GT750 – Boyer Bransden Ignition Round 3

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Ian R. Sandy

After pranging my orange 1976 Buffalo, as is typical with accidents and these bikes the points cover was mangled, and as sometimes happens the points plate itself was damaged. I don’t have a problem running points – they are reliable, easy to fix, easy to trouble shoot but I had been thinking of converting over to an electronic ignition kit at some point as it is just less work to maintain. I have installed the Boyer Bransden ignition kit previously on my  1975 GT750 custom, and also on the 1974 GT550 I rebuilt, and as I had a couple of kits still sitting on the shelf I decided the time had finally come to go ahead and do the same update on the ’76.

The Boyer Bransden Micro MarkIII kit to fit the Suzuki GT750  is a bit of an odd thing as it is really designed for the Kawasaki triples, with the only difference being the (poorly written) instruction sheet and a Suzuki specific rotor. To be totally honest, it is a pain to fit and there are several alternatives available that are much easier to install. The first issue is there is no proper mounting plate included to attach the circuit board to, and so you have to either use some large washers and centre it as best you can in the contact breaker housing, or (as is suggested in the instructions) clear off your old contact breaker plate and then use it. The problem I’ve run into previously is that I’ve always then had to drill and tap new screw holes in the plate to get additional adjustment as other wise the timing can’t be easily set (too far retarded).  The other problem is that the wiring and instructions as supplied tell you to hack your wiring harness to install the device which I was never too happy about.  There are other options – Newtronics has reappeared on the market after having been taken over by Autocar – these are similar to the Boyer Bransden units in that you have to stash a control box somewhere, but at least they have the proper GT750 specific wiring, as well as Suzuki specific mounting adapters. They are available on eBay, but probably a better bet is Motorcycle Ignition in Australia as Shayn will at least answer questions. Another option is the ELZ3Coil from Germany which is the slickest set-up of the bunch as it is just a circuit board that replaces the contact breaker plate, and so there are no changes to the wire harness at all. Very tidy indeed !  Currently these units, with shipping to Canada included, are in the $230CDN range each, and the Boyer Bransden unit will run between $150CDN and $200CDN.

For the moment though, as I had a couple of the Boyer Bransden kits ‘on the shelf’,  it seemed silly to not use one of them. This time though I decided to take a different approach and make up a proper wiring adapter to allow me to just plug into the existing harness. I had all the bits I needed to make up the fittings and also the black sleeving to cover the new harness from Vintage Connections so it was an easy task. After a couple of hours I had it all made up and installed.

The yellow arrow on the right shows where the new cable joins into the existing wiring harness – from there is runs back, following the upper right side rail and alongside the battery to the control unit marked with the second yellow arrow on the left of the photo. I’ve secured the control module on the inner rear fender and everything is neat and tidy under the seat. This location should also have the added benefit of being a cooler place than where I have previously located the units on the underside of  the top frame rail, directly above the engine and under the fuel tank. We’ll see what happens I suppose – I still have one kit which I’ll keep for spares should that be required. With a new points cover in place (part number 11300-31830 and still available from Suzuki in the US for about $50USD) I was back in business !

The bike started up no problem at all and sounds OK – while there are a few signs of wear and tear from the spill evident, there isn’t anything major so I think I got off quite lightly !

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Stiff and Sore

Posted on June 6, 2010 by Ian R. Sandy

Well, sometimes things just don’t turn out quite as expected.

It was a great day for a ride – one of the very few we’ve had so far this year actually – so I was quite interested in putting a few miles on my orange 1976 GT750. I’m the second owner of this bike, and have had it in my care since 1986.  At that time we really didn’t have much in the way of disposable income, and a motorcycle was the last thing I really needed to spend money on, but what attracted me to it immediately was that it was the same colour as the one we’d had stolen in 1974.  The engine on this 1976 bike was seized solid, but the bike itself was original and pretty much complete with the exception of one frame cover, so I gladly picked it up and had it running before too long.

