The MGA of my life

Finally...a drive in town!

2007-03-15T13:32:00Z

Well, the snow finally melted, and I was able to start the MGA. Amazing what cleaning the battery posts will do to get an engine running!

I really love the first drive of the season! As I whipped down the country lane (well, almost country lane, what with the gravel trucks and "drunk hobgoblins" that are the neighbors racing off to the liquor store, it's more like an L.A. street!) I was surrounded by the wind, the quite clatter of the MG running patiently down the road, and the smells of the car as it strolled down the highway. There's always that faint odor of castor oil that still comes out of the old floor boards, still the original ones from the day the car left England. It's a mysterious perfume, reminding me of my grandfather's dirt-floor garage in Cleveland, still saturated with the drippings of many Packards and Chryslers that had lived there over the years. The essential "old car" smell, a smell that tells your passenger that this car has been the get-away vehicle from at least a pub brawl or two, has seen beautiful girls in their scarves and tight sweaters.

There's also the odor of wetness, the damp that all convertibles have from a night or two in summer dews from years past. Of the days that it started raining and you and that beautiful girl labored in the downpour to get the top up, both soaked to the skin before all the turnbuckles are tight and you laugh as you turn on the demist, knowing full well that what you're about to do will defeat its purpose as surely as leaving the top down...

Ah, the memories!

I am brought out of my reverie by the fact that the brake pedal is "soft" again: probably some air in the line from being towed nose in the air for thousands of miles. Oh, well, something else to do this weekend...

Snow day!

2007-02-07T14:51:00Z

We had the first "real" snow of the year in Indy yesterday. Work "released" us in time to hit all the traffic - then the snow stopped when we got home! However, the "drunk hobgoblins" were out in force: wish I had a tow truck - I could have retired in two hours. Here's what an MGA covered in snow looks like...

It's supposed to get above freezing in a week...maybe I can get the MG cleaned and running again... {SIGH!}

Roadster Headgear

2007-01-31T05:58:00Z

(NOTE: If you NEVER use a cell phone in a car, you can skip this post...you won't like it.)

It's too cold to even think of starting the MG: highs have been in the teens here in Indianapolis, and I've had a bad cold to boot. So my weekend plans came to naught: I sat inside, sneezed and sniffled rather than being out for a bracing drive in sub-freezing temperatures.

So this week's entry deals with something I researched several months ago: what headgear works in a small, loud, British roadster? I don't mean hats or berets, but what kind of hands-free phone headgear can you actually use while trying to wrestle your car through traffic on I-95?

Now, I've ALWAYS hated holding a phone to my head. I've been using a headset of some sort at work or at home since the early 1980s, long before it was "bling" and a fashion statement. My ham radio headset was an old Telex unit patched into my Heathkit, and even in the car or RV I used speakers and a PTT button on the wheel or turn indicator for CB or mobile ham commo. My first cell phone was an old 3 watt Motorola bag phone, equipped with a speaker jack and a remote mike, so even this was patched into the inside wires to afford a hands-free environment.

So when modern cell phones came along, I of course upgraded my hands free units along the way. Wired headsets from Plantronics and Panasonic were my first choices, and they work fine in quite environments or in a nice Cadillac sedan. However, when it comes to driving the MG, you're in a whole different realm of noise.

Noise in roadster comes from three sources:

Mechanical noise from the car
Aerodynamic noise
Traffic and environment.

Mechanical noise - the engine, exhaust, gears and tires - is the major noise source at under 30 MPH. The good news is that it is usually low-frequency with some higher frequency overtones - exhaust noise, engine noise and gear/tire whine. You listen to this for warnings of potential problems.

Aerodynamic noise generally becomes a nuisance above 30 MPH. At this point the wind moving over the windscreen, around the pillars and past your head becomes noticeable. Part of the reason is the air flow over the vehicle starts to create turbulent vortices that are pushed down into the cockpit from above and around the sides of the windscreen. At lower speeds these dissipate above and to the sides of the vehicle, but at higher speeds they buffet your head and ears - especially the outside ear, which gets a double-dose from both side turbulence as well as from above the windscreen. Various wind deflectors can help with this, but without careful aerodynamic design (like the newer Audi, Mercedes and BMW convertibles) these only postpone the turbulence.

Finally there's the noise from "outside": primarily other vehicles that you're passing, but also reflected noise from nearby buildings, parked cars - even curbs. Being low to the ground places your ears in line for noise sources and reflections that are normally dissipated away from and below larger vehicles. Exhaust noise - normally projected down and reflected in a broad circle away from a vehicle becomes a straight-shot when you're only a foot above someone's tail pipe. Tire noise from other cars is at your ear level (especially these days with 19" rims on almost EVERYTHING!), and the turbulence from other vehicles pushes right into you from both sides. Worst of all: any semi-tractor and trailer (or big RV or bus) is pushing a hurricane of turbulence to each side, and the wake from the trailer projects a vortex cone at least 100 meters behind the vehicle. Right into your head - or so it seems.

