More Jaguar Woes

While the wheels are off in Seattle getting new tires mounted, the Jag is 2 feet off the ground out in the barn. Of course, we had to have an earthquake, and a windstorm too! 3.6 tremor last Thursday evening, epicenter Whidbey Island. I called home and Christopher asked me if I felt it, I of course wondered if the car fell off. Thankfully it didn’t. Then on Saturday we had a HUGE windstorm. Knocked out power for us most of the day so I couldn’t work on the car. I finally did get to it on Sunday morning and spent what I hoped would be a pleasant few hours out in the barn…

I figured it was time for some chassis/suspension maintenance. Staring at the left front, I worked my way around the car, doing a lube job, cleanup, etc. The E-type has splined hubs and knock-off wheels, so they need to be lubed too, but I’ll wait for the wheels to come back for that. With the wheels off it is easier to get to the suspension lubrication areas, so that is what I started with. Left front suspension went just fine. Right front had one issue, a torn rubber boot (or “gaiter” in brit-car speak) on my steering tie rod end. It is obvious that whomever installed it did some damage to it with the safety wire. Wear and tear did the rest. I’ve ordered safety wire pliers online and should be able to fix this next weekend. The right rear went well, but a new issue awaited me on my final stop around the car…

Above: a diagram/photograph of my loose hub.

The driver’s side rear wheel hub is just a wee bit loose in along the fore/aft axis. Now that I think of it, the car has almost always made a “clunk” noise when moving from forward to reverse, or vise versa. Now I know where it came from. I always thought it was from a wheel/hub issue, now I know it is just a hub issue. This is new territory for me as beyond lubrication I haven’t dealt much with hubs. I don’t recall this much wiggle last time I had the wheels off, so it must be getting worse. I posted this to the Jag-Lovers E-type forum and consensus is that either it needs more shims, and/or the bearings inside the hub (at the bottom fulcrum, not on the axle) are shot. Wonderful.

The irony here is that I discovered the wiggle after I’d lubed up the bearings in the hub and the lower fulcrum. You can see the white lithium grease still hanging off the zerk at the bottom of the hub. I grabbed the spline to steady myself as I stood up and heard/felt the “clunk.” I then started investigating further. In hindsight I could never get the hub to “clunk” with the wheels on due to the weight. I’m just not strong enough to move that much steel, aluminum, rubber, etc around… but just the hub? “Clunk!”

So now I’ll tear it apart to fix the hub and have to RE-grease it again.

Note to Josh: If you clean just a little bit at a time when you have the chance, it all stays pretty clean. I can’t imagine cleaning the entire car, but a wheel well? Sure. A bunch of little jobs add up to one big one. 🙂

Making do

OK, I’m beyond a full week now without my PowerBook.

You know the last time I had a powerbook repaired was back in the “bad old days” of a “beleaguered Apple” (remember those?) This was during the rampant fiasco that was the PowerBook 5300. No, I never used one of those, I was a Duo/2400c kind of guy, but I managed a fleet of laptops at my then employer… mostly PowerBooks, but also Toshibas and IBM ThinkPads. The 5300 was Apple’s best sales tool for selling Toshibas and ThinkPads… gawd it was awful. I think I saw more users switch to Windows 95 due to the 5300 than any other cause. Apple, to its credit did have several repair programs in place for that model though. Based on that experience, the current one is horrible… it is making me yearn for the “bad old days! of 1996!

How? Well back then Apple didn’t have retail stores. You didn’t have to schedule yourself to see the “genius”, or wait for days or even weeks to get your laptop fixed. You called an 800 number, the next day a shipping box would arrive, all ready for your laptop. You would drop your powerbook into the foam container, seal the box and hand it back to the FedEx guy. Literally no more than THREE days later, you had your PowerBook 5300 back. Mind you, it was still a PowerBook 5300, which means it still sucked, but at least you had it back!

I’m now 8 days into my life without my laptop and there is no end in sight.

In the meantime, I’m living with the wheezing old TiBook, which clings to life by the skin of its titanium, um… skin. As I said before, it really can’t be called a laptop anymore since it refuses to run on battery power. It also sits on the verge of meltdown due to badly overheating. I have removed the keyboard from it in an attempt to keep it cool (and running!) Yesterday I found a big heat sink off an Intel server and greased it onto the CPU.

Above: My battered, wheezing, old TiBook, sporting a server-sized heat sink. Resting on it you can see my “Genius Bar Work Authorization.”

Today I am experimenting with using the parts scavenged from my old XK engine rebuild as heat sinks. The camshafts are too heavy, but the valves are doing an excellent job of maintaining CPU temps below 115° F. Plus they look cool. Maybe I’ll shoot a pic for a future entry.

If this were 1996, I’d have had my PowerBook back at least 4 days ago. As it is 10 years later, It looks like it could be another week.