I made a few trips on it – once out to Vancouver and back in a weekend – and drove it to work regularly over the years till we moved to Calgary. Its been super reliable, and although I have toyed with the idea several times of changing it over to an electronic ignition system, I never felt it necessary as the points based ignition for the most part has been rock solid. Of late, the clutch has been starting to sound a bit odd ( it is the original clutch), but all-in-all like many old friends, if you were familiar with their idiosyncrasies it wasn’t really a bother.

I  headed out for Bragg Creek following Highway 8, and 22, and then cut down through Millarville where I picked up Highway 549 and pointed toward Okotoks.  and then on to Highway 2a into Aldersyde and into High River. Everything was running well so I continued on to Nanton which I’ve written about previously here and stopped there for a bit of lunch at the Wild Thyme Cafe, on the east side Nanton just off of Highway 2 northbound. I stopped because I liked the name, and was then very pleasantly surprised at both the service and also the food – recommended !

After lunch it was a straight shot home northwards up Highway 2, and then the Deerfoot bypass into Calgary, on to Bow Bottom Trail and then to the intersection of Bow Bottom and Deer Side Dr, which is where disaster struck. I should first mention, that Calgary is a very nice place to live, but has idiots as elected officials. I’m sure they are all quite pleasant people individually, but for whatever reason, when they gather together to exercise their collected wisdom, invariably they manage to demonstrate that as a group, wisdom is the last thing they possess.  Take street maintenance as a simple example – their starting position is that it isn’t required, and so in the winter (and this is a northern city with long winters) the roads are not ploughed but instead  covered with pea gravel that then is kicked up and breaks car windscreens and headlamps. With the roads not cleared, after every snowfall there are many accidents leading one to wonder if perhaps city council members are given shares in body repair shops as part payment for their vacuousness, but I digress …….  Once spring eventually arrives all the roads are covered with this gravel, which continues to break windscreens and headlights well into May and June. There is an effort of sorts to clear up the gravel, but it really does not seem to be a priority – as an example, the Calgary Stampede banners have already been installed on light posts and standards on many streets by city works crews, but the gravel and the pot holes on the roads still remain.

Gravel and two-wheeled vehicles have an uneasy relationship – on a paved road covered with a light coating of small gravel, it is much like trying to drive on a surface covered in ball bearings. I had been around this corner a number of times this year and although the side of the roadway had not been cleaned and had a lot of loose gravel on it, the centre area of the intersection had been clear. The operative words being ‘had been’ – perhaps a car or truck had kicked some gravel from the roadside into the intersection, or some had dropped from the back of a truck carrying a gravel load.  Whatever the reason, as I entered the corner I saw it too late to avoid it and both I and my trusty Buffalo hit the pavement hard. This is of course, why you wear safety equipment – I always cringe when I see some ‘dude’ with his ‘dude-ette’ on the back in their t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops, as I know what pavement does to skin even at slow speeds. And the idea of not wearing a proper helmet as is allowed in some parts of the world just appalls me – although in the case of an accident I suppose it does improve the gene pool, as they are obviously too stupid to be allowed to breed.

At any rate after a trouble-free run of about  290 km I approached the corner to make a left turn, put on the turn signal and then hit the deck. I wasn’t going fast – about 40km/hour – and because of all the equipment I was wearing I wasn’t hurt badly at all, although I do have some colourful bruising. My beloved 1976 Buffalo is repairable – at first glance actually there isn’t too much damage at all, although as is typical in most Buffalo crashes, the points cover and points are toast – which I suppose provides me with the perfect excuse to install that electronic ignition I’ve been thinking about !

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1973 GT750 – Grills and Forks

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Ian R. Sandy

The chrome that I had done at Alberta Plating for my 1973 GT750 project bike turned out really well, but not completely without  issues. The small screws that hold on the front fender stays were a disappointment as when I went to install them there were two issues: the threads had been chromed so the nuts would not fit the threads, plus when I tried to use a die to clean up the threads, the chrome finish ‘popped’ off of the heads of the small screws. Possibly a better job could have been done – I’m not an expert in the plating business, but of course the original ones were chromed so I know it is possible to do it well. In the end, rather than get fussed with it and as everything else had turned out well I just swapped out the screws for stainless steel.

