Archive for the ‘Home Brew’ Category

Finished the Interior

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

I got off my butt today and got the rest of the interior swapped. It’s not something I want to do again. Removing the old carpet was the worst, and took about an hour. Infact the whole disassemble took twice as long as putting it back together. Here are the pictures of what I got done today. I still need to mount the piece for the rear cargo pocket.

Overhead Bracket
I got the mounting plate to check for fit. I still need to pull it and drill holes for mounting a radio up there. I’m pushing for this small uniden CB I have, my girlfriend thinks I should put a 2 meter ham radio up there.

Old Center Console
I had a hell of a time getting the old console out. I ended up just saying f*ck it and broke out the saw.

Broken Seat Bolt from Inside
I discovered why my front seat seems to flex when I lean. The bolt is broken off flat with the floor.
Broken Seat Bolt from Outside
This is the underside of the bolt. I figure a can of PB Blast, a pair of vice grips, & a trip to the junk yard should fix that.

Carpet Installed
Here’s the new carpet installed. I found out the flat bracket that holds duct work that goes through the console is cracked, so I need to snag one of those at the yard too.

Everything Installed
Everything Installed
Everything Installed

Mag Light Mount
Mag Light Mount
I had played with different ideas to mount my Mag Light, and finally settled on this. I’m very very happy with it.

Here is the full gallery of the interior swap. Today’s work starts on the bottom half of page 2.

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iPod Resurrection

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

Way back on July, 11, 2007, I posted about an iPod I had gotten. At the time, the girl I got it from said she was pretty sure the hard drive was bad. Ever since then, I’ve had intermittent issues with the iPod.

Afew weeks back I thought it was dead, after not having used it in afew months I got the ever popular sad face.

iPod Sad Face

iPod Sad Face

I was able to revive the iPod, but this was the 3rd time in the last year and a half that I had to factory reset the it. At that point I decided to replace the hard drive. A quick search of ebay found a replacement Toshiba hard drive that was a newer model of the one in my iPod. Being as cash was an issue, I decided to replace the existing 20 gig hard drive with another 20 gig. This would have been a good time to upgrade the hard drive size, if I had some extra cash.

I followed the instructions in this blog, but probably could have figured it out on my own. iPods are pretty simple once you get the case open.

After replacing the hard drive and going through the format/restore process of the hard drive. I was very satisfied with the outcome. No part of the process was really difficult or time consuming. Total time invested was less than an hour + the time to resync my music once the iPod was setup. I’ve noticed the seek time has decreased when listening to music. Seek time is the amount of time from when song information appears on the screen until the track starts to play. With my old hard drive the seek time was as high as 5 seconds. With the new hard drive, I’m seeing seek times of no more than a second in a half.

One additional step I did before I reassembled the iPod was take an emery board and sand down the corner I had roughed up while prying the iPod apart. This was so that I didn’t have any rough or sharp edges or nicks in the plastic.

If the iPod continues to work properly, I may consider upgrading the existing battery to a battery that’s designed for an iPod photo/video. That should lengthen the time I can listen on a single charge.

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