Things you've fixed, that others may just have binned

[AndyC_772]

Many years ago I was given a Rexel "Staple Wizard". This brightly coloured toy, clearly designed to entice small children to stick their fingers into the mechanism and thereby learn an important life lesson, has been surprisingly useful over the years and has seen a fair amount of use.

It's been fixed before; plastic parts have cracked and failed, and I've replaced them with similar components fabricated from whatever I happened to have lying around at the time. Now I have a 3D printer, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to keep it going forever - so I wasn't too bothered when my wife mentioned it had stopped working.

I tried it with a sheet of scrap paper, and it dutifully whirred into life and ejected a staple, albeit without much enthusiasm.

Rule 1: check power supplies, and sure enough, a couple of its batteries (dated 2012!) had started to leak. No problem, just take them out, clean up the contacts and replace. Totally routine maintenance, 5 minutes' work at most.

New batteries fitted, insert another sheet of scrap paper, and:

chomp  chomp  chomp  chomp  chomp  chomp  chomp  chomp  chomp  chomp  chomp  chomp  chomp  chomp  ...

It put 3 staples in the paper before I was able to pull it out, then proceeded to chew its way through the entire stack, depositing them one at a time on my desk. By the time I could get a battery out, it had eaten the lot.

Turned out to be a failed capacitor, easily spotted under close inspection as it was leaking electrolyte. Desolder, swap, reassemble and test, and now it's back to its usual self. Should be good for a few more years now at least.

A brand new one is £18 but I've grown quite attached to this one, with its variety of hand fabricated parts keeping it running. I do enjoy repairs, when they're not made unnecessarily difficult, and this device is dead easy to open up and dismantle.

What have you enjoyed fixing, that could easily have gone in the bin but for a little TLC?

[PaulAm]

Most of my lab 

[coppercone2]

the 3310b i don't think anyone would have fixed that after seeing it roll 450 feet

also everything else given what ive seen at work, people are pretty lazy.

I do think that my work on old lead acid batteries is the most 'sick'.. thats kinda a strange fascination to revive those things, but it is kind of popular at least.. but damn those things are not fresh

I am also thinkin about that oil filled capacitor in the lamdba 71 thread, replacing it with a hand full of jellybeans works but damn I want to figure out how to open those cans in some kinda chemical containment hood and wash em and restore em with modern safe things.. maybe the power companies have setups like that (I like how that part looks, tapped capacitors are cool). I am not encouraging doing it unless you work in some kind of a PCB processor but its like tempting to think about

I see those capacitors are popular for audio, I wonder why.. on ebay some old ass ones are marketed as audio.

[shakalnokturn]

I used to repair for a modest living.
Now I'm retired unemployed most of my repairs are second hand test equipment or various things that have been binned before I took ownership of them.
I used to like the idea that I was at least trying to save the planet by repairing electronic equipment and selling it cheap for someone who couldn't afford more anyway. Now I realise that there's just so much waste and nobody cares about it, the world is cluttered with non recyclable electronic junk and there's no room for dreamers.

[retiredfeline]

My most valuable find from an e-waste bin was an Asus Chromebox containing an i7 CPU. I suspect it was discarded because ChromeOS support was ending soon. It's now my desktop machine.

[Circlotron]

Almost every car I've ever owned.

[BrokenYugo]

Most impressive was probably changing a little SMD SOT-223 voltage regulator out on a LCD tv main board.

What makes it impressive is at the time all I had for soldering equipment was a radio shack 30W unregulated iron, a roll of large diameter electronics solder, and a spring loaded solder sucker. I somehow didn't even damage the board.

I also kept a 1988 Yugo GV halfway on the road for a couple summers.

[edpalmer42]

Most of my lab 

 

Mine too!

[TimFox]

My first such repair was an -hp 410A vacuum-tube voltmeter.  See https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/wa_pages/wall_a_page_02.htm  about 2/3 of the way down.
Surprisingly, the tubes were still working, but I replaced the 5Y3, the 6SN7, and the 6AG7s anyway.  Otherwise, I replaced the paper capacitor across the AC line and seriously cleaned the rotary switches.  The Eimac 2-01C UHF diode  in the AC probe needed cleaning of silver-plated surfaces, but did not need replacement.  I did manage to score a spare, in case it is required.  My only problem was the plastic (polystyrene) nose piece on the AC probe which had cracked, and was not happy with being glued together.  However, removing that piece allowed the rest of the probe to be fitted into the N-connector housing from the next series.  This unit was literally in the Dumpster at my university.  It features an input resistance on DC of 110 megohm (compared with the 11 megohm typical of VTVMs), with 10 megohms in the DC probe (which I also replaced).
Amusingly, I was on a cruise with other mature persons and met a retired -hp- engineer at dinner.  I mentioned this repair, and he told me that he had written the manual for the next unit, the 410B.

[lowimpedance]

Almost every car I've ever owned.

Is your avatar a before or after shot of your current vehicle ?! 

[rsjsouza]

I have gotten for free and repaired quite a few A/V receivers from late 1990s/early 2000s... Many computers, lab equipment and small appliances that were hand me downs from others. You can keep a lot of things out of the landfill this way, but the SWMBO tends to limit the amount of junk that one can accumulate,

[Circlotron]

Almost every car I've ever owned.