For the radiator, I wanted something more than just the stock look available in 1972/973. In 1974 a plastic grill that covered the entire front and sides of the radiator was introduced – for the 1973 model year, Suzuki went to chromed radiator plastic end caps (in 1972 these were painted to match the tank) but the face of the rad looked pretty bare. I managed to track down an OEM accessory grill (part number 94960-31000) which was offered by Suzuki for the 1972/1973 GT750 model years from Reiner Schneider in Germany which arrived very quickly and looks really nice. Reiner has probably one of the largest collections of NOS Suzuki parts on the planet – recommended.

The other thing I was thinking about was suspension. I wanted to retain the original look of the rear shocks which was not a problem – I bought a set from Reproduction Decals which look very nice – in point of fact they probably look much better than they actually work, and for serious riding I suspect they will be borderline useless, but it is the right original look (tall upper cap) which is what I wanted.! The front forks were another matter – from the factory, the area under the fork ears was not chromed so over the years, water accumulation at the lower end of the fork ear leads to severe pitting of the fork tube. In my case, several of the corrosion pits were almost half the depth of the fork tube wall, which I wasn’t happy with. Fork tubes are available from Frank’s Maintenance and Engineering in the USA for about $300 a pair with shipping. I was planning to order these when another option presented itself. The local Buffalo guru (Fred) came across a supplier in Japan (Cruzinimage_co) offering replacement fork tubes and he bought a set – looking at them, they appear to be perfect and cost about $80 a pair. Yes they are probably made in China, and yes its possible that the steel is of poor quality, but they do look pretty good being chromed the full length and they measure exactly the same as the originals. I bought two sets as I will want a pair for the 1972 I’ll be doing next winter – for the amount of use they are likely to get, they will do just fine. I have also bought gasket sets and clutch plates from the same outfit previously – I actually like the gasket sets better than the Athena kits available from PartsnMore and other places as these ones are more complete. Recommended.

Below is a shot of the OEM radiator grill from Reiner, the middle photo shows the pitting on one of the front fork tubes, and below that you can see the new fork tube along side one of the four old ones I had available (yes it is also bent as well as pitted !). Just ‘click’ on any image to see a larger version.

GrillPittingTubes

 

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Getting Hosed !

Posted on May 8, 2010 by Ian R. Sandy

A key change from the 1972 GT750 to the 1973 model was the addition of front disc brakes to replace the original internal cable operated drum brakes.  I’m told that brake hose should be changed about every 6 to 8 years, regardless of what it looks like – much like tires – as the materials supposedly fatigue and perish which could lead to catastrophic failure. Of course I’m told this by people trying to sell both tires and brake hoses, and while I don’t doubt their sincerity, I also can’t rid myself of the nagging thought at the back of my mind that perhaps the recommendations are a trifle too self-serving. None the less, I also have no doubt that 37-year-old tires and brake hoses desperately need to be replaced, as the ones on my 1973 GT750 project bike are severely cracked, checked, split and harder than a teenager with his first copy of Playboy ! There was, of course, one small problem.

The GT750 disc brake design went through a couple of changes over the course of the model releases, mainly to do with the hoses and master cylinder and 1973 was the only year in which Suzuki used hard walled steel brake line together with flexible brake hose (two middle hoses to the lower brake lines and an upper one to the master cylinder) on the GT750. This steel line and the middle hoses have been long discontinued, and the later replacement model of hoses uses a different fitting on the brake calliper itself, so you need either to modify the callipers, or replace them with later model calipers. I have a box full of later model callipers, but I was interested in retaining the original 1973 look if possible and while I have seen a few NOS or good used hoses, lines and fittings, they are all of course 37 years old and therefore suspect from a reliability perspective.  You don’t want to be thinking about potential reliability issues when you are trying to stop !

