Building a New Machine

It finally went ahead and bought a brand new motorbike... right from a dealer!... Which is something that Ive never done before.

Ive only ever bought used vehicles in the past, and this was my first new vehicle purchase experience ever.

The bike is a Yamaha Tenere 700 and its the epitome of the Adventure Tourer genre... A quick list of the features that make it so "perfect for what I want to do (and have done in the past) is as follows:

Mid size engine capacity  - 400 -750cc is my requirement, and this one is 700cc, so its at top end for size and the penalty will be weight and it'll be a pig for off-road, but the advantage will be good highway speed and comfort... In truth I would really like something at the other end of the scale for traveling in Europe where the distances are much smaller, or if I was focusing on mostly off-road riding... But this is good for North America :)

Medium weight - as light as possible is best but my limit is 200Kg and this one is on the limit.

21" front wheel for good off-road control (especially in sand) - many other bikes are only 19".

High ground-clearance and off-road suspension. - Yep and Yep.. Actually a little higher than I need so ill probably lower it a bit to aid maneuvering with feet down..

Good fuel range - preferably 400Km or more - this one is actually only 350 or so - biggest limitation but there are some after-market fixes I can add..

Fuel Injected and water cooled engine - For bomb-proof reliability and startability in all conditions... Carbs are great, but get them wet or leave them unused in salty air for a few days and starting can be a real beast... Fuel injection is without doubt the way to go.

Very reliable engine - Yep, the engine design is known reliable from a couple other Yamaha bikes. 

And as Ive said, Im getting ready to leave my employer and do some traveling soon so I decided to get the "bike of my dreams" and start setting it up ahead of time... So I went in and put $1000 down and then had to wait 3 months before the bike came in from Japan... Its not that it was custom built or anything, its just that these bikes are very new to North America and they are very popular and I just couldnt get one sooner... Total cost with all taxes and duties etc was CAD $15000 ... which is a LOT of money for a motorbike as far as Im concerned, but compared to lots of other new motorbikes, its about mid-range.

Anyway, the point of getting it now while Im still at a full time job and cant actually go off touring on it is to get it all set up and ready, rather than doing it in a hurry once I have started taking a longer break between jobs or retired.

And of course, no bike is set-up and ready to go straight off the shop floor, and especially not for Adv-Touring like I do. So Ive been spending quite a bit more money and "adjusting things'...And so far Im about half way through the mod's list I want to get done (and about $1000 extra spent).

Here are before and after pics... Minimal visual difference from the casual glance but believe me its much better prepared for a big trip now than before.

Bike as purchased.

Bike as modified so far.

Things Ive done:

Well first I put a black vinyl coating on the grey tank sections cos I just didnt like the three colour look of the stock bike... Not that Im a huge fan of black motorbikes but it was the quickest and cheapest solution to get something I liked.

Added heavy duty Belly-Pan... Cos they get absolutely hammered when you get into the rough off-road.

Added full front end crash bars... Again, they get hammered in the rough... Its not a matter of if you drop the bike, its a matter of how often and how hard :)

Added "Bark-Busters" to protect the hand controls when the bike gets dropped.

Added rear Side-Racks... To attach 2x large aluminium travel panniers - for all my stuff to go in while I travel.

Added center stand - for ease of tire changes and general maintenance while touring.

Added Windscreen lifter... Cos Im tall and the stock screen is too low which leaves my head in strong and turbulent airflow... not good when you spend all day every day riding like I do when touring.

And the list of things I still need to add:

Rear Panniers - I actually have these but they are sitting over the boarder in the USA waiting for me to come get them when Covid subsides here and they open the boarder.

Rear Rack and Top-Case... For me to put more stuff in

Extended range fuel tank... So I can get an extra 5l of fuel in there to get the range that I want between fueling up.

Handle-Bar risers... to raise the bars 30mm and bring them back 20mm... It doesnt sound like much but having the controls in the right place so you can sit comfortably with a straight back is again incredibly important for long trips.

GPS mount... For obvious reasons.

Heated grips and aux-plug - for cold weather riding... cos you get all sorts of weather when touring, and often all in a single day.

