I’ve used a Honda eu10i for many years at South Hants Model Car Club, and it was a fine unit.  The problem being the cost, they are around £700 new, and even used fetch £400.

A Kipor was a very attractive option, and at about £230 seemed very good value for money.  Slightly noisier than the equivalent Honda.

I saw a Honda EX650 in operation, and I was amazed at how quiet it was, so I searched eBay, and within hours I had ‘won’ an auction for one.  Spares or repair, £50 + £20 p&p…

Now I like a project, so I was relishing the chance to get stuck in.  The auction stated that the engine ran well, but there was no voltage output.

I got it delivered (eventually…), and filled it with oil and petrol.  It started second pull…  Nice.

I tested the output, no so nice, 20V ac and 4V dc.  That’s not working then.

Asking around it appeared that my first course of action was to service it, and try adjusting the governor output.

So I search the net and found Offmains.co.uk who purported to be a seller of spares, and a repairer of Honda generators.

I entered into an email communication with “Peter”, and he too recommended servicing it, and then testing it.

So £17 later I had a spark plug, air filter, oil filler cap on the way.

A quick service and it was running more smoothly, so I had to go down the route of testing the output.  I needed a workshop manual.  I got one off of eBay, about £7.

Some poking about suggested that the stator was bad.  Some more emails with the ever-helpful Peter and he suggested it could be the output capacitor, and suggested sending it back to him for testing.

I sent it back, and he told me it was fine, so it was probably the stator.  He had a used one in stock, and a frequency meter for the front panel (mine had failed), for £100 all in.

Okay, this is adding up a bit now, let’s do some sums…

Honda EX650 Generator = £70 eBay
Service Items = £17 Offmains
Service Manual = £7 eBay
Used Stator & Freq Meter = £100 Offmains

Total = £194

I got the stator this morning, fitted it, put it all back together and fired it up.

Success!  It’s all working fine now.

So a £50 eBay bargain turned into a £194 project…

Working Honda EX650s seem to go for £250-300, so whilst not a massive bargain, I’ve not lost out.  And I know how the thing works now too.

Would I do the same thing again?  Yes, if I had the time to spare, I like a little project.  I’ve ended up with a quiet small generator, I could have got a NEW Kipor for a little more money, perhaps that would have been the better option.

Maybe so, I can always sell this one and get something different in the future.

I made a video for my rcLazy.com website, and got it on the first page of Google’s results in seconds, even before YouTube had finished processing it.

It was very easy, choose a keyword with little competition (but with some interest), make a video, upload it. Shockingly easy!

Jack Conte has recently come to my attention, and his Gulf track is just epic, have a looky listen at the bottom of this post.

He came up with this concept of a VideoSong.  Which has two rules.  One is that if you see it, you hear it, and everything you hear you see at some point.

So basically, it’s a mix of a big load of videos, with all the audio mixed together, and the video clips appearing showing what’s being played.

I’m transfixed by the expertise Jack shows here, playing multiple instruments to great effect.  And I’m just in awe of his music room.

It got me thinking about expertise.  Some people seek expertise in their careers, some in hobbies, some in neither.  But what goes into becoming an expert in something is common, it’s TIME.

Countless dozens of hours go into becoming so good at something. So if you want to race radio controlled cars, you’ve gotta practise.  If you want to be a leading Dentist, you’ve got to practise.

And if you want to be able to play dozens of instruments and creating amazing music like this, you’ve got to practise.

Keep practising Jack, your work is phenomenal.  I liked it so much, I bought it all from the Jack Conte website.

I never knew that Alexa listed Baidu.com as No.8 website in the world.  I never even realised what Baidu was.  The Chinese site must be massive, how can internet marketers make the most of the Chinese market?

Comments below please!  Especially lists of the cars you’ve owned!

1997 Peugeot Boxer Auto Sleeper Symphony Motorhome (present)

Bought in a hurry as a replacement for the Hymer in 1997, paid about £15k for it, still worth only a couple or three grand less.  Great little van containing everything a large motorhome has in a tiny package that fits in a normal car park space.  Everyone’s amazed to learn it has a showeroom in it…

Spent thousands on it, including welding, repairs, head gasket, yadda, yadda.

It’s a 2.0 petrol and is very underpowered and thirsty.  I keep having grand ideas of dropping a 2.5 or 2.8 turbo diesel in it…  Or an LPG conversion.

I don’t intend to get rid of it any time soon, but when I replace it it’ll be for a custom built camper based on a recent Ford Transit 4×4, I hope.

1995 Mazda Mx5 (present)

Bough in a hurry for £3k or so in 1996.  It’s just ace, the handling is simply superb.  Anyone who hasn’t driven one call it a girls car or a hairdressers car.  Anyone who’s driven one knows exactly why people love them.  The best fun at legal speeds you can have I reckon.

Spent quite a bit on it, it’ll nearly be rebuilt by the time I finish with it…  Weekend driver, it’s kept as a hobby car more than anything else, and it’s still seems to be holding it’s value.