So I decided to see about having new hoses and lines made to order, and went looking for an outfit that was willing to do small custom work at an affordable price for vintage and custom vehicles. While I’m positive there are places in Calgary that would have done this for me, I couldn’t find any actually advertising this sort of service on the internet (always my first port of call) , and when I did call one that I found after a search through the on-line Yellow Pages, the person that I talked to was a complete idiot which was disappointing. After a bit more searching, I located another Alberta located outfit called Edmonton Brake and Clutch , located (not too surprisingly) in Edmonton that both specifically advertised this sort of custom service on their web site and also were very helpful and knowledgeable when I called – I was actually able to talk to the fellow in the shop (Blayne) who would be making the fittings up for me, and on the basis of that discussion I sent them a set of what I needed to have replaced and a couple of days later they called to say they were ready to go !

While I wanted to retain the look of the original installation, I’m not such a slave to authenticity that I minded making a few small changes – for one thing I was quite happy to have all the fittings in stainless steel. I was also happy to move away from rubber hoses, to braided stainless steel hoses as it allows much more pressure to actually reach the brake callipers – which can be quite useful when trying to stop ! The downside of this is that the braided hoses are a bit smaller in diameter than the original ones, but I can live with that. I’ve attached a photo to the right showing the original  hoses and steel lines below the new ones – due to the smaller diameter of the new braided hose, I will leave off the wire coil found on the old upper hose, but I will retain the rubber hood that goes over the fitting attached to the master cylinder. All-in-all I’m pretty happy with the end result and so if you need custom brake hoses made up for some reason, give Blayne a call and I’m sure he can get you all fixed up !

Next on the list is to rebuild the callipers, re-spoke, true,install new rubber and balance the wheels, finish off rebuilding the wiring and switch gear,  rebuild the carbs, decide whether I’ll use an electronic ignition or just stay with points,  and wait for Cyclemania Artworks in Okotoks to finish doing the paint. I’d also like to get the engine running, but that means having to sort out the exhaust ……… I’m aiming to have this ready for a show and shine June 12. Could be close.

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1973 GT750 – Engine In !

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Ian R. Sandy

The project continues !

I had the engine fully assembled on the bench and so now was the time to think about who to call to help lift it into the frame – these things are damned heavy, awkward to manage and I’m not getting any younger. Come to think of it, neither are any of my friends ! We (worldwide GT750 folks)  recently had a thread on this topic which can be read here. The normal method is to left the engine into the frame from the right hand side and then somehow support it while attempting to slide in a couple of the engine mounting bolts. This can be a harrowing, possibly dangerous adventure when doing it by yourself as the risk of injury is high, and a male bonding experience if a friend helps you, as you get to learn new, colourful and highly descriptive words that extend and add versatility to your vocabulary !  It seemed like a good opportunity to try another option.

A method I’ve use previously for removing the engine has been to lay the frame on its side, unbolt everything, and then lift the frame off the bike. Many people have also done the reverse to re-install the engine, so I thought I’d give it a try, and I’m pleased to say that it worked like a charm ! With the engine blocked up securely so that it wouldn’t fall over and damage my lovely oil stained concrete floor, I just lifted my frame over the top and into position, slipped in a couple of bolts to secure it and then gently lowered it back so it sat upright on the motorcycle lift – job done ! The whole process took about 20 minutes start to finish with no back ache, no mashed fingers, no colourful language and there isn’t a scratch on the paint that I can see – to the right is a photo of the freshly re-united engine and frame (just ‘click’ for a larger image). Doing all this work on the lift, had the advantage of being able to adjust the working height so it was comfortable, and so much easier on the back. Recommended.

From there is was a simple step to re-install the front forks, and then get the frame back up onto the centre stand so I could remount the swing arm etc..