Tire Pressure sensors... I have not used these cos they didnt exist for motorbikes last time I toured but they are very good for letting you know in advance (even by just a few seconds) that you have a flat... better than losing control at highway speeds :)

Voltage monitor... warning for when the battery is getting low... which generally means that the battery is on the way out.

Radiator bug guard... actually more of an issue than you might think... once you get bug bits stuck in the rad its really hard to wash them out and it can really effect radiator efficiency when you are ploughing through deep sand in really hot conditions.

Tubeless tire kit (to convert the existing tubed rims to use tubeless tires).

Spare drive-sprockets, chain, fuel and air filters, brake-pads , and a clutch cable.

Lowering-Links and shorter side-stand... I want good ground clearance but I also need good foot contact with the ground... I think optimal height for my needs is about 40mm lower than stock so I need to adjust the suspension links... and that will mean I need to shorten the side and center stands as well... Its a pain to do these mods but when you are trying to balance a 300Kg bike/luggage combination in rough steep terrain, every bit extra leverage you can get with your feet helps.

Custom seat padding... I need to make the seat far more comfortable than stock... Again, when you ride all day every day you really what a comfortable seat.

So, still a fair bit to do and I have to run the engine in as well... Total of 250Km on the bike so far... I need another 1000 before its fully run-in :)

So, thats my new moto project Im working on.

I feel a Sea-Change coming

 I can feel a change coming soon...

Nothing important for the world at all,  just for me.

Im feeling less and less inclined to stay working for my employer much longer... and in fact working for anyone for that matter is a real option too. Im feeling strongly inclined to "retire" ( well work a whole lot less or at something I enjoy much more anyway)... within two to five years.

Now of course there are some pleasant things that come with "retirement" - like not having to do something that I dont particularly enjoy (although I dont actually hate it either... its just I dont like working mostly for someone else's benefit), but there are two distinct challenges with that idea.

The first is of course, "do I have the financial security to make that decision", and the second is "what do I do with myself after I decide to make that decision... And these are both very difficult questions for me to answer.

The financial security question is I think very tricky to answer for anyone... I think if I had children then it would likely be simpler at this stage  in that I certainly wouldnt have enough savings etc at this point to consider retiring... so Id just have to keep working, and that would be fine cos life would toddle along like most people raising a family with the kids lives basically driving my own choices... But of course I dont have that blessing/burden... and there is just me in the calculation which means its somewhat earlier in my life that I get to consider the option of retirement. But its still hellishly tricky to decide what to do... There are so many unknowns in the future and my lifespan and the things that could happen between now and when I die are so divers that its difficult to "plan" for.... 

How much wealth is enough?

How long will I live?

What will happen with my health?

What will happen with the global and local economies and how will retirement investments and property values change over the next 40 or so years?... 

The answer to all these questions is "I really dont know!"

Base guess though is that Ill likely live for another 30-40 years, and I think the rule-of-thumb is that you need about a million dollars invested outside of your home to be "comfortable in retirement" (whatever comfortable means?)... And I certainly dont have that much money, so how can I be considering retiring?... The answer is, as Ive mentioned before, that I plan to downsize my house and use some of its equity to live on in my later years.

So I of course have a spreadsheet that I made that projects all sorts of income and taxes and expenses and investment and property growth etc... and its absolutely full of "wild-ass guesses" at every single calculation. So, its a big worry and the trade off is that every year longer I spend sitting here doing my current job is another year that my body deteriorates and further limits the sorts of physical things I can do. But every such year I stay working also adds financial assets for about 2 years of time that I can live in retirement. But if I retire now, then its very unlikely that I would be able to find another similar job in the future if I decided I wanted to go back to work later for a few more years... Employers dont really want to hire new employees who are over 55yo because they know they will be retiring soon and they will just have to train someone else up into the role again in the near future... Its a conundrum indeed.

But, at the end of the day I think I just have to say, my financial planning is reasonably conservative and that even though I will be wrong on many of my calculation estimates by some amount, on the average Ill be about right... And based on that, I think I have about enough assets to be OK in anything but a complete catastrophe of a personal future... And that is the basis of my current outlook... I think I have accumulated enough at this point.

