Golf Boot Floor v2

Since the last time I cut up the floor the golf hasn't actually run much at all, but thats not down to the floor being missing, far from it. But with that being said the intention is to take this to an event later this year and that means moving a good amount of gear around with it. So it's back to the flooring over the spare wheel for another go.

First off, a template around the rear wheel arches inside to transfer to some 3mm plywood sheet. With the extra weight, this should hold up better than the hardboard did and the whole unit should come out if I really want to go lightweight.

First edge cut...

...and it fits! almost on the first go anyway.

The second edge is cut and with some fine tuning it fits too.

The back of the board has to be cut to fit around a small brace and also just about allows for fingers to lift it with ease.

After a long time thinking about how to do this I had a kind of eureka moment and disappeared into the house and wandered about muttering to myself for about 20 minutes while my dad and girlfriend didnt really know what I was doing.

Using some old Ikea brackets and a dremel I fitted them over some screws meant for the rear seats and wound a wing nut on to hold it in place.

The next part of the epiphany was using some 100mm box trunking as the front support instead of wood. I was going to use wood but it'd be heavier and I didnt have it on hand. This was lying around and had been for a couple years or more.

Some quick cuts with the Dremel to get over the wing nuts and it's ready to fit.

The box section is held on with two screws and a thin strip of wood behind for them to bite into and hopefully not strip. So far so good, the washers work well to spread the load and nothing broke.

The completed, as yet uncovered floor.

And from the other end behind the passenger seat.

Underneath there are a few pieces of pine to add some front to back and a piece wider than the sunken floor so it stays at the right level behind the rear lights.

Next job for this is to cover it and try it out.

The Big Desk Move - Pt 9: Odds and Ends

By this point the desk has been done for quite some time, (nearly 2 months) but a few things crop up now and again which work quite well and are worth documenting, if only trivially.

My headphones have NEVER had a decent home. I've tried lots of things and never know what to do with them.

So far int he last few years I've tried:

- Hung them by an ear cup off the front of the desk (which just gets hit by the chair and usually leaves a mark on the desk from the cup fabric)

- Under the screen (usually end sin tangled wires with the mouse and keyboard)

- Left them to the side of the mouse/keyboard (now the laptop is there, so no good. Plus it always tangled.)

- Hung them over the screen itself (obscures part of the screen)

 

Nothing works

I found a metal hook i'd made from some 1/2" x 16 ga. aluminium bar before I got the other hooks which now hold up the laptop PSU. This used to be under the desk and was a bit shabby, but with some extra time with the pliers its turned into a reasonable point to hang the headphones from.

For the time being I've just clamped it in place to see how useful they are in this position. If they get tangled like before I may move it again, but until that happens screwing it into the nice TV mount and leaving a hole if I move it later isn't on the cards.

So far it seems to be a lot better than anything I've done before. I'll probably give it a coat of black paint and some varnish too just so it doesn't look glaringly different to everything else which is either Birch or black currently.

The Big Desk Move - Pt 8: Hanging around.

Now that a few things are finding homes on the desk there are a few unforseen improvements which need to be made.

One of them is the laptop and it's power brick. Until now i've just moved the laptop around wherever there was space, but now that it has an hdmi hookup to the TV and a wired ethernet plug it can have a specific home to the right of my mouse (I don't know why, but having it on the left never felt comfortable).

The problem with this is mostly the power brick dangling down behind my tower and one of the 6 ways attached to the legs, which the brick isn't even using. This means the brick either gets lost behind the back and isn't that easy to extract, or it sits on the desk and will inevitably get tangled in my headphones (which will be in the odds-and-ends post later).

The 240V supply in comes across the underside of the desk above my legs and then goes to the right most screen pillar. Thanks to a spare clover-leaf power cable this one car be left there and the brick attached when needed. But it still doesn't help with the brick being in the way, or worst of all, falling off the desk and yanking the cable if not hitting something else under the desk.