Richard, the fellow who runs the PinkPossum web site did a small write-up some time ago about a simple conversion for the swing arm on the GT750 which I wanted to try. Starting in 1977, the newer model Suzuki’s had needle roller bearings in the swing arm which helped to improve the handling. The standard swing arm bearing for the GT750 is actually a fibre bush which works OK when new, but tends to get sloppy over time. There are bronze bushes available as direct replacements, although you have to be careful that you get some that actually fit ! The ones sold by PartsnMore for example have too big an OD and so need to be turned down somehow before they will fit into the swing arm. Proper sized bronze bushes are available from the Kettle Club in the UK who sometimes also sell them via eBay. On a couple of bikes that I’ve pulled apart for spares, I’ve noticed that the metal bushings seem to have lubrication problems as there have been signs of significant scoring. Of course that could also just be due to poor maintenance, but I wanted to try Richard’s needle roller conversion (details can be found here) as it just seemed like a better idea.

Finding the bearings here in Calgary was not a problem, although I understand that Timkins has recently sold their needle roller production division to Koyo and so the brand names may change. I was slightly concerned initially as the fit is just a tiny bit on the loose side.  I suppose it would be nice if there were a .001 less clearance, but once fitted in the frame and bolted up it actually feels fine with no noticeable play at all and I’m quite happy with it. A photo of the pivot shaft, with the two new spacers (left and right) together with the Timkins B-1412 bearings, two per side is to the left. Note that when this assembly is installed into the swing arm, you need a thrust washer of some sort at each end as the spacer protrudes about 2 mm – as Richard of the PinkPossum site suggested, I just cut the old fibre bush lip off, and used this as it is the correct thickness.

The radiator has been cleaned out, pressure tested and painted and is waiting for me at Crossroads Radiator here in Calgary, so I’m on to the next steps of paint, and getting the rest of the bike bolted together !

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1973 GT750 – Oil Pump

Posted on April 11, 2010 by Ian R. Sandy

The build continues !

Recall when I cracked open the cases on the engine I wanted to use, I found a bit of a mess as it appears the oil had leaked out and been replaced with water over the years, and things were rusted solid. Other than the cases, I was unable to salvage much of the internals at all.

I basically had must of what I needed to replace all of the internals, but I did not have a good gear shift selector shaft and so had to do a bit of searching around to get one. The gear selector shaft on the GT750 was changed sometime in 1974 to have a longer rod on the left engine side. At the same time, the gear shift selector arm design was also changed, and the new ones had much less angle than the ones used in 1972, 1973 and much of 1974. Although I had the correct, old style gear selector lever, the gear selector shafts I had available to me had either corrosion or wear right where the oil seal would ride.  After a bit of head scratching, I was very lucky (and thankful !) to have one offered to me for the cost of the postage by Barry, who is a fellow member on the Sundial Moto Sports Board, which is a great resource if you are dealing with these old 2 strokes.

I previously highlighted a few of the other updates I made during the engine rebuild here and at last I had got to the point where I was ready to button up the cases, as can be seen to the right.

I had four GT750 injector oil pumps available to me – one was definitely suspect as on the bike I’d pulled it from, the oil injector tank was bone dry and missing its cap, which likely meant that water had been able to get into the pump itself. Although it turned, I didn’t really trust it, and on the three other pumps I didn’t have any history. A really good write-up on the Suzuki injector oil pumps is available on Richard’s site here.

Having a working oil injector pump is a must – unlike other 2 strokes, the crankshaft design means you will likely burn out your main bearings if you try to run solely on pre-mix with out having the crankshaft re-designed. This sort of conversion is possible – Bill Bune’s shop will do this for folks who need to run pre-mix for vintage racing applications for example, and I’m sure there are others. In my case though, it was going to be injector oil so I had to confirm I had a working injector oil pump ! To do this, I took a piece of flat steel stock, and drilled and taps mounting holes so I could bolt on the oil distribution loom and oil pump in a similar way to how it was mounted on the engine. The pump driven shaft protrudes though the bottom. I had a scrap oil pump drive shaft from one of my parts engines, and I drilled and tapped a hole in the bottom of it to take an 8mm bolt that I could drive with a 1/4 inch variable speed drill. The reason for doing this is that as the oil pump shaft is turned, it actually travels up and down about 4mm which meant I couldn’t just connect the drill chuck directly onto the shaft – using the original drive shaft allows the pump shaft to both be turned and also allows it to move up and down

After testing the four pumps I had available, I was able to confirm that two worked fine, and that two were scrap so it was time well spent now rather than later after I’d seized up the new engine due to lack of oil ! In the photo below, you can see test rig mounted on the bench and the drive shaft on the bench beside one of the oil pumps. With the engine in the frame I can finally move onto other things !!