Is your avatar a before or after shot of your current vehicle ?! 

It's a metaphor for my usual state of mind. 

[Renate]

Not anything electronic, but I've spent a lot of cumulative hours on my desk chair!
It's one of those crappy $20 pneumatic desk chairs.

First, I did a merge with the previous chair, because the back cushion was better.
And since these cheap-o chairs are designed for (short) grade school students I had to stick a few lengths of 2" x 4" boards under the seat support.
One of the wheels broke. I couldn't find an exact replacement so I bought something, cut the shaft, laboriously cut a slot for the retaining clip.
After a few years it started to sink with lost pressure. The piston is 28 mm, a PVC drain pipe is 1.25" (OD). I cut a length and slipped it over the piston. Rock solid.

[Smith]

Most of my electronics tools. Most tools where thrown out because of a defect, or because they where beyond economical repair (mostly due to hours). Most other tools where bought broken. Except for a just a few.

Most of my audio was saved from the trash too, my amplifiers, CD players, surround receivers, record players. Not just junk stuff, but some really high end stuff too.  Except for speakers. But I did buy most cheap and repaired / upgraded them.

About half of our PC's and laptops too.

Even my chairs. I have 3 really nice chairs for my electronics & computer corner. Sometimes they get thrown out, because something has broke, or they are not ergonomic enough. I sometimes made 1 out of 2 or 3 broken chairs. Now I have really expensive ESD save chairs for free. As I think of it, I even saved my huge working table from the scrap.

Repairing stuff is nice, because you get stuff you would normally may not be able to buy. But at the other side, you don't always get new modern stuff.

[CatalinaWOW]

The most worthless? things I have fixed are actually becoming valuable as they become collectors items.  A few electronics things in this category.  An Allied Electronics ham receiver.  Failed and botched Heathkits.  Early transistor handhelds.  But the ones that are really old and useless are things like saw tooth setters, braces, planes and other tools.   The saw tooth setters are the king of this hill as they went out of favor about 75 years ago when hand saws became cheap enough to make sharpening uneconomic, and now hand saws have also mostly gone the way of the dodo. 

[crerus75]

Here's one that I thought was clever for a last-ditch effort.  My old electric dryer had oilite bushings in the drum motor.  One end of the motor drove the fan, the other had a pulley on it for the belt that turned the drum.  The belt has a spring-loaded tensioner to keep it taut, and after a zillion years of heavy use, the tension caused the motor shaft to start eating into the bushing.  As the dryer ran, things would heat up, the rotor would bind and the motor would eventually trip on overcurrent. 

I took the motor out, flipped it around 180 degrees so that the shaft was tensioned against an unworn section of the bushing, relubricated everything, and slapped it all back together.  Ended up buying a new dryer, but the motor hack bought me enough time to have it delivered and installed at a convenient time, instead of as a last-minute emergency. 

[tautech]

Always fixing stuff rather than biffing it away.
Recent smart charger repair:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/repco-ns-12v16a-charger-repair-log/

[coppercone2]

Here's one that I thought was clever for a last-ditch effort.  My old electric dryer had oilite bushings in the drum motor.  One end of the motor drove the fan, the other had a pulley on it for the belt that turned the drum.  The belt has a spring-loaded tensioner to keep it taut, and after a zillion years of heavy use, the tension caused the motor shaft to start eating into the bushing.  As the dryer ran, things would heat up, the rotor would bind and the motor would eventually trip on overcurrent. 

I took the motor out, flipped it around 180 degrees so that the shaft was tensioned against an unworn section of the bushing, relubricated everything, and slapped it all back together.  Ended up buying a new dryer, but the motor hack bought me enough time to have it delivered and installed at a convenient time, instead of as a last-minute emergency.

Careful, I fixed a old GE dryer motor like this that was laying around, just not to have junk laying around.. the mechanism that ended up breaking was the centerfugal switch. I have no idea why but one day after 3 seconds it just basically exploded into smoke. I thought maybe the crappy bushing job I did was not good enough, so I never do these 'indian youtube style' anymore. If you wanna fix it you need to bore it out and put a new bushing in

Someone was using it as a grinding wheel power motor for many years before that, so maybe it did not help. You need a lathe to do this kind of repair unfortunately it looks like so its reliable. It was one of those jobs where I got it looking good cosmetically and it was starting and running cool but just one day out of the blue when I was playing with it, it decided to go off. I think maybe the friction was just bearly acceptable for a while and when the shaft got into some particular position the starting characteristics were off enough to cause a hard failure. Impressive amount of smoke in a small amount of time, i got scared lol.

I stopped having 'old motor restoration OCD' after that.

But it was REALLY chowdered. Maybe my mechanical ability is just too low.. but those bushings cannot be restored to well.

[megajocke]

The main fan in my HP ProLiant (gen 7) MicroServer N36L started squeaking.

Apparently the BIOS is very picky about the tacho pulse frequency so replacing it with something else would have come with lots of limitations. If it detects the frequency is too low, the computer will shut down.

I ended up transplanting ball bearings from a fan found in a trash-picked high voltage power supply that had failed because of arc-over in the RTV potted high voltage section. The old fan in the server still runs fine with its "new" bearings...