And when I combine that with the view that the company I work for is flat-out making big profits for its self but at the same time is cutting back on sharing that wealth with its employees and has shown zero inclination to reverse that trend, then , well, Im inclined to stop helping them do that...

So that brings me to the second challenge, which I often express in my Blog here... I fundamentally dont know what to do with myself, and that makes retiring a real challenge... cos my usual behavior of stating expensive projects to keep myself amused when I get bored is likely to be a very bad idea going forward into retirement... Fixed fund base to work with and no external sources of income as I get older.

So, whats my plan?... Well I have several things to pursue but fundamentally Im willing to take the risk that Ill figure it out as I go along.... But I have a starting point at least.

First thing is to keep doing what Im doing now while the whole Covid virus thing blows over... probably another year. Then I plan to gear up and prep for what will likely be my last big Moto-tour.

Which is through Eurasia (since I feel I have at least had a look at the Americas and Africa, and I really enjoyed all of them, Id like to do the same for Eurasia). Im not sure of all the details but Im thinking of doing a reverse circuit - which means ship a bike to Vladivostok on East coast Russia then ride west through Russia, Mongolia and probably some of the 'stans, then into northern Europe and Scandinavia in late summer, then South through Western Europe and along the North coast of the Mediterranean then through the Balkans and Greece and Turkey then maybe Iran and on to India if possible and then probably ship the bike back to Canada from there... Probably a 9 month trip or so... lots of planning to be done and Carne' and visas etc... But that only occupies about 18 months of a 30-40 yr retirement.!

I figure I get the hard physical stuff out of the way first then consider further options.

There is also another big "walkabout" Id like to do in Australia by 4WD which is probably another 2 years of effort to plan and prepare and then do. And I would be happy doing another run through of North America in a van (which would be slower but much more comfortable than on motorbike), which would be another year or so... So Ive probably got about a decade of journeying interspaced with sessions at home and maybe doing some contract work to replenish funds.

After that Im expecting Ill slow down a bit more but Im considering trying to live for longer sessions in foreign lands like Mexico or Greece or Thailand... Lots of western retirees do it as their "lifestyle" in retirement and while Im not sure I could just do nothing and just sit around, Id quite like to design and build a house somewhere in a warm climate and there is no chance of being able to afford to do it here in Vancouver... So, while Im traveling around Ill be looking out for places that I may want to live for a year or two... I figure I can spend a chunk of money if I can be reasonably sure of being able to get 75% of it back when I sell... Not easy to be sure of that in foreign lands but I think I can at least spend some time looking into it.

Its of course all rather speculative at this point, but Im feeling like suppressing the uncertainty and money worries and embracing the unknown again and giving myself the chance to "encounter new opportunities" and trust that Ill find my way as I have done in the past.

So, I think Im on a count-down to leaving my current job at this stage, and the more I think about it the more enthusiastic Im becoming... which is a good sign I think   :)

Lets see how my thinking progresses in the next 6 months or so.

Well, That was a Fun One

 Im talking about 2020 in general of course...

Yep its been an odd and tiring year for everyone Im sure... Time for an annual update from me.

Early on in February I did manage to go take a week long break laying about in the sun on a Mexican beach... I went to the Caribbean side in the Cancun area which I had not visited on any of my motorbike travels in previous years... It was nice enough as far as" a week at an all inclusive resort" goes but I have no need to rush back and revisit the area or live there in retirement... But retrospectively Im glad I got to go do it before all travel anywhere on the planet got completely locked down. And it was nice and snowy in Vancouver when I left and nice and Sunny in Mexico when I arrived :) 

On that front, I think its quite a good thing for us all to see just how entitled and decadent we have all become over the last couple of decades. 

In my early adult life it was unusual for people to travel internationally to recreational climates and locals for annual vacations and they were certainly expensive and adventurous trips when they did happen... cut off from regular communications and funded with travelers cheques and $US cash... But recently every new-grad school kid does it with their friends to pretty much anywhere in the world, and we all constantly natter with each other on twitter and facebook and instaspam and money flits across the net with e-transfers and trip-advisor and airbnb bookings etc.

