repairing things

My recent fixing achievement was to patch a skylight leak using that smelly sticks-even-on-wet-sutfaces caulk and some foam tube. It held through yesterday's historic rains. I'll get a roofer out in the spring when the Bay Area dry season starts and get it fixed for real.

FAIL!

pvr broke. it would start up but wouldn't find the disk. so i pulled out and put it in a caddy and, well, there was smoke. bought replacement disk, found one on sale, 6x larger than the original. put it in tonight, turned it on. nothing. no lights, no fan.

next time maybe i won't leave it over a year...

BUT THEN...

turned it on and left it on and the front panel lit up. switched TV over to correct input. strains of bbc one, but no picture. scratching sound coming from device. screen flashed green. burning smell. visible smoke (from the aerial out?). 8(

looks like i have a new external drive at least.

that smell really lingers

I had a wall bracket to fix up for a television in the bedroom. My 24v battery hammer drill is superficially in good condition but the batteries have degraded so badly because I've barely used it in 10 years.

It will charge up enough to drill 1-2 holes at most before sputtering to a slowing level of uselessness. I didn't think it had enough life left to do it so I ordered a basic cheap plug in 230 drill for £50 that I can't really afford.

Then I thought maybe by charging and fully discharging the batteries repeatedly by taping the drill trigger might spark a bit more life into the batteries and after doing this for hours it started to charge up enough to drill 4 holes which is almost like overkill for a bracket that is probably slightly heavier than the smallish tv it's holding up. If I'd kept the faith that you can make old knackered stuff work through dogged persistence sometimes, then I wouldn't have wasted £50, damn it.

Can you return the mains powered drill? If it’s undamaged it’s probably worth trying? I’m not sure about consumer law in the UK but “change of mind” within a day or two seems reasonable.

yeah probably could, lol it doesn't arrive until tomorrow. But then again it will probably be worth holding onto so next time much less fucking about. So probably not a waste of money, more like a purchase I probably won't need for a few years.

I cleaned the front of my telly with a bit of spray and a duster and just noticed a few flickering lines running vertically up the screen. I barely made any contact with it at all! I've fucked it, haven't I?

maybe check to see if any cables are a bit loose

Don't let moisture or dampness get into a flat screen or you will regret it.any more liquid is even worse

Did finally manage to get the stereo out and clean the laser on it . But still not playing a few things properly.
Tried Marquee Moon on it again and got a load of fuzz still after first couple of tracks sounded pretty thin.
Soft Machine Third still iffy as to whether it will play through or just hit a random point and stop go to still where yo see the full disc tinming etc.
& the Lee Perry thing i bought a couple of weeks back still doing the same.

I guess the thing is getting pretty old. I bought it in 2005. But still would be good to get a few more years out of it.

a thing I've never thought about, until it broke, is the light in a fridge. it broke the other day whilst i was defrosting (i think it got dripped on because the glass is cracked)

anyway, odd though it looked, stumpy little thing, replacements are available in supermarkets for £2. led as well, 1.8W. hilariously it gives the kwh used on the side of the box, for something that's on about 30 seconds a day.

(light bulb and battery technology has really come on in my lifetime. i remember lugging around old bike lights that took two A cells)

also fixed the toilet inlet, again, so the tank fills up. just needs loosening up every 6 months or so because of the likely build up. i realise that there will come a time when this will not work.

I recently changed to LED fridge lights not for the trivial energy savings but rather to be able to use 5000°K daylight bulbs, which give off natural sunlight-like illumination rather than the overly warm candlelight look from incandescent lamps. Hard to describe, but easy to see the difference - colours really jump out at you.

The A/C in our car has been acting weird for a few years, with the fan sometimes blowing hard but no actual cold air coming out. This would happen intermittently for long stretches and then stop happening, with no rhyme or reason to it. Recently the A/C finally seemed to go out for good. There are any number of things it could have been. The ambient air sensor (which is a PIA to reach, involving removing the front bumper), a hidden fuse (literally, you have to take some things apart to find it), the compressor (expensive). There's also just a good old fashioned leak, discovery of which would entail draining, refilling with dye, and then waiting. But doing some research I found that it could also be something called an EVAP Sensor, the temperature sensor in the car air conditioning system. That part costs $25, and in our case is located in the driver's side foot well, right by the gas pedal, relatively easy to access. I didn't change it myself, but the $25 OEM part I ordered online fixed the problem. Very satisfying, not least because cars are becoming harder and harder to work on without the right proprietary tech/tools.

