Certainly better than the owner of the garage I used to rent. The garage had one of those one piece garage doors that you would lift against the ceiling. The door was really heavy and the weight was compensated by two huge coil springs about as thick as my wrist. One day one of those springs decided to call it a day. By some miracle it didn't shoot through the windscreen of my car, but the bang was substantial. End result: I called the maintenance company twice and asked them to repair it. The repair guy came in to have a look twice but never repaired it within the year I asked them to. Oh what joy was it to use the door with just one spring.
What did I repair? Not much. Just replaced the three phase power cable on an industrial kitchen appliance. Seems like I've been repairing much less stuff than usual but on the other hand I've been making a lot of things from scratch.
What did I repair? Not much. Just replaced the three phase power cable on an industrial kitchen appliance. Seems like I've been repairing much less stuff than usual but on the other hand I've been making a lot of things from scratch.
I just wondered if any others here do as I do, when buying something new I often dismantle it and see what has been designed badly or compromised.
I often then modify it, even though I am invalidating the guarantee, but I don't seem to get failures in my mods. Everyone laughs ar me and thinks I am mad. (Which may be true).
I often then modify it, even though I am invalidating the guarantee, but I don't seem to get failures in my mods. Everyone laughs ar me and thinks I am mad. (Which may be true).
I'm lead to understand adjusting or replacing those is best left to experts, because as you've witnessed first hand, one slip can ruin your whole day so to speak. Garage door techs aren't cheap, mum had hers stick the other day (hers is powered) and called one out, for a 10 minute tweak job she was up for $175!
As with the Japanese stuff of the 60's, there is plenty of good, and bad with less in between.
Much of the cheap junk gets made when a non Chinese company writes a spec for a low cost product, then shops it to the lowest bidder. The contract build houses KNOW how to win at this game, wherever they are.
Unfortunately the large players also know how to "beat the cost curve" too.
When Motorola got phones made by Foxconn, Motorola had to keep a person IN the Foxconn factory at all times to watch over manufacturing, and keep an eye out for unauthorized "cost cutting" moves. Swapping in reels of inferior quality low cost parts was the usual ploy, but ditching whole test or manufacturing process steps happened too when nobody was watching.
As with the Shuguang tubes that don't pass final test, a LOT of Motorola RAZR phones wound up on Ebay. I got a nice looking purple RAZR for mu wife on Ebay for $30 back when they were $150 at the AT&T store. It worked fine and was still alive when she wanted something else.
Anything that I get from a store here in the states called Harbor Freight that has moving parts gets taken apart and checked out. The first one was an air compressor that had an obvious gasket issue, turned out that it had metal shavings, general grit inside, not deburred strange oil. Has been in use now for twenty years, and set a precedence.
I hadn't had a spring-assist door for years. When I doored a garage about 2012, the instructions were adamant that I must run the cable through the center of the spring (and there was enough cable to do that). Which means the broken coils can't get far from the cable. Less chance of face or windshield.
It looks like, even on an already strung door, you could fish a few yards new cable through the spring, anchored at doorjamb and track-end.
When I was about 16, I thought I'd adjust the door not knowing it was under SO much tension... I got it back to where I could open the door again using pliers and a tire iron, but my dad still ended up paying someone to come do it properly who would then insist the spring be replaced because it was old and might snap while being tensioned...
One of the garage door springs popped when I was living in L.A. It happened with the garage door closed (which is when the spring is at maximum tension), and the car safely locked up inside.
The hard part was opening the door from the outside afterwards - there was no other way to enter the garage. That's when I found the spring broken, and yes, there was a rod running through the middle of it to keep broken pieces from flying away. Might have been a concentric rod and tube, so it could change length - but I don't remember it being a cable.
Funny thing is I have zero memory of fixing it myself, but also zero memory of hiring someone to fix it. I think it would have been seared into my memory if I'd paid someone $173 for ten minutes work.
Oh yeah, what did I just repair? My semi-hollow electric guitar. It now has a pair of Seymour Duncan pickups to replace the dull-sounding stock ones, and I had to replace a damaged tone pot while I was at it.
It's a simple circuit and the electrical repair was trivially easy, but having to fish four pots, a jack, and a switch out of the guitar body through those narrow F-holes, and then fish them back in the same way, was interesting.
I tried pulling the pots back into place with string tied to the pot-shafts (which worked), and also an alternative method of pushing rubber fish-tank airline tubing onto a pot-shaft and using that to pull the pot.
The tubing method is better at guiding the pot shaft smoothly out of the hole, but with the pot in place, you find you can't drop the nut down over the tubing - it's too thick-walled - so at that point you have to hold the pot in place with long-nose pliers while you thread the nut onto the shaft, grab the shaft with fingertips, remove the long-nose pliers, and try to get the nut threaded on without dropping the pot back into the inaccessible depths of the guitar body.