Above: My repair status page at Apple.com. “On Hold, part on Order.

Let’s hope the TiBook doesn’t spontaneously combust before its replacement gets back. It damn well better get back before mid-February when I go on vacation! I would rather not bring a wheezing, overheated TiBook and external firewire drive with me. Not to mention a few pounds of metal to act as heat sinks. 😛

Tetris with/on wheels

I love the video game Tetris, the old Russian puzzle game based on blocks of four. When I worked at Nintendo back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and 16/32/64-bit systems were still over the horizon, one of the benefits of my job was sitting at my desk playing with the (yet unreleased) GameBoy. The only GamePakâ„¢ I had was Tetris, but that is all I needed or wanted. Whenever I got on the phone I’d pick up the GameBoy and start stacking bricks. I still do that today, but usually with the “Breakout”-style games on my Treo or iPod. The game takes away my lizard-brain need to fidget with something while my mammalian brain can concentrate on talking. If you call me at work, and the conversation goes for more than a couple of minutes, I’m smashing bricks on my Treo, almost guaranteed. Weird I know, but that is how I work. I should write some discourse sometime about fidgety behaviors, but not today.

Today I played Tetris in real time with two complete tire/wheel or tire sets of FOUR each… that is FOUR Dayton 6″ stainless steel wire wheels, with some old worn Pirelli p4000 super touring tires mounted. FOUR new Pirelli p4000 super touring tires (wrapped in pairs for added Tetris difficulty!) THREE empty 5 gallon buckets (for my home-brew Diesel rig) and ONE 5 gallon Diesel can. Plus myself, my two bags, and extra set of shoes. All this I stacked into my 2002 Volkswagen Jetta TDi for a run into Seattle. I dropped the wheels and tires off at Foster’s Wheel Service for mounting. All the Seattle Jag club folks I talked to suggested Fosters, so there I went. (Actually I did get a suggestion for a place down in Kent, but that is a bit of a drive for me coming down from Arlington!) I dropped off my wheels and one of my signed copies of the KZOK Classic Car Calendar for them.

Amazingly, it all came out a lot faster than it went in, but before I left I took some photos of the FOUR by THREE configuration in the car (Any hard core Tetris player would know why I didn’t dare stack another set of FOUR things in there!:

It may be a boring looking, Teutonically efficient (52 MPG on veggie oil), dull little car, but those Germans do design it to be very useful. Gotta admire that to some degree. There is no way I could have squeezed that load into a Toyota or Honda of equivalent size.

I agree with Paul Wigton’s dad in that life is too short to drive a boring car, which is why I have the Jag. But you will note that I don’t drive it to work more than once or twice a year. 😉

Separation Anxiety

I dropped my ailing laptop off at the Apple Store in Southcenter today at lunch. Last night I imaged the HDD onto an external drive, and was pleasantly surprised that it booted my old, wheezing, battered Titanium G4 PowerBook. If you recall, this laptop isn’t really a “laptop” anymore, since it will not run on anything but AC power. It also has several broken ports (USB and power mostly) and frequently fails to function. Let’s hope it survives long enough for my 15″ “AlBook” to return home.

I must admit, I felt a significant wave of anxiety wash over me as I left the mall and headed to my car. I’m usually not a very anxious guy, but this particular machine is what allows me to do my work, and I admit to being somewhat attached to it. Odd feeling really.

The drop-off experience was less than perfect, but I think that Apple didn’t really think out the whole after-sales support part of the Retail game… least of all with these “mini stores.” What should have taken 15 minutes dragged out into 90 minutes. Can’t fault the staff at the store for that though… they were fine.

Reading update

Along with not updating the web log lately, I have neglected to update my reading link. I finished “Castles of Steel” over the New Years’ Holiday. My friend John Welch (see blog roll) sent me two books for Christmas which I’m into now. One is James Madison’s personal notes from the debates which produced the US Constitution. The U.S.C. is one of my favorite documents ever written, and it bears multiple readings, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. If frustrates me to no end that our current President seems willing to violate the terms of the agreement he swore to uphold in his Oath of Office. We spent millions to impeach the previous officeholder for much lighter crimes. Oh well.. this isn’t a Political Blog, so I’ll leave it at that. I could never write a political blog… because nobody understands my politics it seems. My Democrat friends are all convinced I’m a Republican, and my Republican friends all swear I’m a Democrat. I’m so far out of both camps that I find it not worth trying to define to them because they all want to mold me into one or the other. Political opinion is NOT binary, though it seems so many Americans believe it has to be.

Anyway, it is fascinating reading to hear about what issues were important at the time, and how they affected the debate, and how the framers distilled the issues into language that was applicable yet open to be used to handle issues that they had no idea would even exist 200+ years later.