In the previous incarnation of this desk there were some metal hooks from $DIY_Store which held the network cables, some power cables and USB cables up and out of the way of my feet. With a new, more organised layout of the cables, these were redundant, till now.

Two of the hooks attached onto the underside of the desk at the back fit the brick almost perfectly, its not quite flat, but its enough that its out of the way.

And better yet, it cant actually be seen from above, but it's still within easy reach when the time comes to disconnect it. 

Annoyingly it actually took longer to find 4 screws which were short enough to not pop through the top of the desk and find the hooks, which i'd put somewhere foolish (under the bed in a box, instead of in the misc bracket box in the DIY cupboard) than it did to fit them.

The Big Desk Move - Pt6: Rack TFT

I'll admit, this is rather superfluous and had I not had the bits still lying around form last time, I wouldn't have put this back together as the 1U KVM drawer in the server rack below rather makes this redundant.

The comms rack has a nice big window in the door on the front and conveniently I have a spare TFT from when this was previously done. The last time was when the rack itself was on stilts over my three 24" screens  and desk. It ended up attached to my PC for misc windows which would otherwise be hidden (skype/gtalk/etc) and had a nice cascade effect for the matrix screen saver, but was otherwise pretty useless.

The screen is an old 15" Sony I got from a friend some years back and have found a few uses for over the years.

With the door off and the screen placed where I wanted it some metal brackets were roughly bent to fit the shape and then rolled at the ends to fit into the grooves on the door. The mounting screws for the VESA/similar mounts allowed the two pieces to be fixed and create an effective spring retention system.

The PSU is not in the screen itself (thanks Sony) so its wedged under the power bar int he bottom of the rack next to the old PIX501.

With the door back on the cables were attached so that they wont bind and can still be removed if the door has to come off.

All in all pretty simple and effective. The plan for this now is to run from my old laptop in the comms rack as a super low powered monitoring box for the network, and from that, ALL THE GRAPHS!

the one downside to this is extra heat, and the minor problem with that is the button for the screen is on the front of the TFT, so the only way to power it off is to use the kettle lead. This might not be as much of a problem if i move the screen to another project in the future and just view the graphs over the network, maybe on the TV...

The Big Desk Move - Pt 2: Screens

With the desk built, the arduous task of building all the remaining pieces back up remained. Firstly the screens.

A while back I got sick of the screens being on their stands taking up a load of space on the desk itself and started making a single arm to hold them, and my speakers up out of the way.

The construction is two pieces of 18mm plywood to form the beam, with 3mm plywood on top and bottom to hide the grain and to hopefully prevent anything getting into the laminate. The posts are three layers of 18mm Birch plywood to match the desk with a shoulder cut into it to hold the beam.

The posts are screwed into the beam and then two special clamps hold it to the desk at each post. the stand is neutrally weighted so it wont tip unless there are screens on, and even when they are on, they're pretty evenly weighted.

Across the back is a mess of wires help in place wherever they fell in bunches using sticky hooks. It worked ok, but far from perfect.

New plan! A piece of scrap angle iron drilled and bent to fit around the base would hold the cables out of the way of the desk and make them neater and easier to work on if needed.

I ended up putting the support on the other way up to lift the cables a bit higher and avoid fouling the windowsill.

This makes it much neater overall, and while I was at it, I swapped the cable for the left most screen from VGA+extension to a single HDMI cable with some adapters to DVI. Much better picture and it leaves the left screen VGA available for the rack should it need it.

Golf Bumper Part 2 - The Fix is In. (Front)

Finally managed to source a new front bumper for the golf, the old one was pranged before i got it and looked pretty shabby.

You can, or maybe not, if you're not looked at it so often) see the twist and lumps of the bumper, plus the indicator is pushed back inside a fair bit.

I thought this wouldn't take long, however as Andy and I found, it took a few hours all told. First off was the grill, and lower valance to make getting to the bolts easier. Initially as there was no ironwork with the bumper were tried to take just the plastic off. That didnt work as the ironwork was attached with clips we couldnt see, and the only other bolts were inaccessible due to the twisting.

