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Crash and Burn… Litterally

Published on 2008-12-15 in Electronics and Repairs. 0 Comments

So Wednesday night my desktop locked up, which was quite unusual, then it was running slow so I shut it down and it never came back up. It wasn’t until Thursday night that I was able to determine that the Windows Partition of my primary hard drive had crashed. Somehow the formatting had become currupted such that the PC could see the drive but had no idea what was on it, or how things were stored.

My brother had dropped off his PC, which wasn’t working right, so I spent time fixing his (which turned out to be driver incompatability issues… this is the third time this year where I’ve seen windows update upgrade drivers to new versions that don’t work… yay). Once that was squared away I got to work on building another PC from scratch so that I could not only get back online but use it as a tool to help recover (or at least determine the extent of damage to) my crashed hard drive.

I spent most of my day on Saturday working on this… Saturday night however my Marantz SR6200 decided to catch fire… this was turning out to be an expensive weekend. Thankfully shortly after the fire I was able to finish diagnostics on the crahsed hard drive and repaired the borked formatting…

Saturday night this is how my office looked:

From left to right: an Xbox I just finished fixing, my post fire SR6200, the PC I threw together, and my desktop with it’s hard drives pulled out the side.

The desktop is running well enough to get my files backedup but in general it’s acting like it’s got brain damage, some programs just flat out wont run, others will run for a while and then just stop working, and it’s a whole lot slower than it was before. I’ve got everything backed up now and a new hard drive on order. In the mean time I’m using the piece-built PC, it’s only a P3 700MHz but it gets the job done.

While finding the source of the fire in the Marantz wasn’t easy, it became pretty clear once I unbolted the amplifier board…

It looks like a major transistor failed. The part was an SAP16 NPN 1413 Darlington transistor made by Sanken Electric. I found replacements online for $2 a piece. Hopefully nothing else was damaged and the receiver will be back up and running with a fresh replacement.

Even if I do get it running again I’ll probably just sell it and buy a new Receiver. I’ve been shopping around online and a comparable replacement is in the realm of $1200 new… that’s with similar power and audio quality in addition to new features like support for HDMI 1.3a and HD audio formats.

I’m looking heavily at the Marantz SR6003 or SR7002 to replace this receiver, if anyone has any suggestions let me know.

Out with the KA…

Published on 2008-11-09 in 240SX, Cars and Hacks. 0 Comments

So Joe, Dan, and James stopped by tonight and pulled my KA.

Even taking their time, and taking frequent breaks to make fun of my lacking toolbox (I believe “even MacGyver had more to work with than this” was stated by Joe at some point) they still managed to get the thing out in about 2 hours time… I’ve even got ABS and AC and they managed to pull the motor leaving all of that equipment in place.

Quite impressive, and now the seal is broken so it’s time to start cleaning the engine bay and prepping the LS1…

Evapo-Rust Mini Review

Published on 2008-10-26 in 240SX, Cars, Repairs and Tools. 0 Comments

So I had these bolts and eccentric washers that I took off my car and replaced and really I didn’t even need to. The old ones were coated in surface rust so I decided to try some stuff to take it off.

I had read a few raving reviews about Evapo-Rust and seen some videos so I decided to give it a shot. The stuff looks like anti-freeze but it feels slippery like dish-soap on your fingers. It’s pretty expensive too this bottle cost just under $9 and it was barely enough to do the hardware I was cleaning. Though it’s supposedly reusable so I dumped it back in the bottle once I was done.

Here’s a picture of my hardware beforeI did anything.

Notice there is both surface rust as wella as this thick black stuff. That thick black stuff is rubberized undercoating because the previous owner of the car had it coated to prevent rusting and it got on some of the bolts. It looks really nasty but it doesn’t harm anything. Apparently Evapo-Rust doesn’t harm plastic or rubber so I went into this assuming that it would leave theundercoating stuff (which kind of sucks becaus it looks ugly).

I dumped the whole bottle of of the stuff in the bottom of a cut-up water jug and just dumped all my hardware in there. Supposidly it does it’s work in a matter of minutes but I was on my way out so i just left it for the night.

