The community repair thread

Kittyfrisk

That is one mucky meter  'The Filthy Fluke'
A well used & great tool  

Emp_Fab

That would drive me crazy.  I'd have that in bits and cleaned up like new.

Danny1969

Emp_Fab said:

That would drive me crazy.  I'd have that in bits and cleaned up like new.

I might have a go later, trouble is a lot of it is oil from working on cars and the plastic is 30 odd years old so it might not come off. Maybe a bit of solvent will do the trick. 
It's strange, I can easily afford a brand new Fluke and it's a tax deductible expense.  But I get attached to my tools and like to use the same ones for as long as possible. The other main tools, hot air gun, screwdrivers  and Weller irons are all over 20 odd years old too. 

Emp_Fab

I'd be very wary of solvent mate....   The lettering might come off. 

Fairy liquid and a toothbrush I'd go for.  ....or a bath in an ultrasonic cleaner.

BillDL

I like the dexterous way you can hold both probes with one hand while testing, like the skills involved in using chopsticks and not dribbling noodles down your front.

OilCityPickups

I posted elsewhere on the forum - but if you want to see me repair the power board on this Alsis Q49 midi controller look here

I'm very big on the right to repair and that stuff doesn't end up in landfill Hence the twin processor 48gb ram dinosaur HP Z600 graphics workstation that's my desktop computer!  - yes it's running Windows 11. 

Chris.B

I'm with you on the right to repair @OilCityPickups I enjoy the challenge of fixing stuff - takes me back to the days when I fixed TVs for a living. 

I enjoyed the repair thread about the keyboard, a very effective fix.

OilCityPickups

A bit of a hobbyhorse of mine is that so many younger guys I meet are absolutely useless at what I describe as 'man craft'. Since we live in safer times we no longer have the gender role of seeing off the cave bears and hunting uppity mammoths - our role shifted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be the DIY kings ... who would decorate our homes, fix pots and pans and even keep our cars running (I have had many a fun time with an engine hoist)  I have quite a few 'home mechanic' books from Edwardian times - when chaps would take on scraping bearings and even making their own telephones. 
I know we are all 'new men' now and far less 'me breadwinner' than we used to be (thank goodness) but I swear many of the men's mental health issues that plague our society stem from us losing direction and the satisfaction and self respect 'fixing things' gives us. 

I'm aware of the 'Shed Movement' and subscribe to it's core ideas ... I wish I had more time as I would love to run a 'shed group'.  

   

ToneControl

OilCityPickups said:

I posted elsewhere on the forum - but if you want to see me repair the power board on this Alsis Q49 midi controller look here

I'm very big on the right to repair and that stuff doesn't end up in landfill Hence the twin processor 48gb ram dinosaur HP Z600 graphics workstation that's my desktop computer!  - yes it's running Windows 11. 

I've got a 2008 HP  T7400 Precision workstation that I'm not sure what to do with, sill containing my old Avid DSP boards.
2 x 4 core Xeons X5482, 16GB I think, SAS drives, etc.
Noisy and uses about 1kW.
I could use it to heat the house I suppose.

I suppose I should sell the parts separately

TTony

Kapton tape.


I've been on a bit of a retro-mp3 thing over the past few months.  Modding old iPods is nothing new (though I do like having 500Gb in a device that'll play for 70hrs+ though) but it also prompted me to dig out another old - Fiio - mp3 player from about 10 years ago.  I'd replaced the battery in it a few years ago, but then stuck it away in a drawer as phones (pah) took over as my standard mp3 player.

Got it out, charged it (battery still good), stuck some mp3s on a micro-SD and all good to go.  I thought.

But it developed a fault. 

Inserting the headphone jack (this is non-Bluetooth) caused some sort of short and the player would power off.  Initial thought was that perhaps the replacement battery was a bit bigger, and as it's right by the headphone jack socket, perhaps the jack was protruding marginally through the end of the socket, touching the battery casing and causing a short?  

The battery (just double-sided taped to the inside of the rear cover) was a little loose, so I restuck it with some new strong tape about 5mm further away from the jack socket to make sure there was no contact.  But the issue remained.  

The player has a lineout too.  Putting a jack into that socket caused the same power-off issue.

The player operates perfectly (ie the UI is fully functional, files appear to play, etc) *until* a jack is inserted into either of the output sockets.  So I'm now thinking that it's a circuit board fault rather than a jack causing a short - assuming that inserting a jack initiates something in the output circuit somewhere.

I'm not getting into diagnosing circuit boards or trying any micro-soldery, so it looked like the player was end-of-life.


But then I covered the circuit board in a layer of Kapton tape (which I'd also used in some of the iPod mods), put the Fiio player back together for "one last try" ... and it's been working perfectly and consistently for the last few days.


Which is very good news, because I like this old player and the new ones are all Android-based, so bloaty and battery hungry.  

TTony

What did we do before Youtube?

I use in-ear buds regularly - more or less daily - and for the past 3-4+ years, I've been very happily using a pair of Sony WF-1000XM4s.  They've long been superseded by the XM5s, and the XM6s are due this year.  So I'm a couple of generations behind.

But with a set of Sonicform tips replacing the Sony originals, the sound quality and noise isolation is superb, and I felt no need of replacing them ... until battery life started to deteriorate.


Reading the forums, a recent firmware update has been blamed for causing excessive battery drain (there's not-a-first), so I went through the process of reverting to a previous version (which requires installing a hacked version of the app onto the phone, and tricking it into thinking the laptop is the firmware server, and installing an older version from there).  All worked, except the battery drain persisted.

To be fair, the batteries - in both the buds and the case - have probably had the best part of 1000 charge cycles, and the buds rarely get fully drained, so they're being repeatedly "topped up" rather than fully charged, so not ideal.

