got off the phone to book the truck in for muffler work since it's got an exhaust leak that widened up from a faint sputtering sound to a rumble and I want that quietened down before it turns into a full out thundering roar like a freight train that the previous truck was before it got traded in and went out in a blaze of glory.

I think your time in Ontario took place after DriveClean got killed.  Depending on model year, it was either take the vehicle in for an ODBII scan or put it on a dynamometer and exhaust gas analyzer.  The 97 Dodge Grand Caravan I had that got stolen needed the dynamometer but the 1998 model did not and that made it a pain near the end of its life since fewer and fewer places could do the dynamometer test for older vehicles.  One of the scams to skirt it was to have an old all wheel drive that required the dynamometer but couldn't be put on one since they could only handle two wheel drive cars.

Things got strange before Doug Ford scrapped DriveClean.  Hybrids and early electric cars didn't produce any exhaust at idle since they don't idle in the traditional sense.  There were newspaper articles about that.  Then, you could "pass" if your vehicle still didn't meet emissions but spent above a certain threshold on repairs towards correcting the problems causing that.  And in the situation of my previous truck, glitchy computer would throw ODB and codes and TPMS even though most of the fuel and evap system had been replaced and were good so it would flunk and I'd end up throwing away more money chasing phantom problems, hit the threshold and good for another couple of years.  The last time it had to go through this, the shop ended up massaging it on a road test to get it into the ready state after clearing the codes, then doing the DriveClean scan immediately after in order to get it to pass.

It was a relief not to have to go through that again after they finally scrapped the emissions testing for passenger vehicles and go after heavily polluting commercial and industrial vehicles.  My truck with the glitchy water damaged computer wasn't the problem but there's any number of out of tune diesel trucks and construction equipent out there blowing soot that the government wasn't concerned about.

Right now, I've got most of the road kit out of the used truck I picked up back in December and won't be loading it back up until after the exhaust is fixed on Monday.  That gives me some time to rethink what goes in the truck and how to arrange it in the cabinets in the back.

Yeah; the Rav4 was brammy-spankin' new when we were there, so exempt for two years, then we were stuck on the right side of the border, but still registered in the US until COVID blew over and... 

It wasn't until we landed here in CT that we ever had the car inspected. It passed of course... same with our 22-year-old Saturn.

mnem
 

[Cubdriver]

I spy a blue Philips crapacitor in both versions. 

'tis actually a late 1975 vintage Sprague (note no waist pinch, which seesm to be common on the Philips ones IIRC):


I haven't tested it yet.

-Pat

Edit to add - guess I should have read a few posts further along before replying.    

[Specmaster]

Hmm, that's odd, because my car also has a turbo and I can honestly say that I have not noticed any lag in it cutting in at all.

Turbodiesels are better in this regard than turbo petrol engines, partially because any diesel has a flatter broader torque curve so there's less of a  low spot and it's  less noticeable, and one also just doesn't expect the throttle response from a diesel that one does from a petrol engine. Plus you're used to a car with a 0-60 time of 10 seconds or longer (I'm not sure exactly which model you have), whereas I'm really talking about sport models more in 6 to 7 second bracket where these things are much more noticeable.

0 to 60 of 10 seconds, where did you get that from, I can assure you that the quoted figure for my car is 8.6 seconds to 62mph. That figure not such a long ago would have been cloud-cuckoo-land for such a large and heavy car, and would have been certainly the level expected of a sports car. It is a testimony to modern engineers that such times today are indeed possible, even without resorting to mnem's sticking a big V8 in the engine bay, or indeed Anders weight reduction techniques that Colin Chapman was so good at (along with chassis tweaks), and still being economical and low emissions. Likewise I'm not sure that a car that measures just 4.8 metres long can be called a land yacht, there are plenty of cars longer and nowhere in the world is  that more true than America. It is true that American cars are nowhere as large as they once used to be, but they are still pretty big when compared with European cars.

I thought you once said you drove for a bus company back in the day? That's what I was ribbing you aboot.

mnem
 

Ha ha so that's what you were on about then eh? Nah, I never drove for a bus company, I was an auto electrician at a bus company and part of my job was to take out buses and 12 metre coaches on road test at the end of the working day when the fitters had finished the routine servicing of them. Very few of them either had driving licences or had been approved and cleared for driving them by the companies driving school. I guess I was just a natural driver as I only spent a day in the driving school along with drivers training to become proper bus drivers. We were all taking turns to drive a double decker, and my stint came just after lunch at the depot in Braintree and I drove for 25 minutes back to the Chelmsford depot, a distance of just 12 miles.

The chief driving instructor walked into my bosses office and said that he had no idea why I had been sent on a driving course as I was already competent and that as far as he was concerned I needed no training. I mentioned in an earlier post that every Thursday we had to wash the garage floor and that every vehicle had to be moved to do that. I had been driving these buses around within the confines of the garage for months before going to driving school, so I guess I had learnt how to handle them doing that.

[mnementh]

Ahhh.... okay. I thought your job entailed both working in the garage and part-time driving active routes when needed.

mnem
D'OH! 

[Cubdriver]

I'm not sure where this thing lived, but it had white fuzz on the display connector insulator, and the pins had a uniform coating of non-conductive nastiness on them.  Traces on the display look rather discolored, too, like it was in some sort of unpleasant atmosphere.  The rest doesn't look too bad, though, so who knows?


I removed the white fuzz with a gentle brushing using an old toothbrush, then cleaned the exposed pins with a DeOxit-soaked piece of green Scotchbrite:


Then did a quickie test using a bench supply.  DC readings are at least in the ballpark:




Now working on the enclosure - those stains are rather stubborn.


-Pat

[Cubdriver]

Both of mine seem to be a later revision, one is so late that the serial number sticker is missing, bloody cheapskates for not stamping them on both. 


David

Mine's a 1538A s/n prefix.  Did they switch to a label from the stamped serial number on the later units, or is it possible that the enclosure bottom was replaced at some point?   A replacement part could be one possible explanation for the lack of serial number...

-Pat