The next morning after rincing off the hardware it looked like this:

Some patches of rust still remained but it was mostly cosmetic as the parts were all smooth to the touch. As suspected the undercoated parts were still narly. I decided to try a 2nd application to see if it could get rid of the rest of the crap to make them completely clean.

I’m pretty happy with the outcome, if I want to remove the undercoated parts I’ll have to use paint stripper or a wire brush but on a whole the Evapo-Rust did it’s job. $9 might be a bit much but considering that all of this hardware NEW from Nissan cost nearly $100 to replace, I’m fairly certain that next time I take off some bolts I’ll clean them with this stuff before deciding to replace them. At least now the parts are clean enough that I’ll be able more easily sell them and recoup some of the money I spent on the new parts.

Saturn to 360 Adapter Revival?

Published on 2008-10-17 in Electronics, Hacks and Video Games. 16 Comments

cracksolth left a few comments on the page for my Saturn to 360 adapter, as a result I started looking back into it. I contacted the guys from Acid mods (great guys BTW) to see if they were doing anything different that would help me streamline the design. In terms of communicating with the older “Matrix” style 360 controllers I didn’t really learn much that I hadn’t already discovered; however I did learn that the newer Common Ground style controllers are getting easier to find by the day and that most of the new colored controllers all use that style of innards.

They even supplied me with this handy graphic to determine the difference between a Matrix and a CG controller without having to crack it open.

As a result I’ve decided to abandon the Matrix style controllers for the time being and just track down a CG style controller to work with since that will allow me to dramatically reduce the pin count.

I’m going to do some playing around and if I like the results I might re-open this project…

My goals this time is to get it to a point of making a “kit” or perhaps even making it easy enough that I can lower the costs involved as well as the ease of install so that more people can get their hands on this. If this is something you’ve been waiting for then you’ve only got cracksolth to thank.

Shoot me an email or post a comment if you have ideas for features you’d like to see.

Refinish Restorer

Published on 2008-10-10 in Cars, Repairs and Tools. 1 Comment

After getting harassed by a co-worker for having ugly faded plastic cladding on my Vehicross, I finally got around to trying out the Refinish Restorer product I imported from Germany. I am so incredibly happy with the results, you have no idea.

BEFORE – AFTER

Subtle Changes in Appearance

Published on 2008-10-03 in 240SX and Cars. 0 Comments

I recently added some clear turn signal covers to the Vehicross (along with orange bulbs so they light up the proper color) .

I also picked up a Silvia Grill for the 240sx. I had looked at these when I first got the car and could only find them beat up and in really odd colors for $200 ish prices after shipping… I saw this one, in great shape and with original paint in my color for about 1/4th that so I snatched it up.

I think both of these do quite a bit to clean up the looks of the cars a bit… and wow, both of my cars need a bath.

Door Handle Illumination Circuit

Published on 2008-09-25 in Cars, Electronics and Hacks. 0 Comments

One of the members on Vehicross.info wanted a circuit that would light up the interior door handles of his car for a few seconds after he turned the key off to allow passengers to more easily find the door handles in the dark (they are actually difficult to find in the VX since they’re mounted quite low).

I came up with a circuit using a 555 timer in Monostable mode that looks for the ACC signal to dissappear, since it goes from 12V to float and since the 555 needs a pulse I used both a pull down resistor to ground as well as an RC circuit to pull the 555 trigger back up.

Power Folding Mirrors

Published on 2008-09-11 in 240SX, Cars, Electronics and Hacks. 1 Comment

I have a set of power folding mirrors for the 240, I’m thinking about customizing them so that they auto fold in and out with the ignition.

Here’s a circuit I drew up.

Fixed Simon

Published on 2008-09-04 in Electronics and Repairs. 0 Comments

Rudy found an old Simon game from 1986 (the date on the box) that wasn’t working…

I cracked it open…

…and fixed it up!

then I “tested” it for about an hour.

Cleaning up the Vehicross

Published on 2008-08-02 in Cars and Repairs. 0 Comments

So yesterday I registered, the Vehicross, after which I had the oil changed with a full synthetic and had the coolant flushed and replaced, and changed the air filter.

Today I spent some time cleaning up the cloudy headlights…

YUCK!

Half Done!

All Done… it looks like new