Root a Motorola Pro Plus

Not exciting at all, however none of the instructions elsewhere seem to exactly describe how to root this clearly unloved Moto Phone (I don't know why - it's great!) once it's been upgraded to 2.3.6.

For Windows download the latest USB Drivers from:
http://developer.motorola.com/tools/usb_drivers/
These come in an installable msi package - you'll need to run this first. Best to do this without the phone plugged in by USB.

Once that is done plug in the phone with a USB cable, it will NOT give you an option to go into USB debug mode. Instead choose "Motorola Phone Portal" which will, amongst about a thousand other things, connect the phone in debug mode. You must also have the "USB Debugging" option set in "Settings->Applications->Development". Wait a while for it to finish...

Download the exploit directly from the clever chap who did all the hard work:
http://vulnfactory.org/blog/2012/02/11/rooting-the-droid-4-a-failed-bounty-experiment/

Follow the simple instructions on that webpage and you are done.

Throwing Light the Right Way - Left.

Well, six (6) years of MOT's on the KLR650, and this year the nice MOT man told me it has a foreign headlight and so the dipped beam casts light the wrong way (i.e. to the right and it should be to the left). I should have known this because I'd looked at the headlight several times for the appropriate UK biased 'E' markings and they are not there. I simply developed wilful blindness to the fact and seen has no-one has mentioned it before...

Anyway, first step e-bay. Nothing doing, it's all crap. Knackered looking parts (existing headlight is actually nice apart from it's recently discovered fatal flaw) and the pictures on there don't show those all important markings without which they may well be as bad as the one I have. It would take more energy than I can summon to start asking difficult questions of the denizens. 

And obviously I'm not going to buy one new of Kawasaki. Do it yourself time.

First thing is looking at the pattern in the headlight glass. Normally you can see a pattern of striations which guides the light for the dipped beam to one side or the other. The old-fashioned way of fixing this was simply to tape over that pattern to get it through the MOT. Except there is none on this headlight. The pattern is plain. Which is actually a good thing, because there's not a lot an enthusiastic bodger can do about patterns cast in glass.

Next, take the whole stupid thing apart. Front plastics off (4 bolts) 2 small bolts at the bottom adjuster and two big bolts either side of the headlight, pull out the wires and... PAYDIRT!

 

Back of my headlight showing the H4 Bulb canted off at an angle of 10 degrees

The H4 bulb is offset in the headlamp reflector at an angle of 10 degrees to the right (the difference between the red and blue lines on the picture) by the tabs on the bulb fitting into slots in the reflector. 

Here's an interesting fact - I have always assumed that the "dip shield" in a H4 bulb, which shades one side of the low beam filament, blocked the light from going to the side. Which turns out to be bollocks - it actually blocks the light from going down. So the above works because the arrangement casts all of it's light onto the top of the reflector at an angle off to the right and then from the reflector downwards to the road - and further still to the right. No light goes onto the bottom of the reflector which would cast light skyward. Which all sort of makes sense otherwise the H4 bulbs would need to be marked for left hand drive or right hand drive and they are not. Who would have guessed.

All that leads up to the very simple fix for this - extend the slots in the metal reflector so that the bulb can rotate 10 degrees to the left instead. File/hacksaw/dremmel and 10 minutes work.

It Clicks, It Pops.

Ever since I've had my Acer Revo it's been irritating me because it pops and clicks at a low but disconcerting volume through the TV I have it connected to. It would stop popping and clicking if I disconnected one of the two stereo channels*; diagnosis therefore is one of those elusive and always poorly explained  "earth loops"

So, I let that annoy me for over 6 months then splashed out £4 for a ground loop isolator from ebay:

Nothing says "High Quality" like a poorly applied black on gold label

Otherwise known as an audio transformer it's a 1:1 er, transformer which, er, isolates the earth between bits of kit thus breaking any of those earth loops.

Staggeringly, it works.

 --------------------------------------------------------

* I don't have it connected up with the HDMI 5 channel sound because:

1.   I don't have any other 5 channel gear to connect it to
2. Ubuntu.

Flap Meat Beef Strips

Enough to make me quit vegetarianism.

Unscheduled Maintenance

Driving along yesterday in a mild summer deluge I couldn't help but notice that the wipers on my SLK were less "intermittent - slow - fast" as "occasional - weary - stopped". I expected my bank balance, personal safety or chances of getting the mid-afternoon snooze all to be at risk.

Having an eye for broken windscreen wipers my diagnosis was that the linkage was seized. The Internet says a new one is more than £100 so I'll obviously be taking the old one to bits in lieu of having anything better to do.

1. Remove both wipers; under the plastic caps on the tops of the spindles are nuts and then a bit of wriggling to get the wipers themselves off the tapered shafts.
2. Remove the plastic bulkhead shield - half a dozen self tapping torx screws then a bit of pulling. The washer jets are attached to this so just plonked on top of the engine so I didn't need to disconnect them
3. You can now see the wiper mechanism; I removed the nut which connects the linkage onto the motor (after marking it's position with tippex so I knew where to put it back...) and the motor was able to whizz around quite freely on it's own. Also I tried to move the linkage by hand and it was going nowhere - Diagnosis correct!
4. There's three bolts holding the wiper mechanism to the car - one above each wiper spindle and one on the bulkhead. Because the linkage was jammed in an odd position I had to also detach the motor to get it out (three more bolts in the middle of the big metal plate on the linkage.

Once I had the linkage out it became obvious it was seized as balls. I put it in the vice to work it back and forward with a big lever and all the penetrating fluid which freed up a little but it was never going to be right. Also I couldn't tell if one or both of the two spindles was seized. It needs to come to bits.

Can you take the sodding thing apart? Unbelievably, you can. Each of the spindles sits in a housing like this:

I am good drawer.

