With the Toshiba Camileo H30 and Pedco Ultraclamp on test. Enjoy!

Tyne Tunnel Midnight Run 20/11/2010 – 200sx from Ste Whiteoak on Vimeo.

Hi everyone. My first post on here!

A while ago I decided to try something a little different with my car. I’d seen some vinyl online that I rather liked and duly emailed and asked for a sample. The colour was Black Galaxy. It looks kind of textured black/dark grey in normal light but when there is bright light (sunlight is best) it glitters all the colours of the rainbow! Yes, I like sparkly shiny things and holographic vinyl ticks all the boxes for me!

When it arrived, I was transfixed as it glittered and sparkled at me, calling me to have everything I own in this colour.

Being a little impulsive, I decided one day to remove my spoiler from the car. Took it off, fibreglassed over the holes left and resprayed with some rattlecans from Nissan. Now I had this bootlid with no spoiler and 10m or so of rather expensive black galaxy vinyl (you see where this is going?!). The bootlid was removed and I enthusiastically ploughed in with scissors, water spray and vinyl on the kitchen floor. The topsheet went on ok but I didn’t leave quite enough for the leading corners. That wasn’t a major issue as I could match up a couple of offcuts.

The problems arose when I tried to fold the vinyl down where the lip of the boot drops to the light cluster. I’d been told that a little heat (such as from a hairdryer) would be sufficient to soften the vinyl so it could be stretched a little to cope with the curves. Little did I know that metallised vinyl does not work like that! It does NOT stretch. Nor does it like bending very much.

I ended up cutting a lot of little slits and folding down about 20 tabs. The end result can be seen in the pictures.

But wait! My tale does not end there!!! Whereas I was happy with the vinyl glittering away I was not happy with the finish. 3 days later I decided it wasn’t a good enough finish (mostly that you could see all the little cuts where I’d folded the tabs down) and set about removing it.

Unfortunately I’d done a good job of sticking it down and whilst pulling it off (gently, I didn’t grab and yank!) it took half the paint off the bootlid too! Unfortunately no pics of this as I was too embarrassed to take any!

I did, however, decide I couldn’t NOT have this vinyl on my car so I set about with dremel and stanley blades trimming my grille, fibreglassing over the hole left from removing the center strut and laying a piece of the vinyl on the lower plane. The end result glitters nicely in the sunlight and has received some nice comments:

I have only just now got the bootlid tidied up and re-sprayed properly (should be fitting it back on the car tonight) after spending quite a bit on expensive vinyl, fitting a couple of meters worth then ripping it off again causing another re-spray. Because of my ineptitude, enthusiasm for doing things without researching them properly first and the fact that I’ve had to have my bootlid repainted 3 times in total and the cost of holographic vinyl, Steve beleived it warranted a WMOCI post!

wmoci.com recruited two new contributors this week. Welcome onboard to Daz and Teggers!!!

We’d like to tip our hats to wmoci.com fan Ken Scudder…he’s built arguably the best S14 200sx in the UK if not Europe or even the World…then rather than garaging it like a museum piece, he gives it serious stick on a regular basis. Ken, you’re a legend!

Now turn up your speakers and listen to the sound of pure bliss that comes from the Procharged 6.0litre Chevrolet LS2 V8 Engine:

Thanks go to KarenP for providing photos of Ken’s car competing at Ten Of The Best 2010 and Ken himself for letting our vinyls grace the hallowed bodywork. “We’re not worthy!! We’re not worthy!!!”

The team at wmoci.com would like to chuck a big shout of “Thanks Dude!” to Kelvyn at KSDigital for sorting us out with some sweet vinyls for wmoci.com. Please be sure to check out www.KSDigital.eu

If you’d like one of the 14ins stickers then e-mail wmoci@live.com for more information

A new game that I and a few mates have started playing is eBay challenges.

Quick rundown of the games

Most items for £1
Everyone has £1 to spend and the winner is the person with the most diffrent items
(A judge who checks for any cheating gets to pick one item from each person)
– We’ve already played this game, the results are getting tallied up today.

Stupidest item for £1
Everyone buys something as stupid as posible for under £1
The winner ( Chosen by a judge ) gets the change from every one elses £1
– The game starts tonight or early this week

More details soon

My wonderful wife and daughter gave me a Toshiba Camileo H30 for my birthday so thought I’d write a little review for this great little affordable HD Camcorder

It offers big price features for a not a massive amount of cash. The RRP is way higher than what you actually pay for it (Around £180 in general). I will update this with some footage from the camera but basically; its easy to use, a nice weight but still compact, feels solid and not as though its going to fall apart in your hand. The footage is crisp and vibrant and although low light levels get a bit noisy it doesn’t affect it enough to comprimise value for money and can be cleaned up with good editing software. Also a plus point is you get 5x Optical zoom on top of digital zoom features. Means zooming with no pixelation issues. Winner!!!
All in all the H30 gets the wmoci thumbs up. Well worth spending some of your money on.