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Blasting in Calgary Part 2

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Ian R. Sandy

I previously wrote about the folks at Consolidated Compressor here in Calgary – I’ve been back there a few times since first writing about them. This is the place that sells do-it-yourself sand blasting by the hour, and its a great service to have available locally. When I was over there this past week, I noted they have a few additional offerings – they have recently set up two bead blasting cabinets suitable for smaller items. Several media are available included glass bead, walnut shells, garnet etc. They also have a small capacity sand blaster outside in a covered area, and using a finer grit media than at the larger, more commercial grade blasting stations. Still no soda blasting option, but I suppose if enough people ask for it, then eventually they may offer that also !

Air supplied breathing helmets, ear plugs and heavy gloves are provided, and for someone like myself who needs this sort of thing just a few times per year it’s actually almost fun – recommended !

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Having a facial !

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Ian R. Sandy

As I’ve been scanning in my photos, negatives and slides I have also been playing with various software options for saving, finding and sorting. One of the big issues with having a huge virtual stack of photos is being able to figure out the who, what and when specific to the subject matter ! For the most part, I’m not bothering to scan photos that do not have people in them, but of course my existing collection of photos taken since about 2000 has been digital and so does include lots of scenic (at least to me !)  shots. This then provides an excellent opportunity to try out one of the facial recognition application options recently offered by various suppliers. There are a number to choose from depending on the platform you are running – for a good overview take a look at this.

Facial recognition capability grew out of the security industry, and it has many applications in both security as well as industry and consumer. Social network sites like Facebook currently have a type of recognition software built-in that picks out faces in photos you upload to the site, and which you can then tag with names, but the current version at least does not search through your uploaded photo collection and attempt to automatically tag other photos having the image of the same person. This sort of capability is available in the iPhoto application for Mac, Live Photo Gallery from Microsoft, and also for free in Picasa 3.6 offered by Google. While normally it would be true to say that you only ever get what you pay for, in this case free isn’t too bad at all !

I started with a test load of about 5,000 photos and left Picasa to crank through them for a while – the CPU loading was never very high (perhaps averaging about 15% on my machine) but it did take quite a while to complete as the photo store is on the server elsewhere in the house, and in this case, running over the network is slower than running on a local store. In fact, I don’t know when it actually completed as I started it off and then went to bed, but I can say that in the morning it was ready and waiting. During the night, it had picked out a range of faces and then the process is you tag these with suitable naming. Picasa then starts doing comparisons on its face collection and groups the photos by named face.

I have to admit, I was blown away by how well this worked, although there are a few things to be aware of. First of all, photos not oriented square to the camera (so not upside down or tilted at 90 degrees to the frame) are not matched. This means that to ensure your entire collection is scanned for faces, and then tagged as faces are identified, you must first go through your collection and flip them round to the ‘correct’ orientation. While I did not have any problem with ‘non-human’ objects being tagged as faces, I did get all the facial images that comprise Mount Rushmore carefully tagged which I suppose is a credit to the sculptor. Picasa also tagged facial images in background photos that appeared in photos, and also images in paintings and sculptures that were in the frame. I actually found this to be quite impressive, as in some cases the quality of these background images was not good. What I hadn’t considered though was that photos taken at our son’s graduations, each having literally hundreds of faces in the frame, could possibly generate so many face images which then had to be tagged as ‘ignore’ !

