2025-05 – Driving Experience

The major things this month were getting the newly purchased car repaired, helping my wife build up driving experience, and preparing for the start of the growing season. A secondary fun project was finding a small electric piano.

Car Repairs

The car we purchased last month went for a major service and repairs. The entire rear axle needed replacement. I’d been expecting a major fault like this due to the noises I’d heard from the back end the previous month and the failure of the rear axle is a common problem for an old version of this model. The ABS sensor warnings also suggested a sensor fault, and there were a list of other lesser problems.

We got it back with most issues fixed and some minor cosmetic tasks outstanding due to parts being on order. The local garage has parts for Volvos on the shelves because Volvos are so common in Sweden, but Peugeot models, especially 20-year-old ones, are not common here and parts had to be ordered.

With the car mostly fixed, it was time to go out for a drive. The car was totally different with the rear axle fixed and, even from the passenger seat, now felt competent on bumps, surefooted on corners, and didn’t sound like someone hitting the rear underside with a hammer.

Over the month we went out on forest road drives to help the wife build up driving experience and car familiarity on quiet roads. I also got a standalone GPS unit because we’d been having issues with the phone-based navigation apps. We wanted something dedicated that might help reduce stress on my wife as she built up driving experience.

Trying out the GPS in the depths of the forest

The standalone GPS was great because it shows the current speed limit and current speed. It’s reassuring to double-check the current speed limit when you’ve forgotten what it was for the stretch you’re on, or think you might have missed a change in limit.

As the month went on I fixed a few minor items myself and from the original fault list. If I had more time I could have done more myself. But it was good to have an experienced local mechanic handling the bulk of the work and paying them helps support an important local service.

The bootlid was difficult to open, to the point of being too heavy for the wife to use. I knew this meant the gas struts that help open the boot had lost their compressed gas over the lifespan of the car. I ordered two struts and then watched a YouTube video of other people swapping the parts over. It took over an hour but I got the struts replaced and the boot now opens with one hand. I replaced some other minor things like browned interior lights and faded control buttons.

The boot lid gas strut is behind the passenger seatbelt. Fantastic.

We then did some drives along the faster roads, to get more experience with dual carriageways, overtaking, and busy roundabouts. It has been quite fun trying to find cafes and locations we haven’t been to, as an excuse to find driving routes.

Towards the end of the month, we went further and drove to the large town to the north where there is a giant pic-n-mix shop and also some fantastic unhealthy fast food places. We even found a place that sold old-style deep-pan Pizza Hut pizzas.

There are some more things to do to the car to improve it but the main thing is that it is ready for my wife to use this summer.

Garden Work

It was a cold May so the plants were late to recover from winter. My first task was to move the plum tree. This tree almost died in a -30C winter the first year we planted it, and the cold split the trunk, but it has been quite vigorous in recovering. It was growing too low, next to a path, and in front of where we now had solar panels mounted on a wall, so it felt like it would work better to move it to the other end of the garden. Putting the tree here will also extend some wind protection down the bottom of the garden, where wind speeds can get high across the adjacent crop fields.

new location, and a couple of light stakes to help

Almost all our plants came back to life after winter. Only one purchase last year, a Wistaria, hasn’t come back. We’re keeping an eye out for signs of life.

As well as car repairs I spent money this month on plants, bushes, and trees for the garden although the dedicated nursery is heavily backlogged with orders so we’re not expecting anything until next month.

We visited a garden centre and got some smaller plants, and also picked up some bits from a Loppis (a second-hand shop) on the way back, including some sheet music (more on this later).

My wife was really happy the tulips came up. It’s been pretty wet and soggy in the garden however so I deliberately haven’t done much in order so that I don’t turn it into a mudbath.

Neighbour Arrangements

I also invited the neighbour over who owns the fields next to me as we were thinking about putting a fence at the bottom of the garden. A survey to determine the exact boundary would be up to roughly €5000, but chatting to the neighbour and putting some pegs in together cost nothing. It will be a couple of months before we put the fence in but for now we have plastic and wooden markers in place. The neighbour also gave us permission to put fruit trees along the border, which we legally have to ask for due to the proximity to the property line.