1994 Hymer Motorhome

Replacement for the Ambulance, to live in.  Bought for £15k, LHD, the test drive was the scariest thing I’ve ever done.  Bit of a beast to drive, but immensely nice to live in.

Traded it in a year or so later for something smaller and more practical.  Lost £5k on it.

1996 BMW 325TDS

Bought in a hurry (a pattern is forming) for a few grand.  Chipped it, nice and quick, and sublime handling.  I was thus converted to rear wheel drive and knew why so many people love BMWs.  Apart from repair costs.  £500 for a radiator replacement at a specialist for example.

Dropped a filing cabinet on it, then sold it to some guy for a couple of grand who though it would be easy to fix.  That was an hour after an eastern european guy crawled all over it and revealed it was a repaired Cat D write off.  Who knew!?

2001 Vauxhall Astravan

The replacement company van for the Combo, turbo diesel, decent enough, comfy, silver.  The brakes weren’t good enough for the engine though, I thought.

Can’t remember how much I paid or got for it.  Unmemorable.

1989 Ford Transit Mountain Ambulance Camper Conversion

Bought around my 30th birthday off eBay.  Saw it 3pm one afternoon, a few hours later I’d bought it for £1500, and the next morning I was on a plane to Newcastle to pick it up.

Partially converted into a camper van, I ran it as it was for a while, and then ripped it apart for massive welding for an MOT.  Rebuilt the camper conversion improving it, and then lived in it for a few months.  Great fun.

Sold it on eBay again for £2200, but I’d spent a grand or two on it, and many many hours underneath it.  A great project.

1999 Vauxhall Combo Van

Bought in a hurry as a company van for £2100.  Way over price.  Complete pile of dangerous shit.  Traded in for £800 a few months later.

1994 Mitsubishi Pajero SWB

I was living in pseudo-rurality and felt I needed a 4×4.  I found this 3.5 v6 special edition beast at an importer and bought it for £8k.  It was terrificly quick for a big lump, and with power everything, including power adjustable suspension, handled ace both on and off the road.

Alas I blew the engine up by failing to keep the oil topped up (I swear that dipstick had issues…)

Stupidly spent £4k rebuilding the engine and then quickly sold it on for £4500 to a man who got a bargain indeed.  Though, he probably would have needed to do the suspension after I bashed the hell out of it…

2004 Skoda Octavia vRS

Bought brand new in 04, for just under £15k.  Essentially a Golf GTi in bigger clothing, it was superb.  Terrific 180bhp engine, sharp sharp handling which was bizarrely better than the equivalent golf.

Sold it after a year or two at a £6k loss as it seemed to go round corners so quickly it scared the pants off me.

2003 Honda Accord Estate

A stupid brand new purchase in 2003 after seeing the cool clunk clunk Honda advert.  The electric powered tailgate sold it totally to me.  Nice quality, all the gadgets, but I found the 197bhp 2.4 VTEC immensely annoying, the semi-auto box was a very poor match for it, and as one has to rev the bollocks of those engines to get any performance out of it I was disappointed.  That engine and box in an executive saloon just didn’t do the trick for me.

Traded it in after a few months for a few grand loss.

2001 Saab 9-3 Aero

Bought brand new off the internet in 2001 as a personal import from Germany for £18k, a good £5k cheaper.  205bhp, loads of turbo power, immensely comfortable, but handled like shit with ride quality of a shopping trolley.

Traded in at a significant £7k loss after a couple of years.

1993 Saab 9000 Turbo

Bought in 1999, I think, for a couple of grand.  It was dark grey metallic hatchback, and had the biggest boot I’ve ever had on a car, including vans and estates…  Low pressure turbo.

1986 Saab 900 GLX

Bought in 1997 for about £900.  I naively paid too much, and spent hundreds, if not thousands over the next few years on it.  It was silver, and I loved it.

It was big, chunky, and a whole lot like me.  I used to love driving it into things, the best was reversing it with the door open which collided with a concrete pillar.

It was looked after by a main dealer mechanic in his mum’s back yard, many, many hours he spent on that, usually on the brakes, which seemed to be a bizarre design requiring a bunch of special tools.

Big scary moment in it when I spun it on a roundabout in Newcastle, the whole world stopped behind me as the back end slowly went round on a greasy road.  It had surprisingly elegant handling for a 2-tonne front wheel drive.

It finally ended up being traded in for £500 when the head gasket went.

1985 Mazda 323

My first car.  Bought in the summer of 1996 so I could hold down a summer job in Surrey.  Bought for £325, spent a couple of hundred on tyres, brakes and repairs. Sold after the summer for £300.

It was gold, great for hiding the rust, with a glorious brown interior.

I think it was a 1.3 petrol, a saloon, and I lived out of that car for months.  I recall having a fuel leak that melted the driveway of a B&B I was staying at, they weren’t best pleased…

As a first car, it was shit, unmemorable, quite possibly unsafe, but remarkably reliable.

