Show us your ugly repair

[bitseeker]

This thread is fun.

Yeah. Fun, scary, and amazing, all at the same time.

[wagon]

I need to take photos of some of the stuff I resurrect.  It is a great thread!

[SeanB]

Not my work, but this was in a monochrome monitor I scrapped last week at work. Got tired of it sitting on the shelf, and it was working ( and had a lovely series of screen burns on the CRT as well) when I last powered it up. Of course I can no longer display anything on it, as I do not have a computer any more with a MDA or Hercules card that is working.

[bitseeker]

Nice jumble-o-caps.

[joeqsmith]

Needed the low ESR.

[bitseeker]

Ah, of course. I shoulda thought of that.

[netman]

Strange footprint relay I couldn't find a replacement for.

[bitseeker]

Hopefully, it doesn't fall asleep like that.

[vk6zgo]

Strange footprint relay I couldn't find a replacement for.

"A relay is a relay,is a relay"-----with apologies to Gertrude Stein.

Form,fit & function---& the foremost importance is function.

Out in the real world,things have to be fixed "yesterday",& the niceties of waiting three months for a company somewhere on another continent to fill a seatainer so you can get the correct relay don't hack it.

The Boss tells you:
"Fix the bloody thing & move on!"

[TerraHertz]

This wasn't an electronics repair, but it was ugly. In the sense of digging pits in mud and dense tree roots, in a hurry since the house had no water until it was done.
Tree roots broke the copper water pipe underground in our front yard, with the first visible surface water about a week ago, but we didn't know till Wednesday since the water went straight into our neighbor's yard, and they thought it was just from the recent rains.
So Thursday was an all day dig, then plumbing in the dark in the evening, then Friday (today) filling it all back in and cleaning up. I'm knackered.

Pics should be self explanatory.
Lesson of the day: It's MUCH harder to dig through palm tree roots, than eucalyptus roots.

[SeanB]

Nice brazing Guy, putting in some soft copper instead of the hard tubing, though I would have put a PVC pipe over them to keep the roots away so they do not crack the pipe further.

Does Australia have water loss insurance for burst piping, or is the water cost so low that you only notice on the next bill the use is high.

Anyway this was a little test I did this week, to see if this solid block of rust would turn into a micrometer again after spending time in salt air. A little current in a plastic pot filled with acetic acid ( only thing to hand, was not going to use anything toxic like NaOH which was the other thing to hand) and a scrap graphite vane as anode.

Still have a few left over, expensive things those vanes, especially if the couriers drop the pump.

[T3sl4co1l]

Baking soda would be safer than vinegar, but NaOH would be safer as well (just be careful using it ).

Salt would be bad, as that would make chlorine.

Tim

[TerraHertz]

Nice brazing Guy, putting in some soft copper instead of the hard tubing,

Ha, thanks for saying it, but my silver soldering is crap. Some people seem to be able to end up with the joint nice and shiny, but I don't know how. Feathered reducing oxy-acet flame, trying not to overheat, but while ensuring the silver solder is definitely wicked all the way into the joint I always get a black-looking result. Never mind, it works.

The pipe is all hard copper. I happened to have a piece that was just a few inches longer than needed, so the repair was zero cost. Bends are done by heating the desired bend section to red heat to soften it, let it cool, then use an outside spring pipe bender. Easy. The joints are done by heating the end of one piece to red heat to soften the copper, then hammering in a pipe expander tool.  Then the end of the other pipe is marked with a felt pen at the required join depth, so you can be sure it really has slid in far enough before silver-soldering. Coat both surfaces with flux, push the joint together, silver-solder. Check the joint underside with a mirror. And then don't drink the tap water for a couple of days till all the fluorine-based flux has definitely dissolved and flushed out.

though I would have put a PVC pipe over them to keep the roots away so they do not crack the pipe further.

Well, I put all that pipework in the ground back around 1999. Then after the new house was built, around 2003 some eucalypt seedlings popped up in the back yard. Thinking they would be small varieties like most of the other trees around, I transferred them to the front yard, which I was landscaping around that time. Surprise surprise, they turned out to be very fast-growing enormous trees. The pipe broke directly under one of them. Now they have established major root systems I think the new pipe route is safe. I like the trees a lot, so don't mind this extra work.

Does Australia have water loss insurance for burst piping, or is the water cost so low that you only notice on the next bill the use is high.