It is such a relief when you tick off the possible causes of a problem, and the easiest solution is the one that offers the fix.

For example, there's a known problem with Mercedes where the car won't start if the brake lamp is out. Going from "whatthefuck,how am I going to afford this" to smiling real big and going "are you fucking kidding me?" can be quite the ride.

My biggest auto-related AYFKM moment was finding out that one of the most common reasons for the useless "Check Engine" alert to activate was because of a worn out gas cap seal.

https://www.404media.co/apple-endorses-california-right-to-repair-bill/

"Apple told a California legislator that it is formally supporting a right to repair bill in California, a landmark move that suggests big tech manufacturers understand they have lost the battle to monopolize repair, and need to allow consumers and independent repair shops to fix their own electronics."

nice

bring back radioshack

one of the most common reasons for the useless "Check Engine" alert to activate was because of a worn out gas cap seal.

which can lead to your car failing a smog/emissions test ... so not 100% useless ime

Had a microwave poop out on us the other day, which I diagnosed as the door switch (the fuse-like thing inside that makes sure the door connection is sealed before it puts out heat). Wasn't something I was comfortable fixing myself, but it didn't matter, since, at 10, they no longer make out model or parts for it. We had a guy out who apologized for being unable to do anything with it, so I had to get a new one, though I was able to reinstall the trim (it's an under the counter model).

Weirdly, at the same time our top loading washing machine broke, or specifically, the hubcap-looking wheel/agitator came loose, which thankfully just means swapping out for a new one. Pretty straight forward.

Shit like that *always* happens at the same time. Rule of threes and all that.

Our overflow pipe has been pissing out water for the last couple of weeks - the one from the water tank in the loft that comes out under the eaves of the roof. I've worked out how to turn the water off in the street, so I did that, then got up in the loft, removed the ball valve and bent the metal shaft down slightly, hoping that means the tank will fill slightly lower and not reach the overflow.

It's currently the hottest September on record in the UK and fuck ME was it hot up there. I was running with so much sweat I couldn't see and when I came down I smelt like a swamp. It's not dripping right now, so fingers crossed...

when I was doing an electrical apprenticeship I sweated out in so many dusty lofts. The worst one was the housing office in Bradford during a heatwave. All the dust sticks to you. I constantly felt like passing out, knowing that if I did there was only a thin piece of plasterboard between the widely spaced ceiling joists protecting me from a 50 ft plummett to certain injury or death!

Nothing like an existential threat to keep you conscious!

toilet leak, the seal where the pipe from the cistern enters the bowl has worked use over the years and now it trickles along the outside of the bowl when i flush. but a) it's clean water and b) it's only during the flush, so like an eggcup-full.

landlord's plumber has been around and because it's boxed in and access is difficult he's proposed replacing the entire thing, cistern, bowl, etc. and the *unrelated* vanity unit when it's really only one seal that needs attention.

he's also the gas check man and had already talked about replacing the cooked (doesn't meet current regs) and the boiler (inefficient).

ironically, the one non-working thing in the flat is the washing machine, none of the above is fatally broken. so all basically off-topic, sorry.

which can lead to your car failing a smog/emissions test ... so not 100% useless ime

― sarahell, Saturday, September 9, 2023 2:48 PM (two days ago)

that's cause you live in commiefornia

this is essentially what happened to me a few years ago and i wound up paying something like £800 for the parts and labour, it was totally insane. i feel that i got completely swizzed. but if your landlord's paying for it...

xpost

i can't help but feel that these several thousand pounds worth of changes (most of which don't really need doing) will affect my rent sooner or later.