And Oh how we all howled like the world was ending when it all got shut down, and oh how all the pampered little people screamed for their individual freedom when governments tried to restrict personal freedoms for perceived social good.  Heaven help us all and our vaunted free democracies if there was ever a more significant or more directed actual threat... Any enemy who wanted to destroy us could easily do it because we clearly have no social cohesion and no semblance of personal responsibility toward others in our societies... Its all for one and one for self... Looks to me like we are all badly in need of exposure to a real threat with more direct and deeply felt consequences... 

Im saying we probably need serious group experience (war/revolution) of some sort to bring the facts home to us all so that the line we all draw somewhere between Us and Them gets positioned further away from our individual interests and more to our societal interests... Im not sure if thats positive or negative thinking though :)

What else did I do?

Well there were a few projects... Finished off a couple tables tops that I had worked on before.

Also finished off the little White motorbike I hade been building for a couple of years.

And I sold one car (It was getting too close to end-of-life) and two motorbikes (not using them and not working on them) over the year... But I bought a new car to replace the old one as my daily driver and bought one new motorbike to tinker with and modify... Its now done too so Ill likely sell it next year.

So Im one at less vehicle than I had last year and next year Ill get rid of another one... Im on a slow "vehicle reduction" plan for myself at the moment :)

And of course there has been all sorts of social turmoil and with Covid being in every conversation all the time for most of the year... 

For my part, Ive had it pretty easy. My work has been constant and mostly unaffected by it all... The company I work for did better than most in that its part of the whole internet infrastructure economy and that got a significant boost this year. Ive been going to work at the office throughout the pandemic. Most of the team I work with went through a few months of mostly working from home, but I stayed in at the office to be the one to adjust things in the lab for the rest of the team whenever they needed it. So its been same same for me for the most part.

It has been a disappointment to not be able to play sport or have dinners with friends nearly as much this year but on the whole Im not nearly as socially dependent as most people I know so Ive "suffered" far less than most I think. 

On the financial front its been an average year... I actually spent quite a bit less than in a normal year due to no travelling (either domestically or internationally) and less socializing, but I also took a significant financial hit from my tenant ( I rent out my house basement suite to help pay the mortgage) being stuck in Russia for 6 months! She went home to visit family in March and got stuck there for half a year, so I chose to reduce rent to a token level for that duration cos she had no source of income and no options to deal with her stuff while she was stuck over there... It has cost me quite a few thousands of dollars to absorb the hit but I think its cost her more, and Im one of the lucky ones so I think I can take on some of the struggle for others without complaining too much... So kind of a break-even year for me... I also note with disgust that all the large banks here in Canada posted pretty muck record profits this year while the Canadian Government and lots of the Canadian people posted record debt!

On the home front, not much going on with my little house... All I did this year was install a green-roof on the storage container I installed in the back yard last year... That was easy enough though it did involve me lugging about 2 tonnes of sand and rocks manually up a ladder onto its roof ... I needed the exercise anyway :)  The substrate is now in place on the container roof but it will take a couple of seasons for it to "naturalize" and the grasses to establish... The goal was a alpine lake shore or river bank effect.

On the down-sizing plan I mentioned last year, not much has happened. But I think I have figured out a way to do the "bridging finance" that I wanted to... So going into next year I will be actively changing around my debt management with my bank as my current mortgage comes due. And then Ill then be actively looking for a house in the specific area Im interested in... I hope to buy a new place and then probably immediately sell my current place... lets see what actually happens :)

Thats about all for this update.

Hoping everyone has a better year in 2021 than we had for 2020.

cheers

Grant

Something of a goal for the near term.

How goes my life at work?



So, Only a few posts ago I described my thinking on the subject of why I was signing back on to full time employment as an engineering team manager again…

And since then, it seems that two and a half years has passed… wow that went quickly… or did it take forever???... I cant tell


Clearly one side-effect of the job has been that I almost completely stopped posting to my blog… but then again, my blog only really seems to serve me significantly when Im “off doing stuff” and have lots of new stimulus to think about and that isn’t really what happens when we work in steady 9-5 type jobs...



Anyway, here is a status report:

Right, well I just reread my post “The Contractor Who Came In From The Cold” and I have to say that my assessment of what would happen and what it would be like were exactly 100% “dead on the money”…

Which is as usual disappointing but not surprising.