The other interesting thing was how fast it seemed to learn – initially Picasa was easily confused by family members each having very similar facial features, but once there were a few dozen validated images, it seemed to get remarkably accurate. That’s the rub though – it does take a fair bit of hands on, and so you do need to be prepared to invest some effort, but I think its worth it.

I am now in the process of cataloguing a folder containing about 30,000 photos, and Picasa has so far found about 17,000 faces which I’m in the process of sorting into about 200 ‘buckets’, each being a family member, past and present day on the three continents we are spread across. For our sons for example – it is fascinating to be able to easily pull up a library of thumbnails showing each of them as they grew up, and see how they have changed over the past 20 odd years. If you play through the images quickly, it’s almost like watching them morph from being children into adults, and is slightly hypnotic ! It is also not difficult to able to call up a portfolio of those photos for display on our TV using our Asus O!Play device, or to be used as screen savers or as desktop background images on the computers we use.

Bottom line is that software such as this turns photos from being a static resource, to being a dynamic one, and as such is pretty special.  Recommended !

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Geek Temptation

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Ian R. Sandy

They’ve tempted me again – ThinkGeek has some of the coolest items available for the totally nerdy, and I’m still on their mailing list of cool things that they offer for sale. I’ve wanted to order a genuine Dr Who Sonic Screwdriver now for some time (note that the photo to the right is courtesy of the ThinkGeek website), but today I see that they are also offering the Personal Soundtrack Shirt as seen on Big Bang Theory (not that I ever watch that show of course) so you can wear your music and broadcast your favourite tunes as you work. Very nice indeed. Of course, there is just one small problem – for international shipments they refuse to use the postal service for shipping and will only use FedEx or UPS.

UPS of course are the international parcel delivery gougers I wrote about previously here.  Pity – I would really like to order that Sonic Screwdriver, as it even comes with a genuine Dr. Who notebook !! However I’d rather hit my thumb repeatedly with a hammer, than deliberately allow UPS to rip me off like they have done previously.

ThinkGeek were friendly (although I must say not very geeky) when I spoke to them about this silly policy of theirs, but they refused to change their procedures, so no ThinkGeek stuff for me I’m afraid. I’m quite happy to let UPS rip off someone else !

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Terabitten

Posted on March 5, 2010 by Ian R. Sandy

There are few things as pleasant – to me at least – as arriving home with a new toy. In this case two new toys as I was bringing home a couple of 1.5 Terabyte capacity drives to be used as mirrored storage for my scanning project. Terabyte – the name sort of rolls off the tongue and speaks of unimaginable quantities of available storage, on tap at your command. Tens of thousands of photos, days of movies and copies of all the documents and email I’ll ever generate or send in a lifetime, and each of these terabyte capacity drives provides about 50,000 times the storage of a single Seagate ST 238 30 MB hard drive which cost about the same per unit 20 years ago – absolutely amazing. I was grinning so hard, my face was starting to ache ! There was of course one small catch – I just had to install them !

I had a spare quad-core machine available, so it was no bother at all to get the drives installed and connected up. They are both SATA drives, and much simpler to configure than the old IDE drives of yesteryear. I wanted them to be configured as mirrored drives, or RAID 1 which normally is easily set up either in software, or in the motherboard BIOS of most any of the newer machines – so far so good. And then, as often is the case, I ran into a small snag which I didn’t even see coming and has cost me the better part of three days sorting out ……… I was Ubuntu-ised !

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution which I run on most of the machines in the house – I have variants of it installed on different machines as determined by their capability: Xubuntu on an older Toshiba that is processor and memory constrained for example, and eeeBuntu on my eeePC as it includes the correct drivers for the hardware etc… For the desktops though its is generally just straight Ubuntu and I try to ensure they are all running the same version and patch levels – recently the new Karmic Koala (a ridiculous name, but I suppose it is catchier than most) 9.10 version was released and most of my in-house desktop hardware was running that with no issues at all. Although I would never call myself a Linux ‘software guru’ as I am really just a hardware guy, I was not expecting any problems. Of course, as someone once said to me, hope springs eternal in the woefully stupid.

