Carb rebuild and leaking like a sieve..

I took the carburetor off and used a gasket set to replace all the old gaskets. I also cleaned it out well and blew out the jets. Everything looked great. While I had the carb out I decided to drain the tank and clean out the sediment trap and tank screen. I fixed the routing of the cables and the fuel line too. Everything seemed to be looking up. I put it all back together and it leaked like a sieve. I think it leaked fuel faster than it used to come out of the tank.

So I learned that if you're going to clean and rebuild a carb, spend the extra $5 and get the kit with the float, pin and needle valve. Now I have to order parts and wait for the them to come in before I can work on the running parts.

I did spent a bit of time adding some electrical bits. I started it up, even with all the leakage, and what do you know, I have working running lights. That means the voltage output and regulator work, which is another positive.

I also took some time and pounded out some dents. I find it's cathartic to do that sort of work. A dolly and pick and big honking ballpeen hammer that was from my wife's aunt's house. It's old and crusty like a lot of the Vespa. But it's a great tool for doing metal work because it moves the metal around so easily.

So I'll order some parts and work on other bits until I can staunch the flow of gasoline. That stuff's much better going down the throat of the carb..

Adding parts and not starting

Added some parts. Some seen, some unseen. Still having troubles getting it to fire up and run. I'm going to clean and rebuild the carb next..

Project Vespa - She lives!

Well I got the Vespa running. I got some advice and after verifying that I had spark, I began work on the fuel delivery system. Once I was sure that the fuel delivery valve was allowing fuel to flow to the carburetor, I moved on to removing it and giving it a good cleaning. Then I  reassembled everything to the point of having a running motor (less the shrouds and other bits). I drifted it down the driveway a couple of times before I realized that I had knocked the ground off on the electronic ignition. Once I reconnected that, a couple more drifts down the driveway and it came to life! Woohoo! Lots of smoke so I still have something to solve with fuel mixture, but it runs. And that's a huge relief. Now I can move on to stripping things down to get the body work sort out. And I can begin to buy some of the replacement parts needed.

Starting a new project in the other category

I took it in a trade to get rid of an old car that I had lost the will to work on. Turns out the guy that took it had a rusty truck (been there, don't want to return) or a rat-rod Vespa. It's pretty ratty. But I'm going to try to bring it back to Vespa glory. My goal is to end up with something along these lines -

Obviously, I have a long way to go to get there. First thing is to get the engine running and I'm working on that task at the moment. Then I'll strip it down and begin the work of getting the body work stripped, smoothed and repainted.

Ok, so I couldn't resist

Moved up to CM 4.2.8 after I kept hearing how it's, wait for it, once again faster. It's really hard to believe that Cyanogen and the other guys working on this stuff can somehow continually squeeze more performance out of the OS / Hardware. This firmware is singlehandedly keeping me from being jealous of new Android offerings. I've yet to find one with a keyboard that I like as much as my trusty old (old?! it's only been out for a little more than a year) G1 keyboard. Yeah, it's sort of thick, and it has a Jay Leno-wannabe chin, but the CM software is tunable and I can get all day battery life with moderate use.

As long as Cyanogen and the guys keep improving the OS, I can't see a reason why I need a different phone.

Latest CM ROM is the best yet! (Go figure)

Well I've updated my phone a couple of more times since the last blog post and for the most part it just keeps getting better. I went from 4.2.3.1 to 4.2.4, then to 4.2.5 and finally 4.2.6. Each release fixed a few bugs and maybe caused a few more with the exception of the 4.2.6 release. This one is a keeper in my book.

Out of the box, compcache is disabled. You can enable it with using a setting in the Spare Parts app (installed by default with any recent CM release). I tried it with no swap and no compcache for a while. Wasn't satisfied with the response of the phone once you go into and out of a few apps though. (Did I mention that I view my G1 as much as a pocket computer as I do a phone now? No? Oh well.) So I enabled compcache and it was better. Still over time as I navigated places and ran too many browser windows, etc., the available memory gets too low and the poor little G1 processor has to work hard and the garbage collector gets way too busy and things would get a little to laggy for my tastes.

So I made the decision to crack open the Class 6 8g card that I scooped off NewEgg as an anniversary gift and formatted the partitions to mostly match my old Class 2 8g card that I've been using for a number of months. The only difference is that I formatted the 2nd partition as ext4 rather than ext3 this time. (More on why in a future post I hope.) I also resurrected my old /system/sd/user.conf and /system/sd/userinit.sh files to enable swapping to a 70M partition on the sd card. I know that this will wear out the card prematurely, but it's a risk / compromise I'm willing to take. Since enabling the swap the phone is working much better. Doesn't slow down, battery life is great, and I don't really have to go into ATK to kill off unused apps. I'm still trying to be somewhat judicious with what I'm willing to leave running, but I really like the way the phone is performing now.