The company management behavior at the project level is exactly the same as before and is in my opinion highly dysfunctional and shows no inclination to change at all… and that is of course because exactly the same people are in charge as were there before and they have exactly the same attitudes as they did before… and as Ive said before, people just don’t change (and that includes myself).

And so, schedules are an eternal joke and the challenge of trying to do a good job managing in that environment is indeed a crappy one… And I was also exactly right in my assessment of my own behaviors in that environment… which is that try as I might to maintain an independent view-point and not get affected by the foolishness of others … well that’s just not possible… I get affected and I get angry and frustrated and well, it’s the same as it ever was.


And so, in short, Im not enjoying it at all.


Its also been 5 years since I went on my last long moto-tour and had a good long break to get the frustrations of work life out of my system (Ive been so spoiled in the past J)

Interestingly, I don’t have particularly strong urges to go off on another long moto-tour at the moment, though there are some rides Id like to do (not least through/around Europe)… but I certainly do have strong urges to not be doing my current job.


The trouble is of course that it still makes far more financial sense to keep doing what Im doing for a few more years… The mathematics is pretty straightforward really and it goes like this:

Ive done pretty well through my homes equity with the Vancouver property boom over the past decade or so (same thing has happened in many places around the world)… but, all that equity is tied up in the land and is not cash… Couple with that the fact that I still actually have a sizeable chunk of debt in the form of the mortgage… which I have lagged on paying off (with my multiple long expensive moto trips) somewhat because of the significant increase in equity… I still owe the bank enough to mean that I wont be paying the mortgage off for about another decade… which is the crux of my current “challenge” J


Because I really really don’t want to be doing my current job for another 10 years!... And therein lies the problem…
Technically, I am reasonably well off and could probably manage to retire… But my “wealth” is largely tied up in equity and is not “liquid”… While Im working, I can use the equity by taking out loans against the house and I can take my long breaks, but while I have debt, I have to work at a high paying job on a regular basis to pay back the interest on the debt… Otherwise the compound interest of the debt quickly grows and overwhelms the value of the equity (about 20 years away by my calculations)… and I then end up living out my later years in a cardboard box under a bridge somewhere… Not what I had in  mind!


The only way for me to be able to stop working is to not have debt, and preferably have “investments” that actually grow instead of decline at the bank. But the only way to do that is to sell my house!     Not so hard you say… just sell it…


Hmm well, that has a bunch of its own problems, not least of which is where do I live then… Ive traveled about quite a bit and Ive found that being an expat living my retirement in cheap foreign lands isn’t all its cracked up to be (at least for me as I understand myself)…
And anyway, I don’t really want to completely uproot myself and move somewhere significantly cheaper… I actually want to stay in the area that Im currently in … It is where all my friends are and it is where I can get the contracting work that I do want to be able to do as a “staged” retirement plan (I know I would not be happy outright retiring right now so I may as well earn some money working part time in roughly the same job I have)… So going to live on the cheap somewhere else is not really what I have in mind.


But, I do have a plan…

I have a crappy little house on a sizeable block of land in a city where real estate is very valuable… But the value of the place is in the land and not the house… That said, Im happy enough in my crappy little house, and so what I want to do is “down-size” my block of land…
Which is technically not allowed (cant subdivide my block), so what I will need to do is sell my current house and buy a different one… I should be able to do that and use the earnings from the sale of the larger land block to have zero debt on the new smaller block… And then Im a free agent and can go back to contracting and take some longer breaks again… Im sure Id be a pretty happy camper in that mode.


Right, so there is a solid high-level plan and Im 100% "on-board"... Yes I want to do that.

The problem now becomes how to achieve the transition… and that is made much more difficult than it probably needs to be by guess who… Yep Me!

The problem is I am very particular about several things in my proposed new “crappy little house on a smaller block”… I know within a couple of streets and a few dozen houses of where I want that to be (based on my assorted needs … which are more or less the specifications of my current crappy little house)… And there are no houses for sale that meet my needs at the moment.

That is not really a problem though because Im quite happy to wait up to 3 years or so to do the change. And its pretty certain that in that time frame the right thing will come up.