It's a simple case of pushing off the circlip (which is actually very easy). I did the driver's side one first and the spindle fell out of the housing with only a slight bash with a hammer. That one's ok then. Then I tried the passenger side (centre) one and, well, that was stuck.

After several rounds of violence and bad language I managed to get it out. It dragged one of the bearings out of the housing with it.

My theory about what's gone wrong here - the depression that the o-ring sits in was full of aluminium corrosion. That had forced the o-ring against the spindle and it had worn away (it was more "D" shaped than "O" shaped). Water got in and sat in the void between the two bearings and that filled with steel/aluminium corrosion. My guess is that this isn't so bad until it dries out and since there's now no water to lubricate it, it suddenly seizes.

Here you can see the spindle complete with the (plain, brass?) bearing that got pulled out of the housing. In the middle you can see where I've cleaned up the big glob of corrosion. To the left is the actuating arm and to the right is the groove for the circlip.

Anyway, all the bits were cleaned up, lubricated and re-assembled (including pressing the bearing back in) and... everything worked perfectly - better than ever in fact. I didn't have a replacement o-ring so I reassembled it with the old, tired one, however I can change that with  the linkage still on the car next time I have cause to be ferkling around in there.

Total time taken - about two hours plus procrastination.

Now, stop raining and breaking.

I've Started so I'll Eventually Finish

What is quite literally a lifetime ago I took the bash guard of the KLR650 with the the intention of touching up it's rusty bits and also those of frame tube behind it where the front wheel chucks a load of rocks and muck straight onto them . That was a divorce, a house move, several jobs and quite a few years ago and somehow amongst that it never got finished.

One problem was finding some matching paint. There's no point asking on the internet for a paint code because you get 3 different answers, none of which sound promising and none of which you can actually obtain anywhere. So, I took a rare sunny day off and drove down to Halfords clutching said bash guard in my mitt for comparative purposes and £6.49 later I was the owner of this:

Off-the-Shelf Vauxhall Platinum - Eerily Oriental

This is a very yellow silver metallic colour which to my utter incredulation is a perfect match for the frame paint on the KLR650.

 Here's the bash guard with several blended in repairs on it. It's not a great photo but the match really is excellent.

Previously much more brown.

Also I must congratulate Halfords on upping the quality of their aerosol paint as it now appears to actually contain some pigments and solids and applies well. It's no longer reminiscent of trying to apply spiitty poo to a vertical surface, something which we have all no doubt attempted. 

One less job on the list, I'm now wondering how good a match I can get for "Kawasaki Engine Bronze".

Spanners in the Post.

The modern world is not rubbish. You can come home from work and find a spanner has been delivered to your doorstep. That wouldn't happen in the 80's.

Tomato for scale. It's a quite large cherry tomato.

The reason I need this spanner is despite earlier optimism, the "Check Engine" light on my R170 Mercedes SLK keeps coming on, showing error P0410 on the scanner. And none of my existing spanners will do. And who doesn't like more spanners?

Stop Doing that.

After extensive research (i.e. Google) it would appear I need one of these:

Part Number A0021406860. Or £50 as it is more commonly known.

The generic description of the P0410 error is something like "Air pump or associated wiring failed". It's to do with the part of the emissions system which pumps air into the exhaust for some reason. Only my car doesn't have an electric air pump - instead it uses the supercharger and a series of valves of which this is just one. 


So all I need to do is unbolt the old one and and bolt this one in.

Yes, that's how it works.

Regrettably. the old one is here:

Yes that's right - you can barely see it. It's between the back of the engine and the bulkhead nestling in a bundle of tubes and wires. Follow the rubber hose up from the bottom left. The other side of it is threaded into a metal pipe.

I've taken off all the fancy engine covers to reveal it - they are removed by the "pulling very hard" method.


So:

1. You can't actually get a spanner on it because the bolt hex part is too thin for a normal spanner.
2. If you could get a spanner on it, you can't turn it because there is no clearance
3. It's ultimately attached to the exhaust so it's virtually welded on with grot and heat.

Splendid.

First attempt I tried making tools out of bits of scrap metal:

I am skilled toolmaker

These variously bent, twisted off and ruined my knuckles.

Next I decided to remove the long pipe the valve is screwed into which snakes around the engine and opens into the exhaust manifold, then I could get it onto the bench. In my previous attempts with the home-made tools this was flexing alarmingly and I don't even want to know how much a new one costs.

I am replacing part 250.

The pipe (200) attaches to the manifold with this funky bolt (230) that you can't even seen - I needed my new 27mm spanner and sixth sense to get it off.

Removed (and replaced) using ESP. Don't loose the two malleable washers.

Annoyingly, once I removed that and the additional two bolts (210, 220) that hold the pipe in place, it was still jammed in. I managed to rotate it enough I could get at it though:

Yes, so very much more accessible.

The dirty great pipe spanner was used to hold the pipe (oddly enough - I do like to use the right tool for the job) in an effort to stop twisting the fitting off the end and also to help stop bending it; a serious amount of force was required to get the valve off. That was partially successful in that it only bent a bit making it just a slight mare to get back into place.

The hose clamp (270) isn't re-usable so was cut off and my Mercedes now sports a beautifully made clamp rescued from a 1970s Alfa Romeo. I think the clamp is the only bit of that car that didn't turn to dust.

The valve itself is a one-way valve - I could easily blow through the new one in one direction but the old one was blocked both ways - definitely broke and most likely the problem. When I went into the immaculately presented parts desk at the Mercedes dealer the lady there didn't even need to go look for it - she had a box full of them under the counter. Not an uncommon problem, perhaps. The fault has been reset again so hopefully that will be the end of it. 

That's a good 3 hour job by the time you are finished messing about. My hands may take longer to mend.