First off... VICTORY! I've got both the A/C blowers working in my
Jag for the first time since I bought it six or seven years ago. On
the second one (which looks to have been a replacement unit) it
turned out, as expected, that the transistor driving the motor on
the low and medium speed settings had blown. Except it wasn't kind
enough to completely blow, but just have too much resistance, so I
had to mess around checking other connections thinking the
resistance might have been somewhere else. It turns out that
amongst all my stocks of high-power transistors I didn't actually
have any darlingtons in TO-3 package, so I ended up building the
darlington circuit from the datasheet using two transistors, which
at least meant I could use one of the incredible 60A 250V power
transistors that I picked up very cheap years ago. Then because I
thought I should be able to omit the first internal resistor from
the original part's darlington circuit I managed to completely
confuse the motor controller and it played dead for quite a while I
said various swear words. I still don't know what was going on
there, the controller has some sort of feed-back system I think.
Anyway, that was the easy bit, the hard part again was getting the
thing back in place, deep as you can get into and above the
driver's foot well. Still not nearly as bad as getting the
passenger one in though, even though I had to do most of it lying
upside-down through the door, bumping my head on the brake pedal.
Another little nest of about eight relays over that side as well,
for good measure. At least I think wrestling these things in and
out of place has built up my arm muscles a bit.
So I was never more glad to feel warm air on my feet when I drove
over to the city of Geelong where, among other things, I made a
visit to the "tip shop" at the transfer station. Yeah I know, I
take this fancy car to all the most glamorous places :). Anyway,
after finding a park amongst vans and battered hatchbacks on the
strip of dirt behind the ramp for the rubbish skips, I went in and
had a look at all the neat stuff that people had thrown away since
however many months/years since my last visit (I don't like driving
through city traffic, so I rarely get over to that area). The
council website still said that they had the number of people
allowed inside limited to four and other social distancing rules,
but unsurprisingly that all seemed long gone and there were quite a
few people wandering about. I picked up a arm-load of stuff - six
not-too-badly-scratched DVDs to substitute for the loss of my usual
local op-shop intake since it burnt down, a pack of nuts and
washers, one of those round IDE cables still in its packet, a few
giant syringes of which they had hundreds and must be handy for
something, etc...
But the spot I want to talk about is right at the back of the long
old shed which makes up the indoor area of this tip shop. It's
beyond the point where most people walk and the door is
half-disguised by a row of shelves along the wall that you approach
from, half filled with more DVDs and a scattering of varous music
mediums. Above it is written in permanent marker:
all
books $[2]
Where [2] is the spot where someone has stuck a little square of
paper over the number that was there before (1, I'm pretty sure,
because that's still what's written on the shelves inside, where it
hasn't worn off). The rectangular room that it opens into from the
side was obviously an office from when the place was a factory, or
possibly an earlier incarnation of the transfer station. It's
comfortably small compared to the expanse of the rest of the space,
light coming in along a narrow window just below the ceiling along
the exterior wall, necessarily supplimented by an old florescent
light in the middle. A steel pipe runs along the same wall,
slightly offset, just passing through for some purpose probably
long forgotten. There is a mix and match of various old half-height
domestic bookcases along all the walls except the end opposite from
which you enter, where there's an old chair and a wheelie bin with
a sign requesting "no food scraps". Behind are some dated
reading-related posters and some little quotes written on paper
with permanent marker. One went something like "When you watch TV
you see the future, when you read a book you travel through time".
There are a couple of plush stool things placed in the middle of
the room, looking rather obviously out of a skip but not so much
you wouldn't sit on them. It's just nice in there, like some quiet
little nook within the big busy city, little discovered yet somehow
slightly cared about. Really I don't know who does care for it
because the tip shop is run by the normal blokes who work at the
transfer station, haggling hard with people over the price of a
rusty lawn mower (they seem to have generally given up on marked
prices at this place, you just go up to the counter and see what
they say). With all due respect, they don't really seem like the
bookworm types. Still there it is, and I feel like I could stay
there for hours, poking through incomplete sets of encyclopaedias,
travel guides, and cheap paperback novels. Honestly most of the
books there aren't much good, especially for me as I don't really
read fiction. Last time I did find an old university chemistry
textbook from the 80s and (surprisingly) a very practical general
engineering textbook from 1942, but nothing at all this time. It's
the nicest bookstore, with the worst books. But it's just peaceful
there somehow, amongst the rubbish.
