Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
On 30 January 2012 10:54, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
People who repair things are a dying breed.
I fully agree. Totally off-topic, but anybody here know of a course
or books one could buy on basic electronic repairs. Thinking in lines
of PSU etc to start with. I've been long wanting to enter this as a
hobby project of mine, but I have no idea where to start. I am so
stick of buying new PSU or other power adapters, when there is
probably a good chance it could have be repaired in a few minutes
(only if I knew how).
I remember 8 years ago, my laptop charger had a worn wire. You had to
wiggle the wire before the laptop would charge. I search high and low
in the UK for somebody that could simply replace the cable. Nobody
wanted to touch it! Eventually I bought a soldering iron, cut out the
broken part of the wire and fixed it myself. It's ridiculous that
nobody wants to repair things any more.
My degrees are electronics, and in theory I'm trained to fix some /big/
mainframe switchmode PSUs, so with apologies to the list owner I'm
probably in a position where I have to comment on this for safety reasons.
My advice: don't.
The big things that I worked on had banks of transistors that were
packed with toxic powder (beryllium IIRC), when one failed the whole row
would unzip messily. A colleague took a new CRT out of its packing and
got a massive shock because it still contained charge from manufacture.
I've got any number of stories about people who've done something that
they thought was safe which has gone on to cause damage or injury.
Things like the output wire on low voltage PSUs are fair game for
repair. You can get spare concentric connectors from RS or Maplin in the
UK (Graeme- I thought you were abroad?), you can slit and superglue
"boots", fabricate insulators from metal-loaded epoxy (black stuff- it's
actually iron oxide) and RTV or potting compound, repair some (but not
all) plastic that degrades with age and so on.
But if you want to start getting into the electronics side of it, and in
particular if you want to work on sealed PSUs (I don't know the current
situation, but the law used to be that anything containing >50V had to
be unopenable by hand i.e. you /had/ to use screwdrivers etc.) then I'd
suggest looking around for something like a C&G-accredited electronic
technician course- which full-time would take years.
The chap I was talking to about my PSU repair is at
http://www.olympus-electronics.co.uk/ He quoted a nominal £45 but that
obviously doesn't include carriage etc.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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