I ended up having to use a third technique of the the 1/4" jack, as neither string nor air-line tubing worked. I made a custom tool for it (following a You Tube video), consisting of a 1/4" mono plug with the housing removed and the base ground away, soldered to a heavy-gauge flexible wire so I could fish it through the jack hole in the body.
I put off this repair for a long time because I anticipated that it would be really difficult to fish all the bits back into place inside the guitar. In the end, it wasn't difficult, once I figured out the right techniques and took my time with the process.
-Gnobuddy
Hi wiseoldtech,
Yes, and they are all shielded too. Major disassembly just to clean the controls and switches. Can't run it while you're doing the deed, so it may have to come apart a few times.
Someone tried to align the FM tuner, and it's a mess. Then there are the shoulder washers to replace in the output amp assembly. I have my own design using high temperature, high strength resin (over 250 °C rated) for the new ones. I've been waiting for these for 35 years and finally a friend and I got them together. They are 3D printed with high loss and a complicated curing procedure. Someone has new ones on Ebay, but they look like the old ones. I don't trust them. Anyway, due to the trouble of printing these, I can only make enough for units I have to repair myself.
-Chris
Yes, and they are all shielded too. Major disassembly just to clean the controls and switches. Can't run it while you're doing the deed, so it may have to come apart a few times.
Someone tried to align the FM tuner, and it's a mess. Then there are the shoulder washers to replace in the output amp assembly. I have my own design using high temperature, high strength resin (over 250 °C rated) for the new ones. I've been waiting for these for 35 years and finally a friend and I got them together. They are 3D printed with high loss and a complicated curing procedure. Someone has new ones on Ebay, but they look like the old ones. I don't trust them. Anyway, due to the trouble of printing these, I can only make enough for units I have to repair myself.
-Chris
Hi wiseoldtech,
Yes, and they are all shielded too. Major disassembly just to clean the controls and switches. Can't run it while you're doing the deed, so it may have to come apart a few times.
Someone tried to align the FM tuner, and it's a mess. Then there are the shoulder washers to replace in the output amp assembly. I have my own design using high temperature, high strength resin (over 250 °C rated) for the new ones. I've been waiting for these for 35 years and finally a friend and I got them together. They are 3D printed with high loss and a complicated curing procedure. Someone has new ones on Ebay, but they look like the old ones. I don't trust them. Anyway, due to the trouble of printing these, I can only make enough for units I have to repair myself.
-Chris
Indeed, Chris, some of those monsters are complex boxes to deal with.
Those Pioneer SX-1250's are like that Marantz - shields all over, controls difficult to access, etc.
Been there, done that, hated it, loved the money later.
Seagate ST-225? I fixed a lot of those.
I took a few dead ones apart before I figured out that most could be fixed without cracking the case.
1) The stepper motor driver chip got HOT. So hot that the board turned brown. If the chip was made by SGS (now ST), it was probably still good, move on to step 2. If the chip was made by Motorola, replace it. They worked until they got hot, then the stepper locked up.
2) The board was fastened to the cast housing with three screws. Only ONE should be tight enough to prevent the board from moving laterally. I either loosened the other two, or put thin nylon washers on both sides of the board for two screws.
The drive should now work at least partially, recover and back up it's data. Poor recovery can be assisted by attempting to recover data from a cold drive (an hour or two in the fridge) or a warm drive (I set them in the Florida sun for an hour). That technique still works sometimes today.
Perform a "low level format" with the Seagate floppy on the drive (MFM and RLL drives), then a regular format (boot from a DOS floppy, then format C:/S), and restore all the data.
3) When reinstalling the drive in the PC, mount it upside down (board side up). This prevents the heat from the board from making the casting hot, causing expansion. If there are two drives, try to put some distance between them.
All old drives used a stepper motor to move the head to one of several predefined tracks, like a floppy disk. These are written on the platters during a low level format. The drives had serious heat problems causing misalignment over time eventually leading to tracks writing over each other. The heat from the PC board was the major contributor, and it was on the bottom of the drive. The board grew in length as it got hot, forcing deformation in the casting. The above steps could get a year or two more out of a "dead" drive.
Modern drives have the low level formatting written on one or more platters. The heads search for a known pattern to find a certain track. That "searching" is the "clicking sound" that one of today's dead drives makes. It is often the point contacts or conductive elastomers that fail making it impossible for the head to find a track, hence the constant searching. I have fixed one or two with a pencil eraser, but nowhere near the success rate I had with the old ST225's and ST238's.