The problem though is that this means that I cant really sell my current house till after I buy the new one… And I cant guarantee that I could immediately sell my house once I want to.

And that means my problem becomes "bridging" finance…
Its pretty hard to go to the bank and say “Hey, can you please loan me a huge sum of money so I can buy a second house”!...
Sure I have the equity to cover the loan in my existing house, but the bank cares more about my ability to pay the interest with income… And as a single professional I admit I am well paid compared to many people, but sadly I just don’t earn enough to make the payments on such a large loan for a second house in this real estate market...
… Oh such first world problems I have J



The arrogance of me!...  Im being picky and greedy and its blocking me getting what I want… Yep, that sounds exactly like most of us humans J



So, there is my current challenge … trying to get comfortably free of mortgage debt so I can stage myself into retirement and give up the stress of having to work full time for a crappy corporation. But at least my direction is a bit clearer… I have a specific goal and a specific time line that is “within sight”… 2-3 years is very “immediate” compared to 7-10 years away which in my emotional mind just becomes “forever” away.


It actually feels good to have the core of a plan J
So now all I gotta do is figure out how to achieve it.

Bunch of 2019 pics of stuff Ive been doing.

Last years trip back to Australia... stopped in Bali to get over jet-lag for a couple of days.

Grew my beard and mo out for a few months... very silly appearance :)

Got this one going and then sold it.

Was going to sell this one that I restored/moded... but its too much fun to ride so I decided to keep it... Im such a hoarder!

Some of my summer frisbee team... Im still running around as best I can at 54yo.

My ugly little vespa next to some foreign university students car... seriously!

Another little coffee table that I made... gave this one away to a friend.

Complete rebuild/restore/renovate on this one ... Ill finish it this coming summer and then probably sell it.

Dont have enough space to store all my motorbike projects so I put some footings in and got a shipping container for them... Itll be my workshop now.

Last year I took a vacation week in Arizona... pretty warm red countryside.

Failure to Reconcile

Im struggling… I really am.


I am seemingly unavoidably, constantly, and profoundly disappointed in “humans”.


As far as we know, humans are the most intelligent species to have ever existed, and in probably little more than twenty thousand years of social development, have transformed from being small subsistence nomadic family groups of primates into a planet modifying highly technological pan-planetary (being a bit generous there maybe :) ) society. From understanding the essential survival skills of our dangerous existence in a hostile environment to understanding and utilizing deep quantum physics, highly structured political economic and social organizations and the beginnings of genetically manipulating our own biological form.


But for all those achievements we are by and large still absolutely abominably self-interested and have such little foresight as to be eminently happy to shit in our own drinking water or eat detergent pods because it will get us attention from other people… or any number of other highly self-destructive behaviors… and for the most part, these “bad behaviors” are not even malicious or “directed” activities… They are simply the manifestation of gross and obvious negligence…

I cant express how disappointed it all makes me feel…
It crushes my spirit to see what people constantly do to them-selves and each other and the planet and well, everything!  
Its killing me… I hate people!


And I cant possibly be alone in this feeling… Im not operating on some higher plane of intelligence… Im probably a bit smarter than average but far from exceptional… There must be tens of thousands of people who see the same terrible human behaviors, and the blatantly obvious consequences, and just like me are essentially powerless to effect change in the masses of people who don't see it and dont even bother looking at it.

So, I gotta ask… How are people able to “carry on” and watch it all happening without despairing?

Really… It must drive lots of people to give up hope and just bump themselves off… and clearly lots of people do just that.


For my part, I have no intention of taking such steps… but it does pose me with an ever intensifying existential crisis and increasingly obscured search for personal purpose…
Then again, perhaps that’s half the point of it all right there … well if you are the kind of person that needs to "find the point" of things.
But if there was no struggle there would be no reward, and whether there is reward or not, there is always struggle.

… essentially, I think Im just well on my way to becoming a "Grumpy Old Man"  :)

KowaSix Fix - (Jammed Winder)

This posting is intended as a "community contribution" for owners of the "Kowa Six" medium format film cameras...