In this case, all I needed to do was set up the mirrored (type RAID-1) terabyte drives in a fresh Karmic Koala 9.10 system. And that’s when I ran into the small snag. I usually build my own computers, and most modern home-use motherboards include a simple RAID configuration capability. RAID stands for ‘redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks’ which depending on which RAID version you select can be a way of spreading data across hard drives, such that if one (or possibly more) hard drives fails – which they all do eventually – your data is preserved. On enterprise grade servers, this is standard, but on home systems the systems are quite a bit simpler and really what you normally see called RAID is just a clever implementation of a BIOS enabled multi- channel disk drive controller using a special driver which gives the illusion of having a full-blown RAID capability. It isn’t foolproof, but its better than nothing and generally works quite well. However, since this is not actually ‘true’ RAID such as you would get in a multi-thousand dollar server from Dell, HP or IBM- the Linux folks disparagingly refer to it as ‘fake raid‘ and pat each other on the back and rejoice in doing things correctly in that annoying MAC sort of way that passionate advocates of whatever the current flavour of the month have – be they Microserfs, i-whatevers, tree huggers or ex-smokers. I on the other hand am just interested in getting things to work, and under Windows these ‘fake’ raid’ configurations work perfectly fine pretty much right out of the box – as I found to my dismay, under Ubuntu they do not.

The first day was spent trying to understand what exactly was going on – although I could set up the motherboard firmware to be RAID-1, the 9.10 OS installation would not boot. After several installs and some spirited discussion with the machine in question, this seemed to be mainly a GRUB issue as the nice folks at Canonical changed the boot loader with the 9.10 release from GRUB standard to GRUB 2 which, it turns out, currently will not live happily on this kind of mirrored drive. The second issue is closer to the hardware and has to do with how the controller software/driver gets confused when presented with two drives being used in this manner on this sort of low-end hardware. Note that you can configure a software emulation of RAID, however when I did try to set that up it didn’t work either. The standard OS install uses what is called a ‘live cd’ (which is a brilliant concept allowing you to run the OS off the CD with no changes to the computer and ‘take it for a test drive’ so to speak – most of the Linux distributions offer this),  but there were references to using what was called the ‘additional’ cd – this took over an hour to locate as it was not obvious where to actually find it.

The internet is normally what saves me when dealing with these sorts of problems. For example, the Toshiba laptop I was running Xubuntu had a video problem, but it took next to no time to find a simple patch to get it all working correctly. In contrast I spent many hours sorting through various suggestions and on-line advice to resolve this 9.10 mirror issue, and after trying multiple combinations, multiple configurations and multiple patches using hours of arcane command line entries via the system terminal, after three days of messing about, I did finally have it working. But I wasn’t happy.

The whole point of this exercise was to set up a server with mirrored drives to store the pictures, photos and negatives I’m about to scan in via my new Epson V700 scanner. For a non-commercial environment especially, a server needs to just ‘work’ – they can’t be a project, and although I did have a working server, with mirrored drives under Ubuntu 9.10, I just didn’t trust it at all. For one thing, my ability to see the health of the mirrored drives was limited as the disk drive manager (Palimpsest) gave me contradictory and confusing information showing the drives multiple times with different descriptions – none of them really correct. So I was in a position of not being able to tell for certain whether or not the RAID is working correctly, couldn’t easily get stats, and couldn’t easily set flags to warn me of impeding problems. All of this could be done via the command line, and of course all of this could be solved by someone with better Linux software skills, but I was not prepared to make a career out of this. For my requirements, this just was not ideal.

I had a spare copy of Vista Ultimate sitting unopened on the shelf, and I was able to get that up and running happily with mirrored drives in about three and a bit hours, if you include all the phaffing about doing updates. It seems quite happy serving files to Linux boxes, and otherwise seems to do pretty much what I want without a lot of drama, so it will do fine for the next year or so, or till I have the time to circle back and try this again.

Next on the agenda – the 1973 GT750 engine.

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