Rick's b.log - entry 2020/06/27

HeyRick gone? Not Found? What?!?

Thanks to David Pilling for bringing this to my attention, and Rob for a quick fix.

Lights and speakers

Time to do something about that. The first job was to dig out my old S7 and the tiny endoscopic camera to look and see what's what.

In the crazy restricted space that is, quite literally, accessed by sticking an arm up under the dashboard with the rest of the body contorted in ways that imply days of backache. I popped out the speaker (two clips that didn't want to budge) to better see what was going on, but sadly it was too small a space to fit my hand through.

Getting the thing apart was easy. But I learned as a child that taking things apart is often a lot simpler than putting them back together again.

Fixing it was also easy. Just scrape all of the twenty three years of gunk off of any metal part that looks like it might be an electrical contact.

The switch is extremely simple. The barrel part contains a spring that pushes a central 'pole' outwards. That's the part I'm pressing with my finger. When the pole is out, door open, the metal piece at the base of the barrel and the one attached to the other end of the pole make contact.
And when the door is closed, the pole is pressed in (as shown in the picture), and the metal bit at the other end of the pole no longer makes contact.

Getting it back together was, as predicted, somewhere between "torturous" and "Oh FFS!". Really, you haven't lived until you've tried to fit a 4mm nut onto a 4mm bolt while simultaneously holding a washer connected to a wire on place on said bolt, while contorted to have one arm stuffed up into a tiny place, while doing it entirely blind because you can't position yourself to see either part and still be able to access them both.
I'd love to say "nailed it on the first go". I'd be lying. Tearing the whole thing out and lobbing it across the driveway is a stage I was dangerously close to reaching. Thankfully I managed to get the bits together before that, but not before my back and shoulder signalled pain.

I also discovered what the dangly thing is. It's the gadget that makes the two tone beeping if I open the door while the headlights are on. It too is a bit capricious, but that's possibly an iffy connection due to the thing dangling. I'll see if I can fit some plastic ties to hold it in place. Just not today, my body won't thank me for it.

Since I had the speaker out, I thought I'd take a look at it.

Yeah... now I understand why Epica, Ayreon, Delain, etc don't have much in the way of bass.

The outer part of the cone has disintegrated. The speaker on the right also makes a buzzing noise when playing bass so either there's some of the outer ring remaining, or it's even more broken.
The speaker, from edge to edge, measures 85mm.
The hole in the dashboard measures 80mm.

In terms of rating, there is nothing whatsoever marked on the speaker. A quick prod with my multimeter indicates that the speaker is 3.9Ω.

Looking for speakers on Amazon is... yeah. Some are for cars. Some look like they're intended to be mounted in a cabinet, most are a totally different size than I'm looking for. And there's no direct replacement.

Given that a lot of single speakers are more expensive than the average car radio, I've decided to simply choose a cheap pair to fit. The ones I'm currently looking at (Amazon ASIN B07DDD971M) are 10cm with tabs at each corner. That said, I'm not against putting it in place with four self-tappers. Felicity is clearly showing nearly a quarter century of existence, with numerous rivets and patches. I'm not going to get precious over how the speakers look. I just want my symphonic metal to not sound like an '80s cassette player and the sorts of cheap headphones that they came with...

Now, since I have a rather unhappy gut (it "blew up" early this morning (5am, oh joy) - I'm not sure if I ate something bad (what!?) or if it's the heat finally getting to me), I'm going to make some rice and sit on my bed watching movies. Good news/bad news. Good news: it's 20°C, not 30°C. Bad news: it's raining. Oh well. All the more reason to do nothing today. ☺

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Rick, 28th June 2020, 10:00

I pretty much marathoned Buffy season six from the musical (I'd seen up until that point).    Funny thing is, when you watch it like that, you start to realise exactly how much is filler to pad out stories to the episode length. Things tended to be...a little slow up until the point Willow got VERY annoyed.    Amusingly, Amazon rated most of the episodes 16+, but for some reason gave "All" ratings to the final two episodes. I took a photo of the rating on screen at the same time as Angry Willow flayed somebody. Okay, it was a recap, but really things didn't get much better from that point.

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