The community repair thread

chillidoggy

Danny1969 said:

Ken Wood .... I never knew that, just told the wife but she knew, apparently we have one in the cupboard 

Well, if it's the same type, it was before built-in obsolescence had been invented. It would be the mixer of choice for anyone interested in saving the planet.

roundthebend

I love this stuff but don't have much skill. Today I was cleaning my bike turbo trainer which uses a manner for resistance and has a flywheel bolted on. The bolt has a plastic cover which pushes on, but for some reason has worked loose and falls off too easily. So, I cut some strips of plastic (from the label on some tangerines) and used those to pad it out. Worked a treat.

Danny1969

chillidoggy said:

Danny1969 said:

Ken Wood .... I never knew that, just told the wife but she knew, apparently we have one in the cupboard 

Well, if it's the same type, it was before built-in obsolescence had been invented. It would be the mixer of choice for anyone interested in saving the planet.

I've also just realised the Kenwood factory is 2 miles from my house

I'm a big believer in repairing rather than replacing things. Save the planet, save money and learn something too. 

ThePrettyDamned

Danny1969 said:

So Beats wireless headphones ... apparently these are expensive. This pair only only has audio coming out the right side, left side is dead says customer. 



So these are Bluetooth re-chargable headphones but they do have a 3.5mm socket to plug in a cable, so first thing I do is plug in an aux cable to my ipod and audio comes out of both cans so I know it's not a driver gone. then I try bluetooth and sure enough the left side doesn't work when using the bluetooth internal amp. So time to get them apart. I quite enjoy this part, working out how it comes apart without damaging anything. 



So this side we have the battery and the micro USB socket which feeds a lipo charge control circuit. I was expecting the headphone amp to be in this side as well but it isn't. That means it's not the wire passing through the headband that's broke as the headphone amp is the same side as the non working speaker so the headband wire only passes audio through to the right speaker which is working. I'm quite pleased about this as it means the whole headband doesn't have to come apart. 

So left side apart. 



So this is well most of the action is. Here he have a bluetooth receiver with combined amp and volume control. The aux socket has a switch on it so inserting an aux cable kills the BT side of things and routs the aux cable directly to the drivers ..  so first of all I check that's not the issue. That's fine. So I rig up a stereo socket with some fly wires so I can connect some headphones directly to the bluetooth amp module and find the outputs. 

So here's the socket which I've got another pair of cans connected to. First I solder on ground then prod to find my left and right. 



So I find the left and right outputs on the bluetooth PCB and the left output isn't connected to the pad that's got the left output. the build quality and soldering is so shit the vibration alone in the can has pinged the wire off. 

So not a difficult fix and all done now but have to say these things are complete crap. Why or how they can charge £130 for a crap pair of cans with a £10 bluetooth amp in it that's been soldered so badly it breaks all by it's self is beyond me. 

So if you have a faulty pair, do they work both sides with an aux cable ? if they do then drivers are good and your probably find a wire has come away due to vibration, poor soldering and poor design. 

They don't even sound that good. Truly a case of branding success. 

BigMonka

I need help good repair folk!
I've got a Dyson DC44 handheld vacuum and found that it wouldn't turn on (after having deteriorated in battery capacity over the last few years). So I took the battery out and found the voltage was extremely low and charging it wasn't having much impact. So I ordered a new battery from ebay which arrived today...
I plugged in the new battery and without even pressing the trigger I could see flames from the motor so immediately pulled out the battery and blew away the smoke! I guess my question is whether you think that the motor will be salvageable after that sort of trauma?
I must confess I'm really pissed off that this has happened (my boiler also being broken certainly isn't helping with general stress of things breaking either!) and can only assume that the voltage of the new battery is way too high.

What do you guys think?   

the_jaffa

I saw a thing a few years ago where someone pulled some Beats headphone apart and found that they had actual weights added into them to make them heavier and hence appear more solid and premium.

Danny1969

BigMonka said:

I need help good repair folk!
I've got a Dyson DC44 handheld vacuum and found that it wouldn't turn on (after having deteriorated in battery capacity over the last few years). So I took the battery out and found the voltage was extremely low and charging it wasn't having much impact. So I ordered a new battery from ebay which arrived today...
I plugged in the new battery and without even pressing the trigger I could see flames from the motor so immediately pulled out the battery and blew away the smoke! I guess my question is whether you think that the motor will be salvageable after that sort of trauma?
I must confess I'm really pissed off that this has happened (my boiler also being broken certainly isn't helping with general stress of things breaking either!) and can only assume that the voltage of the new battery is way too high.

What do you guys think?   