Main Features:

1080p, Full HD resolution

Digital H.264 Full HD video camcorder

Digital still camera

10 MP CMOS sensor

5 x optical zoom

HDMI digital AV output

7.6 cm / 3” touch-screen LCD

SD/SDHC card reader

Video stabilisation (Only up to 720p, not in 1080p)

Easy YouTube upload function

Battery Type: NP120 Li-ion battery (A spare is around £6 on Amazon)

Battery Life Video recording time: Approx. 2,5 h, (610 mA)

Power Saving Mode: 3 minutes

Interface ports on the camcorder: HDMI / mini USB 2.0 / TV Out

File Formats: AVI (video), JPG (image)

Video Recording vs. Capacity – MPEG4 1 GB SD: FH (1,080p) = 15 min.; HD (720p) = 30 min.; WVGA = 25 min.; VGA = 60 min

Photos taken vs. Capacity (1GB SD) 1 GB SD: 16 megapixel = 195 photos; 10 megapixel = 244 photos; 3 megapixel = 814 photos

Full Specs:

Dimensions (mm) 45 (W) x 65 (H) x 110 (D) mm

Weight (g) 229 g (w/o battery)

Certifications CE, GOST, SASO, NCRS

TV Output Digital: HDMI

Analogue: composite video (NTSC / PAL selectable)

LCD Monitor 7.6 cm / 3” touch-screen

Movie Resolutions:

- Full HD (1920 x 1080p / 30fps)

- HD (1280 x 720p / 30fps)

- WVGA (848 x 480 / 60fps)

- VGA (640 x 460 / 30fps)

Storage:

On board Storage Media – 128 MB Nand Flash Memory (usable storage: around 90 MB)

Expansion SD/SDHC – Up to 32 GB on removable SD type cards

Lens 5 x optical zoom lens (F=3,5 (W) – 3,7 (T))

Focus Range Macro: 1 cm; normal: 10 cm ~ infi nite

Image Sensor 10 MP CMOS sensor

Digital Zoom 4 x digital (1 x for 1080p), 5 x optical

Exposure: Auto

Self-Timer: Approx. 10 sec.

Still Picture Resolutions:

- High – 16 MP (4608 x 3456)

 - Standard – 10 MP (3664 x 2748)

- Low – 3 MP (2048 x 1536)

Flash (for still) Auto, red-eye reduction, digital light, Off

White Balance Modes: Auto, daylight, fluorescent, tungsten

We discussed getting wmoci.co.uk as well as wmoci.com for all of 10 seconds. You could look at it as overkill, .com is more generic and we aren’t a company. None of you will have noticed you can type in www.wmoci.co.uk and get to www.wmoci.com but then if you were going to a site called wmoci.com why would you use .co.uk as a suffix?
So why did we do this? Well 2 reasons.
1. Luke and myself both thought well we’re in the UK so why not? It seemed like a good idea at the time.
2. Its starting how we mean to go on. Wasting money on a .co.uk address for a site called wmoci.COM is genius. £4 wasted, yay!

The Kodak Zi8 full HD 1080p video recorder.
For around £130 this is a great little gadget. Light-weight design pretty compact so easy to carry around in your pocket.
Has four different settings, you can either record at 1080p if your not bothered about memory usage, a 32GB memory card is a great extra for this. Or you can record at 720p instead saving more space. For sports and other fast moving video you have the option for 720p at 60FPS for some great slow motion play back. Or if you want to record for hours and hours theres simple VGA recording. The camera has a built in usb cable that pops out allowing you to download the videos straight to the PC or you can of course take the SD card out and transfer them with that. The camera also has an inbuilt HDMI out port so you can plug it straight into any HD tv and begin instant playback of all your videos

A few downsides I can pick out,
One its very very light. Too light in fact making it very easy to shake around and mess up your videos, however it has a handy tripod mount that’ll fix that. The second is lack of any night vision or flash, you get a much lower picture quality in the dark with lots of noise in the picture. The editing software that comes with it though makes it pretty simple to just turn up the brightness a little which makes it a lot easier to see. However this will add around an extra 30% to the file size.