In the end we took the whole bumper, ironwork and all off. this was problematic as the bumper is held on by the same bolts which hold the front engine mount and subframe in place. Cue a trollyjack for added support.

The old bumper came off easily enough once the four bolts were removed, no need to beat anything or wrench it off, just slid out with a gentle nudge.

You can see a little better how wavey the front of the bumper is.

The nice new (well, ish) bumper.

Some of the ironwork was really badly bent, and instead of taking a pciture i beat it into shape and bend it around with pliers to get it like this. The small angled piece at the top was almost 45 degrees before.

After a good deal of manipulation using hammer, pliers and just plain standing and jumping on it, the bumper was roughly straight once again. Of course this meant it was wrong as it needed a slight curve to fit the front of the car. Cue more subtle application of jumping.

The original iornwork was bolted together but the pins broke free and started to spin, so without anything to hold the other side by, the nuts wouldn't tighten. A handy M8 bolt and some locknuts subbed in and worked fine.

After 4 or 5 test fits and some more twisting the bumper fit back on and with only a little dirt from the grass.

Everything put back together, looking much better than before and actually fitting properly for once. Next up a new number plate as the old one is cracked and really should have been replaced a while ago, but it never failed the MOT on it so i didnt bother.

Golf Bumper Part 1 (Rear)

Way back when i got my golf 5 years ago (bloody hell!) one job that was never done before it was put on the road was to fix the bumpers. Both front an rear had previously (before my ownership) had been knocked, very gently mind, but enough to twist the rear and deform the front plastic.

Here you can see the lumps and bumps of the rear in all their glory. As a result the right side bends up slightly and doesn't fit into the gap in the rear quarter panel, there by rubbing the body.

With the back of the car on axle stands the two bolts holding the bracket on could be loosened beneath the boot.

Naked as the day it was installed, at least if you ignore all the other parts still attached. The bumper came off fairly easily and slid out, ready for the new on to be installed.

Four bolts later and the new bumper is installed. Next job, source and fit a new front bumper to complete the fix.

Golf Audio - Part 1

For those that don't know, I've got a Golf. Its pretty heavily stripped out for track use. Because its stripped out, it was also the easiest thing to install a spare sub into I had laying around. The sub's been through quite a few car's i've owned since the mid 2000's, but nothing was this easy to do (the first time).

Adenau - Nurburgring

There's no before picture, because i didn't think (surprising how often i forget and just start working on something before i decide to write anything up). Previously there was a false floor over the spare wheel which the sub sat on, and this worked fine until the space saver i had in there, turned out to be fractionally too small to fit the front wheels. A full size alloy meant the floor didn't sit properly and it slid off, so it needed to be fixed.

Instead of putting the floor back and raising it up, it seamed more sensible to move it forwards to make the wheel well and general boot area easier to get to and use. People said stripping everything and then putting this in was a waste of time, but given its removable when i'm on track, and the drive to and from the track is pretty monotonous with poor sounding music, i don't really care :D.

This is the back of the car as it was.

The back 'seats'

Lacking a big enough sheet of wood to make a new floor, I used the old one.

The biggest issue was making sure the new seat belts would clear the eventual location, even though they're not in yet, i don't want to have to change this later.

More shaping and securing the floor together...

The floor will probably end up getting something stuck under it and need to be removed, so needs to be removable, and as I cant get under to hold one side, I've had to make pins to bolt to.

The pins stick just far enough through for a wing nut to go on the top without leaving thread sticking out.

Behold! It fits.

The old covering was re-purposed and doesn't look too bad, its not perfect, but it works.

Test fit! Still fits...

Perhaps not my most flattering angle, or the most comfortable position to work in.

As is evident by the darkness outside, this took a while to finally wire and bolt in, but it worked and the boot is massively more useful now I don't have to reach over the top of the sub.

Eventually i'll put the ooooold build log up of the car. Maybe.