I think there's a control PCB directly on top of the motor which handles the motor switching and monitors it's rotation with a hall effect sensor. If you saw flames from the motor before you hit the trigger then the switching circuit must be faulty as switching normally uses a triac or MOSFET which only pass current when there's a gate voltage which comes from the trigger 

You need to get it apart really and have a look 

chillidoggy

Right, I’m on a roll with this photo lark.

https://i.imgur.com/jTWzRML.jpg

boogieman

chillidoggy said:

Right, I’m on a roll with this photo lark.

https://i.imgur.com/jTWzRML.jpg

You can see why these things last forever. I’ve seen lighter duty gearboxes in a motorbike. 

Danny1969

Wow, I thought that was a moped bottom end !!

chillidoggy

And the parts have arrived for the rebuild, along with a gearbox conversion kit to bevelled gears. Go faster parts for a mixer? Who’d a thought?

boogieman

chillidoggy said:

And the parts have arrived for the rebuild, along with a gearbox conversion kit to bevelled gears. Go faster parts for a mixer? Who’d a thought?

You need to respray it in Gulf colours now. 

Emp_Fab

Can you imagine what Soviet mixers are like ?!

chillidoggy

Yeah, they’re vaguely female and built like shot-putters.

Danny1969

This repair will show just how tight I am, it's a pair of £9.99 USB powered speakers. To be honest I'm not sure if this counts as a repair, all I can tell you is that I borrowed these from the shop I do repairs for and when I hooked them up to my laptop last night they sounded so bad I assumed they must be broken. 



Basically there's so must distortion from these little audio IC amps it's pretty unlistenable. 



So coming in we have 5V and ground from the USB cable, then audio ground and left and right for the input and then left and right speakers out.  So I'm gonna wire in a whole new 5V stereo audio amp. 

This is the PAM8403 chip ... a very cheap class 3 watts a side class D stereo amp which cost the princely sum of £1.89 assembled on a PCB and delivered from China. So in it goes, wiring is simple as it just needs 5V and ground, L + R audio in and L + R speaker out the other amp used. 



Listening with the new amp fitted I could hear some distortion on the low end because the 5V rail couldn't keep up with the transients so I glued a reservoir cap on the back of the PCB connected to the power in. Also put some foam in the boxes. That did the trick and they sound OK now.



And that was it done. They still aren't Hi Fi but they are tolerable now. I won't throw the old PCB away, that will be pressed into service running a polyphonic Ebow design I'm working on. 



  

Danny1969

So my step daughters car, VW Golf MK6  failed it's MOT on a binding handbrake and an indicator side repeater. The handbrake was easy enough to sort out but the side indicator on a MK6 Golf lives in the door mirror and you can't change the bulb, in fact it's an LED not a bulb you have to change a whole part of the mirror. Looking around I found the right kind and ordered it, then got a call saying not in stock. Found in again but gonna be a week delivery and she wants to use the car. So though f#ck it I do like a repair challenge. So here's the bit you have to replace as a unit. 



It's a sealed unit so I work out roughly where I need to get to and cut a chunk out of it, being careful to preserve the screw fixing as I need that to bolt it back on 



Pulled out the little circuit board and notice there's a component missing and shaking the assembly a diode falls out so that's basically why it's failed ...shit soldering 



So soldered diode back on the board. Checked assembly with a 9V PP3 battery and then rebuilt it as best I could 



And there you go, bit of a pain but it's fixed and will pass the MOT now. 

Chris.B

Good work Danny I would think you have saved £100+ with that repair.

Danny1969

Chris.B said:

Good work Danny I would think you have saved £100+ with that repair.

Thanks mate, just got back form MOT station and car has passed now. The bands van is next although there's no major rush to get that done at the mo unfortunately 

Jalapeno

Hot glue gun to the rescue !   Thise things are awesome !!!!!!

Loving this thread @Danny1969 ;

chillidoggy

Whilst I didn't actually repair anything per se, this morning I diagnosed the reason why my downstairs heating was only coming on when the upstairs heating was on. I braved the queue at Screwfix, put a new synchronous motor in the 2-way valve for the downstairs circuit, and off she went.

 As the thermostat dial has been so stiff for about 10 years as to be almost impossible to move it without a pair of pliers, I also caved in to the wife's demands for it to be changed, and fitted a new one. Admittedly, I got a 240v belt off the thermostat wires when I forgot it's connected to the mains, but I reckon it was a small price to pay to avoid the wife's tongue-lashing and ear-bending.

All this is particularly satisfying because not only have I managed to avoid calling out a heating engineer on a Saturday, but also the heating usually packs up just in time for the Christmas holidays (most holidays, actually), so I'm hoping I've beat it to the draw this year.