I'm informed by a plumber that if given photos of the leak, the water board will adjust the bill to be normal. Fingers crossed that this is true. Hence took a lot of photos.

Anyway this was a little test I did this week, to see if this solid block of rust would turn into a micrometer again after spending time in salt air. A little current in a plastic pot filled with acetic acid ( only thing to hand, was not going to use anything toxic like NaOH which was the other thing to hand) and a scrap graphite vane as anode.

Still have a few left over, expensive things those vanes, especially if the couriers drop the pump.

So who left it in salt air? Not you? And did your restoration work?
Just for amusement, a pic below of other potential carbon electrodes. Some WW2 vintage anti-aircraft searchlight carbon rods (I have a lot of these), and also large motor carbon brushes. (Also have a big box full. Some are pure carbon, others are a carbon-copper mix.)

[Cubdriver]

I'll bet that bit of tubing is well annealed right now!  That does not look like it was a fun project.  My fingers are crossed that it's good for at least another 17 years.

-Pat

[ovnr]

So I needed a PCIe x1 video card. And I wasn't willing to pay a premium for one - or wait for shipping, for that matter.


Some dremelling later - and discovering that I cut a couple somewhat important traces - and voila! Like a bought one.

[bitseeker]

Woah, OK, that's the first time I've seen someone actually do that.

This is such a great, quirky thread.

[SeanB]

I'm informed by a plumber that if given photos of the leak, the water board will adjust the bill to be normal. Fingers crossed that this is true. Hence took a lot of photos.

Anyway this was a little test I did this week, to see if this solid block of rust would turn into a micrometer again after spending time in salt air. A little current in a plastic pot filled with acetic acid ( only thing to hand, was not going to use anything toxic like NaOH which was the other thing to hand) and a scrap graphite vane as anode.

Still have a few left over, expensive things those vanes, especially if the couriers drop the pump.

So who left it in salt air? Not you? And did your restoration work?
Just for amusement, a pic below of other potential carbon electrodes. Some WW2 vintage anti-aircraft searchlight carbon rods (I have a lot of these), and also large motor carbon brushes. (Also have a big box full. Some are pure carbon, others are a carbon-copper mix.)

Got it in a pile in a box a while ago, just was trying to see if I could free it, soaked in thinners for a while then decided to try vinegar then the carbon and a spare 12V SLA battery. Put a lot of oil on it Friday and worked it in the screw threads, and tried to get the zero to be closer, but always ended up with the 0.03mm offset, so will live with it. does agree though with the feeler gauges on test side though, so I will just leave it as an offset.

[Kilrah]

The thing is one big bodge.

Wow that one's particularly crazy! Love the IC in the wrong SO package width

[Rerouter]

So I needed a PCIe x1 video card. And I wasn't willing to pay a premium for one - or wait for shipping, for that matter.

Why didn't you cut out the back of the pcie socket instead?

[ovnr]

Why didn't you cut out the back of the pcie socket instead?

That'd involve potentially fucking up the motherboard instead, which had more value to me than the video card. Also it felt risky as you would be cutting right next to the spring contacts.

But most importantly: See the capacitor below the heatsink, to the left of the blue Gigabyte logo? That's directly in line with the slot, and the card would hit it. I actually did two cuts - the slot to make it fit into the connector, and also a bit over half the total edge connector. So first from x16 to x6 or so, then a slot to make it fit into the x1 slot. It's fairly visible - notice the lack of PCB underneath the AC coupling caps on the video card, under the mobo heatsink.

[Kilrah]

Ah. The photo doesn't really make it apparent that you did another cut further back, thought it was only the slot.

[razberik]

My girlfriend broke some plastic part on her Marshall headphones. Remain was lost.
Took me about 3 hours to fabricate the part of aluminium sheet. It doesn't fit well anyway and it is ugly, but it works.

[vze1lryy]

Here's pic one...

[vze1lryy]

Here's pic 2 & 3

A power line was shorted to ground inside the board. Everything on that line had to go on a wire outside the board, every component on that line had to be re-routed or moved to something else... the inrush FET can be seen stuck to the fan. 

This still works 11 months later. It was one of my most fun repairs to do, it took about 40 minutes and the guy was watching the entire time. I wouldn't do it again, but it is cool to do it just to see if it can be done, so I can cross it off the bucket list.

[Kilrah]

Wow