Movember is a campaign for Prostate Cancer, where stupid men get to grow stupid facial hair all in an attempt to gather donations for charity.

A few years ago, whilst living as a homeless hippy, I grew a moustache of a very similar nature.  Unfortunately it backfired and is now the photo on my passport…

What people don’t tell you about moustaches is the attention they get.  People look startled at you, and then they talk to your moustache the whole time, they can’t take their eyes off it.  I guess that’s what aliens feel like.  Or women with excessive cleavage?

It was a fun month, I enjoyed it, but tonight it will go, probably to return once more next Movember.

You might still be able to sponsor me.  Thanks for all your donations so far, I’ve raised over £100 which is nice, and overall the event has raised tens of millions of pounds for a very worthy charity.

I used to leave everything on, computers, routers, TVs, video recorders, etc. Many geeks see long ‘uptime’ as a badge of honour.

These days I turn almost everything off at night. My nerdy little bedtime routine involves turning off lights, sockets until the only things that are left turned on at the wall are the fridge, the boiler, my bedside light, and my iPhone charger.

The only downside is now I have a Virgin V+ box, which is a hard-disk cable video recorder. So it doesn’t record when it’s not turned on. But no matter.

I also often turn everything off when I go out, maybe not if I’m just popping out for an hour or two, but if I’m out longer than that I go through the same ol’ routine, everything gets turned off.

The advent of good mobile phones connected to the internet is a big reason everything gets turned off. I used to leave the internet on all the time, for instant easy access. But now, I just pick up my iPhone to see email etc.

Why do I do all this? One reason is to save money, of course, I have a pound coin electric meter (the flat I live in used to be a holiday flat), so it’s very obvious how much electric is being used.

The other big reason is safety. I don’t think people realise just how easy it is for electrical items to catch fire. Many many fires are caused by electrical faults. The last thing you want is to wake up to be confronted by smoke and flames, or worse, not wake up…

I remember once sitting at my computer and smoke suddenly came out of it, a fan or something failed and up it went. I turned it off quick, but it was a scary prospect, if I hadn’t been sat there, what would have happened?

Do you turn things off? Have you ever had anything electrical catch fire? Comment below…

Why did I want one? Not enough pockets.

Back in the day you could get away with your front door key and a tenner. These days I’ve got loads of keys, a wallet packed with plastic (not credit cards, bloody loyalty cards), a massive iPhone, shades, tissues, sunblock, Valium, anti-bacterial hand-gel, Wuther’s Originals and a hat.

I stopped wearing a watch years ago, around the time mobile phones became ubiquitous, as I realised you’ve always got the time nearby. And because I fiddle like mad with anything that’s not screwed down, fiddling with my watch in a job interview / meeting / date wasn’t a great impression I realised.

So I thought it would be perfect to have a phone on a watch. No need to put it in a pocket. I don’t make many phone calls, but text a lot. I could text away on a watchphone / phonewatch / watch-de-phone, and have one less thing to carry. It would always be there for when I did need to make a call.

Then, I could just have the watch, a key around my neck on a string, a tenner in my back pocket (or a piece of plastic) and the male pocket bulges would be solved. Freedom again!

But, sorry LG, you’re about a decade too late. Now I use my iPhone for the internet WAY more than as a phone, or for texting. So I now carry a smartphone for being smart, not for use as a phone.

Where did I put my man-bag?

Quad band Watch phone ET-1 BT headset white/PINK

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I don’t tend to have a daily dose of news. I’ve done this on purpose, it’s mostly negative and dreary, and there’s little that actually really effects my day to day life.

I don’t even read any news websites regularly (despite managing the build of one the major ones a few years ago). I figure if it’s important news I’ll find out from a real person.

What is seeming to happen though, is I now find out news from Facebook and Twitter. The Social Media networks are excellent real time distributors of news. News often spreads via these networks before it reaches the main media.

Tonight’s example is the Earthquake in Samoa, and the subsequent threats of Tsunamis (what is the plural of Tsunami?) hitting Pacific shores. I saw an RT (retweet) about it, and thought “is this a news event I need to know about?”. A quick Google News search for Tsunami returned several thousand current articles, a hot topic indeed.

So, is Social Media the new News? Is this where we’ll get our news from in the future? Will traditional media change to become more and more current? Everyone predicts the death of newspapers, it’s yesterdays news.

But hell, it doesn’t matter if you drop a newspaper in the bath. iPhone’s aren’t quite so waterproof.

The game released in 1978 (when I was 3) by MB games is a lasting image of the 80s. It flashed and beeped and you had to repeat what it did. Kind of a multimedia version of the old classic “I went to market and bought…” parlour game.

So, I need to fix my need to have one! I want one! Does anyone have an original MB Simon game kicking around under the stairs or in a loft?

Let me know!

For an instant fix, you can play here:

Simon made by Neave Games