The bottom of the garden looks a little messy but we have big plans for it.

I also checked if we could have permission from them to put a short water extraction pipe across a narrow strip of their land near the stream. We’re allowed by law to extract up to a certain amount of water per year without a permit, but the neighbour owns the stream bank our equipment would have to cross.

Lastly, I negotiated potential delivery of used IBC containers via tractor. The local hard-bread factory sometimes has surplus food-safe IBC containers and these are super-useful for water management when growing vegetables through the Swedish summer. However I don’t have a trailer to transport them, so I offered to pay, or to make a donation to a local cause.

Getting Another Musical Instrument

I’d been looking for another musical instrument to use alongside the guitar, to have another hobby for during winter.

Although I’ve learnt a fair amount of guitar, I’d not learnt much about music theory and knew it was something I should tackle. After a bit of research and reading discussions on the internet I focused more and more on a electric keyboard as something to complement my guitar playing and as a means to learn music theory. It is also awesome to see some of the pianists on YouTube. I ended up following “vkgoeswild” who is a pianist that covers heavy metal and punk songs on piano and plays at various venues. The video below is one of her videos from some years ago where she puts a lot of energy into a song:

Electric Piano Purchase

An electric piano came up on Blocket (this is roughly a Swedish equivalent of ebay) – it was a good price and some research indicated it had pressure sensitive and weighted keys which helps learning. I could see it was about 1.5 hours drive away and should fit in the car.

We drove over to the seller. I tested every key by playing each one but in hindsight I should have long-pressed each key and run the demo program. We got it back home and into a space. The main benefits of an electric piano versus a standard piano are that it’s always in tune, light to move, and can be used with headphones.

Problem Discovery and Troubleshooting

After working through some music I found that if I pressed and held two specific keys then a loud angry clicking noise came out of the speakers. Like something seriously wrong. I thought it was a mechanical issue, and it was a long way to drive back, so I figured I would take it apart, find the damage and work out a repair. I used YouTube to watch other people doing similar work on the same model and gave it a go.

Annoyingly, the noise still occurred if I touched the bare electrical contacts for the keys directly which meant it wasn’t the mechanical components at fault. There was no sign of any damage. I vacuumed out a small amount of dust and similar and then reassembled the system. I went online and found other people who historically had the same issue. One comment mentioned that the problem still happened in the “demo” mode where the keyboard plays a saved tune without any keys being pressed; I was able to confirm this matched mine.

Apparently, it would be a fault with the electronic “brains” that handled the different synthesised voices/instruments that the piano could produce. Usually, it would cost a lot to replace one of these – more than the cost of the keyboard. But they’ve stopped making them anyway. Daggnamit.

Workaround

Because the problem is caused by the synthesis engine producing specific pitches with a specific instrument, a workaround was to select a different synthesised instrument from the available selections.

The first 4 instruments were pianos (“grand piano”, “modern”, “classic”, and “mellow”) and all produced the same problem. The majority of other instruments were simulated church organs, jazz organs, strings, or other instruments that are a bit love-or-hate. But luckily the last (fifth) piano instrument called “bright” worked as it should without fault.

So the solution is to select the different instrument from the default, every time the piano is turned on. It’s a little bit annoying to have to do this but it means the piano works fine for practice.

Modern Learning

One of the awesome things about modern electric pianos is they can output, via a link, exactly what key was pressed, when, how hard, and for how long. By joining the piano to an app, you can feedback when errors are made, or calculate how many errors you made when playing a certain song. Or when learning the music can be displayed and will pause for you if you make a mistake or need time to find the key.

But the piano is 14 years old, so I needed a USB-A (like an old USB printer) to USB-C cable. In my USB cable collection I had every other cable that could exist except that one, so before I could play with apps I had to order one and wait for it to arrive. In the meantime I used various YouTube tutorials to start learning some specific songs.