1202 ALARM

I was given 4 interesting decimal digit displays some years ago which had been part of airfield equipment which was being upgraded. These use 10 tiny 28-volt bulbs for each digit, each illuminating a clear plastic slide etched with the numbers 0-9, a precursor to the 7-segment display. I wanted to upgrade the displays to LED illumination with the possibility of building a retro clock of some sort. The bulbs are a miniature T1-3/4 size which are 5mm, but have a wider flange so a 5mm white LED wouldn't be a direct replacement. 12-volt LEDs are available in the T1-3/4 size, but at about £3 each this would cost me £120 to replace all 40 so that was a nonstarter. After some thought, I hit on this alternative. M5 washers with a 10mm outer diameter, solder the anode to the washer and bend the cathode roughly into the middle. Cheap and works!

In the autumn of 2018 the heater re-circulation motor (I'll refer to this as the HRM from now on) in my 2015 Skoda Rapid decided to fail. It had been making a grinding and clicking noise for a while and I had asked the local Skoda dealer to look into this during a routine service, which they didn't, but more on that later. The problem was that the motor failed in the re-circulate setting so the interior of the car steamed up very quickly and the windscreen couldn't be de-misted. Putting the air-conditioning on was a short-term solution up until the outside temperature dropped below 10 Celsius and that stopped working! There isn't a lot of information online about the Rapid because it is a less common model than other Skodas, but it shares a lot of design with the Fabia and Octavia so it wasn't too hard to get diagrams showing where the motor was and how it works. To get at the HRM I had to remove the glove box (7 Torx screws) and the heater motor (5 Torx screws), ...