I can't imagine it getting much better than it is now, so Cyanogen's going to really have to create a compelling release to get me to update any time soon. As always, write call, twitter, whatever if you need to supply missing details.

An Update on My Rooted G1

I've been patiently waiting for Cyanogen to resolve the issues that caused Google to send him a cease and desist letter concerning his previous releases of his customized Android builds (ROMs to some - I think it's a misnomer). Well he worked out the issues - basically, they were unhappy with him packaging their closed source applications with his builds; even though their own build process includes the binaries! - and he was able to get rolling again. Prior to my recent upgrade, I was running CM 4.0.4 which was the last stable build prior to the C&D from Google. That version was very stable and I was pretty happy with it on my phone, but it had one nagging issue and that was that the phone would slowly degrade in performance the longer it had been running. (Android is a customized Linux with a Java like application layer on top, so you literally boot Linux when you power up the phone.)

So I watched intently as Cyanogen got rolling with a new unstable series of builds that didn't infringe on Google's intellectual property. (See they're not all sweetness and light and openess as some might believe.) The numbering of these builds was 4.1.x; numbered similarly to the Linux kernel with even minor version numbers indicate unstable and even indicating stable. The reports from people in the IRC channel (#cyanogenmod on irc.freenode.net) were that the speed of these builds was incredible. Cyanogen put in a different process scheduler than what stock Android is / was using. But it wasn't without issues. Stability was one, and another was randomly starting playing MP3 files. There were other things too and it was just enough to keep me from pulling the trigger and updating.

But at some point you have to release and the guys that help Cyanogen got things to a point that they considered stable and called version 4.2, then 4.2.1, then 4.2.3 and finally 4.2.3.1. And this is the build that I've been running since last weekend. I actually upgraded from 4.0.4 to 4.2.3 with the instructions on the xda-developers thread about the new release. (Have I mentioned how much I dislike xda-developers.com and all thread-based forum sites?) This process basically uses the fact that your phone is already rooted (since I had 4.0.4 already) to perform the update. In summary the process is that you lay down a new official Android 1.6 (Donut) build on your phone using the rooted recovery partition / image and then before completing the installation (by rebooting your phone), you then lay Cyanogen's new stuff over the top of the install thus replacing all the bits required to keep your phone rooted. If done correctly, you end up with a 1.6 rooted build. If done incorrectly, you lose root access to your phone, possibly permanently.

With that dire warning out of the way, what's good about the new version?

It keeps the lovely and indespensible apps2sd functionality (especially if you have a G1). It gives you the latest Android (source released) base OS. It features a tweaked CFS scheduler that positively is better than stock Android. It makes the phone respond like you always hoped it would from the start. My phone responded pretty well with 4.0.4 just after a boot and maybe for a day, but it never ran this well. 4.2.3.1 also has usb tethering. So your phone becomes your laptop's data link when you're out of normal network coverage or just don't want to use whatever WiFi is around you. I haven't recalibrated my phone's battery yet, but I've noticed that day by day, my battery life is improving. I used to be pushing it if I used my phone much throughout the day and would need to juice it up when I got home from work (or sometimes before). Today I noticed that at 5:30pm it was still at 48% capacity. That's a solid 11 hours with plenty of reserve. Word is that if I recalibrate it will get even better. (In other words the phone isn't showing the true capacity of the battery.)

What's bad, if anything?

By default, 4.2.3.1 doesn't use compcache or a swap file or a swap partition. But like all of CM's releases it can use that stuff if you want. To enable it you create a user.conf and userinit.sh in proper place and those 2 files control those and other settings. I enabled a 70M swap partition on my old, slow (unclassified == Class 2) 8g micro SD card. Since enabling swap, I've had occasional spurious reboots of the phone. I think these are related to a timing issue with the wifi radio and the swapping activity to/from the (sd card's) swap partition. I'm seriously considering upgrading to a Class 6 8g card to see if that helps. If it doesn't, I think I'll disable the swap partition. The only downside is that I'll take a penalty when I run all sorts of stuff like I do without some additional virtual memory to back it up.

Someone has updated the Cyanogenmod-updater on the Market and I was able to use it to upgrade from 4.2.3 to 4.2.3.1. Very easy and painless. I'm looking forward to whatever Cyanogen comes up with next. Email or call me if you have questions about the process or whether your phone will work for this update. If I can't get the answer, I can put the question in front of some guys that will know.