Day: September 10, 2026

It’s not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning, to paraphrase a very famous gentleman in history. I’m talking about my Savannah’s new screen. But before I get onto that, something else that’s been winding me up. I didn’t get to bed until 01.30 am after being preoccupied with yet another ongoing computer problem. Right now the cost of memory chips has gone through the roof, the reason being apparently, that supply cannot meet the demand of AI businesses and datacentres. Whereas in the past computer memory costs have fallen even as they have become faster now the opposite is happening.

The cost of the solid state disk drive that I installed in my current machine that I built in 2022 has doubled from just under 200€ to just under 400€ which is putting such drives out of the reach of many amateur builders like myself. The Chinese have been quick to notice this and all of a sudden, not because of philanthropy on their part I would imagine, many low cost solid state disk drives and RAM sticks have been arriving on the market. Knowing that I could return them for full refunds, in recent weeks I have purchased three inexpensive solid state disk drives. Two of them have failed immediately on loading them with data and the first failed a few days ago after having been installed about a month ago.

All have been refunded to me in full but my experience can’t be coincidence and the Chinese supplier(s) must know what’s going on. So why do they do it? Do they just calculate that not every customer who purchases the junk will send them back? That’s the only reason I can think of. I’m awaiting delivery of yet another more expensive SSD from China and I’ll be interested to see how that fares, but if it fails it’ll also be sent straight back.

So what kept me up last night? Because of my experience with the three SSD’s that I’ve mentioned, because I’m now in desperate need of computer back up storage I decided to go for a more conventional external USB disk drive. It arrived yesterday and during the afternoon I began copying data onto it, a lot of data because that’s how you find out if it will fall over or not. And it did. I persevered until 01.30 am because I knew that I had to get restarted on the Savannah’s screen today and needed to arrange the return of the disk drive before doing so. I managed to do that but it meant I didn’t get to Malbec until after lunch.

I did OK in the time available but wasn’t able to finish the job off. It’s something that you can’t rush because that’s how you mess it up. I started by removing the protective film that was still on the outside of the screen and placing it in position to get a feel for its fit, which wasn’t bad. So then I was able to fit it much more firmly using two wood clamps, one in the doorway on each side. The clamps are the perfect tool for that and once the screen was firmly in place I could see that the problem I had with crazing of the old screen around the two pop rivets that had secured it to the two vertical front struts would this time be academic.

The reason for this was that although it can’t be shown in photographs, the screen was standing some way off the struts and as the dimensions of this screen are not much different from the old one, it’s no wonder that the stress of riveting it to the struts eventually led to stress damage. This time I won’t be doing it, so I plugged the holes with pop rivets and gave the struts a refreshing light spray with matt black paint as now they’ll be more in view from both outside and inside the cabin.

So after that I pop riveted the screen lightly in position and called it a day. I found afterwards that although the passenger side of the screen is perfectly in place, the captain’s side will need a bit of adjustment to pull it down. That’ll involve drilling out a couple of pop rivets but it won’t be difficult and any spare holes will be hidden under cover plates anyway. But that’s for tomorrow, hopefully. I’ve received notice that a parcel I ordered is being delivered tomorrow and I just hope that I won’t be waiting in all day for it and wasting what would otherwise be yet more valuable time. This being France, I just have a feeling… 😕

Tell you what though… take a look at the final photograph below. It wasn’t until I’d taken the old screen out that I realised just how brown and cloudy it had become. The new screen will be almost like having nothing there. 🙂