Shady Goings On

With borrowed RAM and AMD Duron (1.1Ghz) and my old motherboard (ECS K7S5a) I finally got the old dog working! I held my breath as it went through the Windows 2000 installation process and had to pinch myself when it made it through. I never thought it would reboot, but even that worked!
I’ve now updated it with SP4 and the Automatic Updates thing (which won’t work) and got the internet going. Just need to try it with my old HD now…

Oh and now it all works, I’ve had to move it upstairs out of the way because we’re having french doors put in on Thursday. So I can’t even use it.
Ah well …

Yes, the staircase is done!
No more sanding, scraping and blasting the old paint off!

I’ll post some photos as soon as I take some but the difference is unbelievable.

I went shopping the other day and got myself most of the things I knew I’d need to get started fibreglassing.
The Uk supplier I used is CSFNet and they seem quite reasonable, they also have a series of guides on thier website.
Anyway I have now:

• white gelcoat
• polyester resin
• catalyist
• 2kg of 450g/m chopped strand mat
• 3″ glass fibre roll

The whole lot set me back £60 including tax, postage and packing. That might be a good deal or it might not, I just don’t know! If you know somewhere better please tell me.

Now I’m a bit more educated on the subject I know I also need:

• black pigment
• yellow pigment
• PVA release agent
• consolidating roller
• cheap brushes
• paper cups
• lollipop sticks (spreaders)

I’m not going to place this order right away as I don’t know how I’ll colour match the yellow of my car (and I’m also waiting for payday!). I might just go black or carbon fibre. I’ve also seen that you can add metallic effects to the gelcoat and that would look spectacular in black.

Summer is coming and all GTM owners will know that ventilation is not that great at anytime of year. At the moment winding down my window suffices but that’s not so elegant and makes a real racket (not to mention wind drag :-o) on the motorway.

So I’ve been cooking up something to resolve these problems (see my earlier post: Making things from fibreglass).

I took a few snaps so that you and I can visualise my idea, later (when my pc is up and running again) I’ll photoshop a mock-up onto these snaps, failing that I’ll just draw on the roof

This final one is the front splitter, it’s purpose is to reduce lift at the front of the car at high speeds… and protect the nose from kerbs and speed bumps.
As you can see it did the latter of these two jobs admirably, but it can only really do that once, so I’d better fix it up!

This week we’ve been mostly… sanding back the staircase, oh joy! I’ll keep my mough shut the next time I have an idea like this! Although it looks good it’s been such a pain to do. After taking of most of the gloss with a heat gun we were left with a crappy brown covering, some old paint maybe? Anyway the heat gun wouldn’t bring it off, so it was out with the sandpaper.
Well that was a month or so ago and now we’re all but done. Tonight is the final assault! We’ve got to finish a little sanding, just neaten up some filler and replace a section that we took out. We’ll then dust and wipe it all down before using a clear varnish. Two (maybe three) coats of that and it’ll look spot on
It better anyway!
Tomorrow we’ve both got the day off and we’re having carpet fitted.

Also in a few weeks we’ll be having french door fitted at the rear of the house in the living room.

In some ways I feel like I’m making headway with the pc: I’ve managed to borrow an AMD Duron processor from a friend and even a graphics card, and now the sympoms are slightly changed. I’m still no nearer to finding the actual problem though and I’m running out of ideas!
I’ve changed motherboard, processor, memory, graphics card and hard-drive, and of course re-seated the heat sink several times. I’m at a loss to what the problem is. I’ve not yet changed the power supply and that is next on the list. I doubt it’ll be that though as there’s barely anything plugged in, maybe the voltages are floating or something? Anyway I’ve got an old one (that I’m currently using) that I can try.

Apart from that I’m actually tempted to take it to a shop to get fixed! The scandal!