Its an old 120 size film SLR camera, and my Dad gave me his old camera that had not been used for years and needed some attention and that I thought I might enjoy using.
Anyway, as I said, it needed some maintenance since it had not been used in years. So, I was trying to "loosen up" the shutter (its a leaf-shutter type camera rather than the more common focal plane type shutter of most SLR cameras) and aperture settings in the lens which were a bit sticky with lack of use... and with no film in the camera I was winding and firing the shutter in quite rapid succession.
Somehow I managed to get the winding mechanism jammed so that it would not wind forward and would not fire the shutter.
I tried removing the lense and pushing all the buttons and twiddling everything I could but it would not budge... and I dared not force the winder forward because I felt sure it would break something inside.

What to do?... well, go check out the internet of course... Which I did and I found a fair number of posts in various places that sounded like my stuck winder problem but absolutely no solutions to the problem that applied to my situation... I tried the suggestions I found but my problem was different it seemed... And the only clear response for the more complicated problems was a recurrent statement of send it off to so-and-so in the US who is the repair wizard guy for these old cameras... oh and by the way it will cost you several hundred dollars to get it fixed!

Not what I wanted to hear.
So, undeterred I decided that Id have a go at it myself, and after quite a struggle I did manage to fix it without damaging anything else... And the fix in my case was not too complicated and I think others could do it so Ive decided to share that fix here.

The Fix
1) You will need to peel off the vinyl covering on the winder hub... Its held on with contact adhesive so its quite a job to get it off, but that's what you have to do to get at the 4x little screws that hold the winder top plate in place... Be careful to not tear the vinyl (It can be reglued onto the cover after)
2) Remove the 4x small screws with a very small Philips-head screwdriver.

3) Remove the winder cover plate... which is now held in place by the winding lever spring plate so you have to lift an edge and slide it out.

4) Now you have to remove the winder which means undoing the two central screws in the middle... Don't worry about the little ratchet mechanism cos if you are careful it will all stay exactly in place as you lift the winder up off the camera. If things do get disturbed though, its no problem to put the little cog back between the "gripping levers" when you reassemble it all.

5) Now you need to get access to the 5x small screws that hold the camera side cover on... Again you need to peel back the covering Vinyl to get at them... I have a picture here so you can see where the 5x screws are so you need not fully peel off the vinyl. (Note there is also a slightly larger 6th hole there that has no use that I can see)

6) Now the side cover should simply lift up off the camera and reveal the guts of the mechanical mechanisms in the camera body (very scary!) 

7) Right now we are ready to fix things... But to explain Ill show a couple of pictures... These two are of the camera mechanuism in loaded and in fired positions respectively... almost no difference right!

and here is a third one with the mechanism in the "jammed configuration"...


The difference appears very minor (mostly in the subtle position of the L-shaped lever on the right and a small nub of a lever sticking out from under the brass center hub near it..

 It all looks very busy in the picture but all we have to do to fix things is do some poking with a screwdriver... There is a little lever with a turned up tab sticking out from under that multi-armed steel top plate that the winder axle sticks up through... its on the left side and is more clearly seen in the picture below.

Now if you winder is jammed like mine was then you cant see that little lever... cos its stuck back under the plate... In normal conditions, the little lever is "wound-back" anti-clockwise as you use the winder to advance the film and reset the shutter.. and it ends up almost in the same place after winding.
And when you fire the shutter, that little lever snaps clockwise full circle around the winder hub.
But when you fire the shutter and wind the film advance knob at the same time, things can get out of synch and the little lever only manages a portion of the rewind circuit.
So... How to fix it
I held the firing button in (ie in "fired" position) and I used a poker (ie very small screwdriver) to release that little lever from being stuck... It releases in little "leaps" when you push it in the anti-clockwise direction, so you have to poke it from several angles and chase it back to the start position on the left side of the winding hub... … You know its in the fully fired position when it stops spring releasing and is just loosely sitting there.
And that's all you have to do!

Now if you temporarily put the winder back on with the two screws, you should find that its all working as it should be... The winder retracts the mirror and advances the film and then levers-through and keeps winding but without resistance and the camera is ready to fire... Test it out a few times and then you can reassemble the side cover and winder in reverse order and you are good to go. The vinyl coverings can be re used with some carefully applied contact adhesive too of course.

Anyway, that's my fix... Hope it helps someone :)

cheers

Grant