(next door's rent was put up 17% after she complained that the water pouring through her ceiling was making the pace uninhabitable. 6 months later the flat is for sale and she has to find somewhere new)

got a new washing machine and half way through its first wash cycle was getting the error code for water issues and was furiously convinced I'd been sold a dud. Couldn't find any kinks in the hose or waste pipe, and even heard the water rushing into the tank when I turned the it on. I spent a fruitless hour fucking about with the machine and then the same booking a hotpoint engineer. Then I checked again because you get charged £70 if the engineer finds out the fault is your own dumbass doing. After further investigation I discovered when the machine was out of the bay the hose was ok and then was being stressed back into a water blocking kink out of my sight when it was pushed back towards the wall...duh. So now I realise in future: don't turn the water on until you've pushed the machine back towards the wall in the bay because at least then it won't even start a wash cycle if this irksome shit happens and you'll know what the problem is straight away.

the plumber took the cupboard door off its hinges to give himself better access. (he then left it outdoors for 3 weeks until i brought it in, but hey). four and a half months later(!) he has finished in the cupboard but the door is still unattached. the screws, god knows where those are.

i went and had a look for new screws yesterday. i need exactly 9, they sell them in packets of 250.

There's an old-school hardware down the street that sells screws and bolts individually, for 8¢ or 12¢.

And each time I go in, this old man follows me back there and watches me like a hawk as I pick them out from the giant drawers.

What's the worst that's going to happen? I grab a handful and make out like a bandit with $1.56 worth of stock?

I think taking them out and putting them back but mixing them up would be worse!

local hardware place sells screws individually and because they were visibly different i got enough to replace the hinges on all 3 doors, not just the one that's currently unhinged. so, 27 (actually 30) rather than 9. £2. which is a bargain until you consider they were only £3.50 for 250 screws which makes this v expensive on a per-screw basis.

(42p for 30 at box prices so i paid almost 5x)

door now attached. hadn't figured on having to jack the door up a bit to get it to reach the hinges but it was nothing a few bits of cardboard couldn't cure. had forgotten how cock-eyed the door used to hang anyway because, like every single thing in this flat, it was done on the cheap.

(another example of this is the line of blue tiles in amongst the 5 lines of white tiles in the bathroom, one colour metric, the other imperial so the joins don't line up)

(another example being the bedroom door, which is an old front door, compete with yale lock)

What's the worst that's going to happen? I grab a handful and make out like a bandit with $1.56 worth of stock?

have been working on my pops kitchen sink/dishwasher situation lately, and patronizing his local home depot

and it is fascinating, the usual sales associates wandering around, but also there are no checkout lanes, only individual self checkout stations however each station has a cashier, just kind of standing there to scan your things

could be a geographical anomaly but I suspect theft is such an issue that we don't deserve hardware stores anymore

As per the commentary on the 'continuing with CDs' thread, my kid got given a CD player. It had a 3-pin connector plug on it, so I figured I'd just cut that off and put on a regular UK plug. But there's no earth wire in there - just the blue and brown ones. I've wired the thing up, just to see if the CD player works as much as anything but am I going to a) give someone an electric shock or ii) burn the house down?

I've done some basic Googling and not *all* devices require the earth wire apparently - saw things like electric drills and vacuum cleaners mentioned.

If it is expecting a 120vac 60 Hz power input and you hit it with 230vac then option ii is a possibility. But if it expects UK power and not weedy US power, then no.

Option a can happen with an ungrounded device and also don't touch any capacitors if you are poking around inside the guts.

there's a bunch of interesting details in the link from the other CD thread where this came up

https://www.hifiwigwam.com/threads/what-sort-of-plug-is-this.122336/

It's probably not modern compliant, but it is to British Standard. The design means the earth pin connects before the others. The non-compliant bit is that the sockets aren't shuttered. IIRC, the socket is part shrouded, so the pins are covered when they're live and not fully inserted, so safe enough.

Thanks Jaq and sleeve (and NickB elsewhere). This place continues to be the sanest place on the web.

Interesting! Thanks for that link sleeve, have never seen one of those.

This is good:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/4/24090828/oregon-right-to-repair-sb-1596-parts-pairing

too bad for the owners of 2013 Audis, which apparently are exceptionally stupidly designed with proprietary parts and manuals.

cars are an entire thing, though

I recently repaired a sewing machine on behalf of a community repair café where I hope it will be used to repair many clothes and homeware items. I was lucky to find on ebay a random lot of parts that happened to contain exactly the small part I needed. It runs beautifully.

wow. yes!!!

That's so cool! Bravo!

Also cool to find out repair cafés are a thing. https://www.repaircafe.org/en/cafe/long-beach-repair-cafe-ca/ There's one close that reopened yesterday after 3 years.

~Hope to repair to the repair cafe soon~.