What electronics have YOU fixed lately?

[TM86]

they were terribly unreliable.
local collage here required students to use them so at the start of every school year we would get a bunch of calls to buy them. Then a couple months later get the angry calls when they lost all their work.

You make it sound like the click of death was a bad thing.

 

[enine]

It was.
I lost track of how many calls from college students yelling at us, asking how we were going to recover their data, etc.

 

[VA7JHI]

One of my two drill batteries stopped working. I opened it up, and measured all five cells. One was very low compared to the others.

I pried the spot welds off and worked the battery out of the pack. (It was in the centre.) I worked a new cell into the pack, and spot-welded it to the old terminals.

I put the un-assembled pack onto my drill, and it worked!

I put the case together with the four original screws, and now it doesn't work. :-(

 

[Cable Guy]

I took a couple months off to remodel a house, well that's done now, I am glad, and I finished a uniden Madison for a friend, recap, replace clock with counter, add variable power and adjustable modulation. That turned out great, kinda sad to see it go...

Today I fixed a Stryker 655hp, 2 shorted finals, driver bias way too high, bad channel encoder too so I ordered a new one from Stryker and will get it out the door soon.

Got another 655hp here but it's the newer board, kinda short form factor, but a whole section of the tx output area is missing, just charred flakes of once mounted smd junk. That's going to sit until I come across another like it to study.

The more I say I don't work on Stryker radios, the more they flood in. Maybe I should say I won't be rich, see what happens?

My son bought a crybaby wah pedal, it just needed some cleaning and adjustment. My other son has a drum synth with a dead pad, but a new piezo pickup fixed it. That's all for now.

 

[VA7JHI]

I have a kilowatt power supply, Raytheon-Sorensen 40-25B. up to 40 volts at up to 25 amps, coarse and fine adjustable volts and current.

But it trips the ground-fault breaker my "tech trailer" is plugged into when I plug it in.

I stuck a DVM set to the highest resistance range across either side of the AC input to ground. It shows a typical capacitor behaviour of low impedance, going up to >200 megohms over several seconds. Hmmm… so it has caps to ground from the line… I either clip them, or find some other way of keeping the inrush current from tripping the GFI breaker.

When I moved the 60+ pound thing, I heard a rattle inside. That's a good enough reason to pop the covers!

On opening the covers, yup, some fairly big caps from line to ground. I could just clip them… but I won't.

I also found what looks like a #10 nut. Hmmm… where's the matching screw? Stuck on the main circuit board somewhere? I tapped various things, hoping to shake out the screw, but no luck.

So I buttoned it back up.

Rather than remove the line filter caps, I found a "surge suppression" box for a Ricoh laser printer in my junk box. Seemed like an appropriate "fix" for the ground fault. Opened it up, and removed the output ground and taped it up. Put it back together, put a sign on the bottom to remind me what I did to it, plugged the Raytheon in, then plugged in the surge box — and no GFI trip!

I suppose I've made it slightly more dangerous, in case the missing screw winds up shorting the line to the case… but at least I can actually use it now!

I know, not a very interesting "fix". But it made me feel good to be able to use this beast!