It's A Start....

My New Year's resolution other than the usual "get fit" is to be a lot more persistent with my repairs. I always learn a lot even when a repair takes days on something that isn't even worth the time. Since I'm now working outside in the well-insulated and well-heated Fragwell Lab, I have the room for all kinds of things

Last night, I repaired an NEC MT1050 projector I had had sitting around for over two years. First day of the year and first repair of the year.

While I'm still working on repairing a Planar 42" plasma monitor (which, when fixed, will be the biggest thing I've ever repaired) with a bad power supply board, there are other games afoot. Last night, one of the two-lead parts I replaced in my projector proved an interesting conundrum. While I have a very good (for ten minutes at a time due to a thermal defect) Hakko soldering iron I salvaged from the trash at work, it only heats one side of a component at a time. What to do?

Simple: Use the Tenma soldering iron I've had since 1997 on the other side of the component and get it out of there without trouble or pulled pads. That part worked, but not without difficulty.

Tenma gear is a lot better than anything Radio Shack could ever hope to cough up, but they're not Hakko (let alone OKI/Metcal, for that matter). About a year after I got the iron, the power supply fell off my desk for some reason and landed on the plug for the pencil. It's been flakey on temperature feedback ever since, causing the power supply to think the iron has heated up to full temp before it has even started to heat. I couldn't repair it before due to the obvious catch-22. Now, with the Hakko on-hand that's no longer the case.

I opened the case of the Tenma iron to see Chinese Class 1 work and goddam phenolic paper circuit boards. The connector for the pencil (pencil compared to a Radio Shack iron, hulking compared to the Hakko) was on its own goddamn phenolic paper circuit board so I pulled that and unsoldered the ground lead for inspection. Results: Broken traces for what can only be the thermal feedback, judging by the lack of charring from arcs that one would find if it were the heating coil circuit. So what to do?

When I was younger and just wanted something to work, I'd use my scratch and solder technique where I scratch the masking away from the trace and solder across the gap. These days, I know better. While I lack new masking material here at home, I'm not about to merely scratch and solder the failed board. I save clipped lead remains from through-hole components I replace during repairs for situations like this. Next to me, I have a 24AWG solid copper lead from a capacitor that I will use for this.

Since the construction isn't RoHS compliant in the least, I won't have to worry about tin whiskers growing from the exposed work, not that it would make a difference anyway on something like this.

Repair finished, it works again.

It's worth noting that I was impressed with how quickly the Tenma station reached working temperature compared to a Radio Shack iron. Turning both the Hakko and Tenma on at the same time, however, the Hakko is the clear winner by like a minute.

I think my next repair will involve cleaning the controls on my Philips 7851 receiver and retrofitting it with white LEDs for panel lighting. And while I have the cleaner out, I'll see what I can do about the old Hitachi oscilloscope I picked up at the DI for $5. The controls on that are so dirty it's unusable in current form. I don't have a probe, either, and don't think I'll ever manage to scavenge one so that will be a purchase, for sure.

I'll have to see what kind of repairs I can do today to fill my quota in advance. I was thinking one fixit project a day was a good goal, but I'd run out of things to fix. More likely, one a week is a good baseline with three a week being a very good goal. Bottom line: I don't want broken stuff hanging around here for two years like the projector I could have fixed long ago did.

An additional goal I have is to learn something new each month. Even things I've had limited exposure to are fair game for this. For example, I have an SGI Octane workstation I'd really like to use and have used before. I did an IRIX install on it back when it still had the EMXI display adapter in it, but the current install won't start up since MardiGras and Odyssey display adapters aren't plug and play to the OS. I need to reinstall to get it all working again and I found my IRIX disc set last night. I've used the step-by-step IRIX install instructions in the past, but what I'd really like is to be able to do it from memory.

In addition to the SGI Octane, I still have other SGI rigs and I have two IBM RS/6000 systems I'd really like to get running. Since I'm running into UNIX systems more often now and working on Linux systems in my career, more experience is a very good thing. And this blog is a good portfolio.

I resolve to start adding photos to my entries... as soon as I can get a stupid card reader.