OK, well that was a long-winded way of starting this piece. What it amounts to is that you have different noise rejection requirements at different speeds and driving conditions - conditions that you do NOT have in a sedan or large vehicle.

In order to be useful while driving, a telephone headset has to muffle or cancel the ambient noise from the sources above that reaches your ear(s), and do the same to separate your voice out of the noise at the microphone. There are numerous ways of effecting this filtering, all of which are used in modern portable telephony equipment. Some work on specific noise components, others are more general, filtering out or passing ranges of frequencies that are found in noise or speech.

How most of these filters work is beyond scope here: what follows are my personal choices for cell phone headsets that work for me in the MG. I've owned and tried well over 20 different headsets in the past two years, and I've found the following three that seem to do a good job - under specific circumstances.

First, I break my driving down into two categories: "neighborhood cruising" and "over-the-road". They mean pretty much what they say: driving to dinner or the store and a nice cruise back home, never going above 45 MPH (well, not hardly!) and driving in traffic on the freeway for an hour or more.

For "neighborhood cruising" - typically my daily commute over mixed rural roads and city streets - I've found that a good noise-canceling headset with good wind resistance works just fine. I have two that I switch day to day. For "over-the-road" NOTHING I've found does a superior job; however, I have one headset that does pretty well up to 55 MPH and fights truck noise and buffeting very well.

For my day-to-day drive I use:

Plantronics Voyager 510S. This little jewel of a bluetooth headset is relatively cheap ($50-60), is pretty rugged, has excellent wind rejection and is plenty loud to hear over most road noise. Yet it's not totally ear-blocking, so it can be worn in the office or at home without giving you a "honey-do ear" (turning a deaf ear toward those "honey-dos"), and is light-weight enough to become unnoticed. And it stays put without a lot of hassle: even crawling around under stuff doesn't usually dislodge it - although your ponytail will tangle in it when you least need it to.

Blue Parrott B150 Roadwarrior. I found this on my way from Dallas to Jacksonville driving the MG at a truck stop. Normally it sells for over $100, which kept me from buying one for some time, but you can find these at trucker centers for under $80. This is a "conventional" headset design: over the head pressure band, with an ear-covering speaker on one side and an adjustable flex boom microphone. The boom mike has a "right" side and a "wrong" side: it contains two microphones, one that is pointed toward your mouth and a second on the back side that picks up noise. It electronically cancels the noise out of the mouth mike and also uses this to cancel noise in the earpiece. Not as comfortable as the Plantronics, and plenty "geeky", but it does much better in noisy environments - like heavy traffic and can take a bit more wind than the Plantronics. I use this quite a bit these days when I'm outside in the cold and wind, as it also give a bit of ear coverage as well.

Nextel NASCAR Pit Crew cellular headset. OK, this is TOTAL geek! I originally got this so I could hear a phone conversation when surrounded by a crowd of people all talking loudly at the same time. I think it was at work, although it could have been my wife and her sister at home...anyway, this is an actual NASCAR pit headset (I can't remember who actually makes it, but the same unit is available from the manufacturer as part of a UHF communications set for racing). It has been modified to work with a standard cell phone - meaning the PTT is non-operational, but you get full-duplex voice and can add a second mono input for background listening - like your NASCAR UHF receiver. It's hard to wear for a fat-head like me, but the inconvenience is outweighed in "over-the-road" driving, where the full shell binaural earpieces give excellent protection from the buffeting that truck wakes and passing vehicles hit you with. While it provides a considerable amount of attenuation to low and high frequency noise, it passes enough mid-range to allow good perception of surrounding sounds. And it keeps your ears warm. I highly recommend it if you're going to drive on the interstate for several hours with the top down. Eliminates "road deafness" and the lingering ringing that too much wind will cause. I was never hassled by the police in any of the states I went through wearing this headset, although I think it was the MG that wowed them, not the headset!

I hope this is helpful to you folks out there. It's a pain to buy "a pig in a poke" when you're looking for things like a headset, since there are so many choices, and none of them are as cheap as a burger and fries. However, when you're trying to drive your little car and you need to talk on the phone - and remember, you should NEVER place a call while driving, and only answer if you feel safe (you don't HAVE to answer, you know!) - these headsets will make your life more comfortable - and a damn sight safer!

Well, that's the post for this week. Hopefully I'll have some "real" MG news to report...if the weather gets a bit better...

Posts from the Roads of America: Ventura to Indianapolis

2007-01-15T09:26:00Z

The past week Kathleen (my wife and CEO) have been driving the motorhome from Ventura to Indianapolis. This has been a rather hurried drive: we're trying to stay ahead of the ice storm that is hitting the midwest, not a good thing to be in no matter what you're driving.

We tow the MGA on a dolly, and do nothing special to it for towing. I've read many posts at several web sites about MG towing, and the general consensus is that as long as the gear box has enough oil there should be no problems. So far this seems to be true: about 3000 miles of being pulled behind the motorhome (and another 1500 or so being driven around) and there are no discernable problems in the MG. Although the top does leak...