Replacing them would cost ~£250.  A set of batteries costs ~£25.  Got to be worth giving a go, right?

I spent longer watching this video than the replacement actually took ...


It's a little scary because the components and cables inside the earbud are a little on the small side, but - seriously - it took me less than 10mins to disassemble the old buds, pry the batteries out and re-assemble.  They're now sat in their case (also with replaced battery), charging.  I did a quick pair test - to make sure all was working - and all was fine.  

But without the step-by-step YT video, I'd not have dared try.


Fingers cross I get more than 90mins use from the renewed buds.

TTony

Quick update after a week of daily use ...

Whereas pre-battery change, the buds lasted about 90mins from fully charged to re-charge required, I now see about 5% of charge used for the same 90min journey.

That's with all other setting the same, ANC on full (train journey), volume level, EQ settings, etc, all as they were pre-battery change.

So I'm over £200 net up, but - more rewardingly - have the satisfaction of having fixed them.  Hopefully good for another good few years now.

normula1

Brilliant result Tony

roundthebend

Nice one @TTony ;

You reminded me I did something similar - relying on YouTube - though much less fiddly or expensive. 

I have a Camelbak Podium bottle for road cycling. I've actually got 3 and had them for years. The valve design is great because it stops leaks and is easy to open and close. But, the silicon on all of them traps water which has got pretty ugly with black mould. I do my best to scrub it out but just accepted that I'm not really drinking from those crevices so I'd love with it longer.

Then I found a video showing how to dismantle the whole thing. Which I've done, cleaned everything and sterilised it all. 100% clean now. It seems my wife might have chucked 2 of the lids away because of the mould. Gah



So frigging easy. Saves me £10-20

Danny1969

Excellent work @TTony ;

 Here's a few recent repairs  that might prove useful as these things are so common 

EV SX200 speaker. These speakers are pretty popular, either in powered or passive form. This one has no treble coming from it according to the customer. So either there's a problem with the compression driver or there's an issue on the crossover PCB. Some EV's use a bulb fuse in series with the horn and if you drive the speakers too hard the bulb will heat up and restrict the current to the horn. Keep driving it hard and the bulb fuse will blow. 

I remove the bass driver and look at the crossover. No protection fuse bulb so I pull the horn spade connectors off the crossover PCB and measure for resistance. It's open circuit so diaphragm has blown. 

You need a long screwdriver to take these speakers apart. No as long as my superlong one here but pretty long. Takes the grill off, remove the bass driver  and remove all the screws down the sides and the 4 in the front. 



Then the 2 halves of the cabinet will come apart and you can get to the compression driver. It's held on with 2 bolts which I've removed here 




To swap out the diaphragm order another using the EV part number, 81514XX series in my case. Prices are £25 to £80 - source is Ebay. 



Unbolt the old one and slip the new one in. Be careful not to foul the diaphragm as you get it in the slot, the tolerances are quite tight. 



And that's about it really. 

Sporky

TTony said:

Replacing them would cost ~£250.  A set of batteries costs ~£25.  Got to be worth giving a go, right? 

I have those, and mine went to only holding ten minutes of charge rather rapidly, so I'll give that video a go - ta. Though I already spent £70 on a set of Nothing Ear As... 

Where did you get the replacement batteries? 

Danny1969

I wouldn't normally bother with another laptop repair here as I've covered a few already. This Lenovo Thinkpad is expensive though and well thought off by people who want a quality laptop but can't use a Mac. 

So it a USB-C power machine which won't power up. First thing I do is connect a USB-C volt & current reader in series with the charger and USB-C port so I can see what's happening. There's a chip on the the laptop that tells the USB-C charger that it's a  laptop and requires 20V. The USB-C charger will then change it's default 5V to 20V and current will start flowing. 

But as you can see no current is flowing despite the 20V handshake being successful. That's why the laptop is dead. 



So it's got to come apart so I can prod around and find out what's gone wrong. 



The charging current is quite high in relative terms. So what I'm looking for is something that will switch that current and that's always going to be a MOSFET, or more normally 2 or 3 of them. MOSFET's on laptop boards are generally in 8 pin DIL format, like an opamp. As only a Gate, Source and Drain connection are required the gate is on it's own pin then the other 3 pins will be common on one side and all 4 pins common the other side of the chip. i can't see what I want this side so gotta take the board out to see the other side. 

One trick that can help is to press the board in different areas while looking at the USB-C's current draw. If there's a bad joint then you can see a blip when you get in the right area. I find my MOSFETS under some black tape. There's very little solder on the legs / pads and that's the issue. I put some solder paste on all legs and deliberately short out the legs which are shorted internally and on the solder pads to get a better mechanical connection so the issue doesn't happen again. Not pretty but will be more reliable. 






And it lives again. I should have made sure the USB-C VA reader was up the right way when I took the picture, but if you can read upside down you can see it's now drawing current and charging ... and working 






USB-C volt / amp display is a tenner on Amazon ..

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B99Z2GJK?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1

Danny1969

A quick Mackie bass bin repair. It won't turn on. 

There's 4 allen bolts to get the power amp module out. 



This is a good old linear power supply design. Fuse is good so power coming in. Measuring the output of the transfomers secondary winding off load yields only 20V ish on the main dual output when it should be about 80V. So I suspect it isn't getting 240V in the primary. So I pull out the board with the IEC socket on it  and find this lovely joint 




I clean it up and reflow it with leaded solder. Then it's up and running again. 

TTony

Sporky said:

Where did you get the replacement batteries? 

eBay I think Mr @Sporky ;

You can find the same brand as in the buds originally, and I doubt anyone would bother faking such a low value / low volume item, so thought eBay would be safe enough.

Sporky

Ta!