With Jennie in the UK visiting her sister and me having made excellent progress on the "honey do" task list, it was time to chill and do some stuff that I've been wanting to do for ages. One of the jobs was to properly adjust the clearances in the MG differential. I knew it needed doing as bits of the shims were visible in the oil when I changed it in late 2021.
I only have an automotive trolley jack and axle stands which would make the job difficult in terms of access, compounded by my slowly healing femur, which makes grovelling on the floor somewhat uncomfortable at present. The decision was made to do an overnighter in Auckland and let MG specialists, Paul Walbran Motors do the job properly on a hoist. The plan was once the job was done, to do a solo road trip for a few days and catch up with old friends. However, the weather has been pretty dire this winter with another deluge forecast to start late in the day after the repair and last for several days. The latter part of the plan was wisely abandoned as it's pretty ugly outside right now.
Driving from rural Coromandel to Auckland was straightforward but getting to Walbran Motors in Grey Lynn out west was a real pain because of the volume of traffic on non-arterial roads that hadn't been upgraded in decades. Driving with a manual gearbox in horrendously slow start-stop traffic is a real pain. Fortunately, the MG engine runs cool which is a blessing.
I was met by Andrew, Paul's son and his team and given an MGF courtesy car until the BGT was ready the following day. It was actually good fun to drive but a milky plastic rear screen on the soft top meant more than usual reliance on the rearview mirrors, plus masses of shoulder checks!
Diverting from things automotive for a moment, Grey Lynn wasn't an area of Auckland that I was familiar with. However, the ethnic mix of the local population meant that there was an amazing variety of eateries within a 5 minute walk of the motel. I chose a Chinese takeaway where no English was spoken but coped just fine with hand signals and pointing. The lady running the show made the noodles from scratch and the spiced pork dish was divine. About twice as much as I could actually eat for NZ$14 (USD 8.50 and GBP 6).
The next morning, I got a call saying the car should be ready around 1pm, so that I could make the 3-odd hour drive home in dry weather and daylight before it got too challenging on the twisty Coromandel roads. I then got another call saying that they'd discovered a leak on one of the rear brake hydraulic cylinders, plus worn rear shoes so they were fixing those too. I arrived whilst they were still working on it, so took the opportunity to take a few photos in the workshop. Outside MG club events, I've never seen so many MG's in one spot. Here's a selection.
I buy parts through Paul Walbran Motors but this is the first time I've used their workshop and was really impressed. Andrew, Jade and Nick all went out of their way to make me feel welcome and shared information with humour and good grace - sincere thanks to the their team. I love working on our MG but for some jobs, expert assistance makes perfect sense. Logistics from Coromandel to their premises takes some planning but their expertise and customer focus was well worth it. Traffic getting out of Auckland mid-afternoon was terrible but I had a dry run to within half an hour of home when the heavens opened. Made it just on dark too. The proper diff clearances have made a big difference too. No more clunks and jerks when I get on and off the throttle.
Now for something entirely different which pleases me no end. I'll probably receive eternal damnation though from any computer engineers who may read this. The desktop PC which I normally use for more complex tasks has been crashing not long after boot-up with increasing frequency. My knowledge of computer internals is close to zero but being a retired professional engineer with a decent knowledge process plant condition monitoring, problem-solving is second nature. Before it crashed a few days ago, I managed to run a diagnostic program which wasn't a lot of help on the face of it but I noticed that the CPU was running at well over 90 C with a light load, which I thought seemed a bit high. Further research confirmed my suspicions and led me into the murky world of CPU cooling. This in turn steered me towards thermally transmitting jointing compounds which are used to join the CPU to the cooling fan, giving a uniform heat transfer. Never heard of them until I found a chatroom discussion on the topic. The discussion might have been in Martian but I understood the gist of it as the laws of thermodynamics are pretty much constant everywhere. Poking about in the internals, a quick inspection showed that the original jointing compound had partially vanished and the remainder had turned to powder which is hardly surprising as the computer is at least 10 years old.
No normal or sane member of the human race has a tube of CPU jointing compound in their cupboard and living in the countryside only exacerbated my problem. What I do have, however; is copper-based anti-seize compound for maintaining our vehicles etc. It has a high temperature rating and is thermally conductive. There was mention of this in the chatroom with opinions more or less evenly divided as to whether it would be an acceptable substitute - so much for expert opinion! As the fan heat sink was copper, I figured that bimetallic corrosion was probably not an issue. Besides, my PC isn't upgradeable to Win 11 so its future might be limited anyway. With fingers crossed and sparingly applying the copper paste to the mating surfaces with a cotton bud, I reassembled it onto the motherboard. Hallelujah - the computer doesn't crash and the CPU is running below 70 C even when being driven fairly hard. I think we can count that as a win for a computer ignoramus. Nice to learn new stuff to keep the grey matter active.