We had a bit of excitement in Texas: lost a tire on the dolly about 75 miles east of Dallas. This at the time that the NWS was issuing the ice storm warning and TDOT was busy closing interstates around Dallas. Our emergency road service could not get anyone to go out to the break down site and assist with a tire replacement - the only tow operator that called back told us and the ERS that "loading the dolly on the flatbed would damage the tow truck", so we dropped the dolly (after taking the MG off) and drove both to Wal*Mart to wait for a tire store to open in the morning.

Imagine our surprise when we returned to the dolly site to find the bad wheel and lug nuts missing! Apparently someone decided to "put dibs" on the dolly and stole the flat tire to prevent us from getting the dolly before they did. I pulled the good wheel, blocking the thieves from taking the dolly with their own trick, then had to purchase two new wheels and tires. Yeah, we could have used one, but I wanted a matched set - and I got a spare now. We got the tires on and retrieved the dolly in about 10 minutes: the most terrifying ten minutes I've spent on the side of the road, as cars and semis were litterally driving into ditches within a mile of where we stopped. Within an hour we were on our way to Shreveport and meterological safety!

IMPORTANT SAFETY TIPS

Always carry a spare for ALL your tires - even a tow dolly. Buy the spare when you buy the trailer or dolly: it's cheap insurance.
Always carry tools that allow you to change tires and remove road damage. I had to purchase a cheap set of air tools (the motorhome has a hefty air supply and chucks for hoses) to remove the tire, and had the thieves not removed the shredded dolly fender for me I would have needed a hack saw and cutters as well.
If you have a choice of roads to take to a destination, take the route with the least potential weather hazzards. I decided to take I-20 instead of I-10 to save 8 hours of driving - and ended up having to drive two 10-hour stretches -AND- lose a day with the tow dolly in order to avoid the ice storm. I-10 would have been longer, but no worries about ice.
If you have a motorhome, invest in a trucker's road atlas. Not only does it list all the truck plazas (most of which have 24 hour service centers), but it also tells you about low clearance hazzards and weight restricted bridges. Trust me: you don't want to sweat crawling under a 13'6" bridge with the suspension flat because you got caught just past the last cut-off. (Our motorhome is supposed to be 13'4" tall...but you can't trust bridge markings...)

I'm sitting at Tom Sawyer's campground just outside of Memphis (a nice place) having made it this far. Tomorrow we finish the trip with the last push to Indianapolis. Only a day late back to work...

A Brief Time of History

2007-01-09T10:16:00Z

I got my 1956 MGA when I was in junior high - 1968. It was "driveable" - if you pushed a lot. My dad and I repaired and restored it for the next 6 years, keeping me out of trouble in high school (the car never was running...you know the drill). (An aside: my girlfriend then had a Mercedes 190SL, so between us we were always pushing something home on a date...) The restoration was completed in Kansas City with a beautiful beige paint job.

I moved to California in late 1980 from Kansas City. The first few weeks I was living at my parent's home while apartment hunting. My sister arranged a date with one of her friends, and I borrowed the MG to go out on that date. The young lady, a girl by the name of Kathleen, was quite taken by the little sports car we used that evening. We cruised Whittier Boulevard (at the peak of the Low Rider phenomena) and were accorded a spot in the "show-off lane" as we circled back and forth through Whittier. We received many whistles and other complements from the other drivers. I guess the reception was good enough: that same girl and I have been married now for 21 years!

In 1981 I was driving by Macarthur Park in L.A. and rear-ended a new Cadillac at 5 MPH. Ruined the front grill, totaled the Cadillac (long story there), got me 57 stitches where I hit the steering wheel, and I stopped driving the car - my dad suspended my driving privileges! My dad and my sister repaired and restored the car for the second time, restoring it to the original white and black interior. They exhibited the car in Concourse events in the L.A. area for the next few years. In 1995 my dad got tired of fighting with the 1500 engine and slipped the 18GB into it for better drivability and added front disc brakes.

Skip forward to July 2006. My dad had the MG in for brake repair, and told me "you pay for it, it's yours". In October I flew to Dallas where the car was, paid off the mechanic, and drove the car from Dallas to Jacksonville, FL. Along the way I stopped at all the casinos in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, and let the valet krew park it - which I mention because it turned everyone that sat in the car into an instant "I want one!" MG fan! (This also insured that the car was kept under close observation in front of the casino and not parked in a dark corner...)

So I now "own" my first car! It's a "10-footer": MGB motor, many Moss replacement parts, but it runs well and is a hoot to drive. I call it a "time machine": you get in, turn on the engine, and you're 17 years old again!

The MG is dolly-towed behind a motorhome, and is our "dinghy" for warm-weather locales (a 2002 Saturn VUE is the alternate).
My wife and I are data warehouse consultants, and we live full-time in two motorhomes. We criss-cross the US, and the MG faithfully follows us where ever we go!

Feel free to contact me about any topic, especially full-timing in an RV or consulting...or even knuckle-knocking an MG on the road...