Simkin.Org

Category: Uncategorized

  • Defender Rear Gas Strut

    I don’t live on a perfectly flat road and I don’t usually have the option to find a parking space using a spirit-level. This means of course that when I open the rear door, it is either a two-person job or I have to hold the door open and use my free hand to load or unload. Why didn’t Land Rover design a better mechanism to hold the door open?

    The standard fitting is a door stay bar that rolls in a channel on the door with a metal clip to attempt to be a retainer, but anybody with a Defender knows it wouldn’t hold custard nevermind a heavy metal safari door.

    So I ordered a gas strut from eBay. Expect to pay £35-40. There are a few different kits out there with varying fittings. The one I bought looks like this and reuses the original internal bracket. The seller was “aw4x4-uk”.

    Fitting is very easy.

    • Remove the metal door stay and the clip
    • Use the spacers to refit the bracket in the bodywork – you may need some slightly longer bolts for this job.
    • Attach the gas strut to the bracket and mark up where the other end meets the door when the door is open and the strut is still under 90 degrees from the back of the car. If your tyre is against your side-light, you are too far open!
    • Droll two holes
    • Fit two rivets
    • Done!
    Use the existing bracket, spaced out so the strut doesn’t foul against the doorframe. I found that whilst it would seem sensible to fit the strut between the two arms of the bracket, the square head would not then swivel properly. You could file it to a round if you prefer and then adjust the height the other end using the plastic spacer. It doesn’t make a difference to the operation.
    Once you are happy with the positioning, drill and rivet the bracket to the door
    If you have a door card, you will need to cut it to allow for the strut. You could avoid this by fitting the strut higher, but my door had no other anchor point for the strut to be riveted to. This was fine for me and I suspect, the majority of Defender drivers.

  • Defender Mud Shields to save the outriggers

    I recently had my entire chassis replaced from the old rusty mess I had to a nice shiny, galvanised one.

    As with most Land Rover owners who have just paid out for significant work that they didn’t do themselves, I started poking around underneath to both admire the result and to look for snagging work I needed to pick up. In doing so, I discovered something that maybe a few Defender owners are not really aware of.

    My previous car was a CSW edition out of the factory meaning it had side windows, carpets and seats in the back but was otherwise the same as a hard top. Or so I thought!

    It turns out there were a few other little tweaks to aid with sound proofing. One of these is the mudshield behind the front wheel. Go look at the back of your front wheel arch and see if it looks like this….

    Prevent rust eating your footwell

    Other than the CSW edition, all Defenders chuck mud up onto the outrigger and are slowly dissolving their footwells. This is what eventually led me to admit I needed a new chassis. I could really do with this not happening again.

    There is a great company you need to know about called Gwyn Lewis 4×4. I have no relationship with the mother than loving this simple but effective product – the mud shield. It is a plastic panel you screw in-place and it reduces road noise (a little) but mainly prevents mud being flung up to where it causes havoc.

    That looks better doesn’t it. Worth the £30? I think so.

    They also do panels for the other arches, but for me this is the place where these parts are essential. Don’t wait until your chassis has eaten itself.

  • Is your PC part of a global botnet?

    Now you can find out thanks to Kaspersky Labs and this neat little tool: https://checkip.kaspersky.com/

  • Back On-Line

    After a very long absence, I’ve decided to fire-up this blog again. It has been down mainly due to my idleness, inspired by constantly shifting the site around from one server to another when I needed the hardware for something else. But it is back to stay now.

  • Diablo 3 Overheat

    Diablo 3 is pretty good. But like me, you may notice it thrashes graphics cards to pieces and they soon overheat. I’m lucky in that I installed a monster fan a few years ago and whilst it is noisy, it keeps everything within tolerances. However, you may instead need to lower your FPS expectations:

    http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-lockups-and-crash-troubleshooting-pc

    After previous issues with drive 296.10, I’m going to give the beta drive 301.24 a crack….

  • iPad and Wireless

    If your iPad cannot connect to your wireless, try changing the channel. Our Wireless LAN set to channel 13 made it invisible to the iPad. Setting it to 8 fixed it.

  • How to master reset a Nokia N95

    *#7370#

    12345

  • O2 Broadband SuperUser

    O2 Broadband suggest using “Administrator” as a login name to the router. Use the same password, but login as “SuperUser”. You can then create your own user account with your choice of password and set that as having SuperUser access rights.

    Still can’t get telnet working but it is only a matter of time….

  • Ripping TV Series box-sets into itunes

    Easy peasy.

    – Rip the DVDs using Handbrake getting each episode out as a separate MP4

    – Add the files to itunes. They will by default appear in the movies category.

    – Right-click each one and choose Get info. Then Options. Set Media Kind to TV Programme.

    – Under the Video tab, set the series name, series number and episode.

  • Moving Dawn of War to a new Computer

    If you’ve moved Dawn of War II and your saved games are not appearing, it is because your “Games for Windows” or “XLive” profile needs to be copied as well.

    1. On your old computer, copy the contents of c:\user\xxx\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Xlive to a USB stick or similar. Also get a copy of xxx\Documents\My Games\Dawn of War 2\Saved Games

    2. On the new computer, Start DoW2 and login under the same profile. If it was online on the old computer, just login. If it was offline on the old computer, create a new offline profile with the same name.

    3. Exit DoW2

    4. Delete the contents of the XLive folder on the new computer and replace it with the stuff on the USB stick.

    5. Copy your saved games from the USB stick into the folder on the new computer

    6. Start DoW2 and enjoy!