Suzuki Intruder VS750 1988

I have still hung on to my view that buying things that are intact is a waste of money. I sneakily planted that thought into my brother Jannes head when he started to talk about buying a motorcycle. I didn’t see the point in paying more than 3000 euros for a bike when we could buy a defective one for half of that and put in some work to get the same bike. We had been talking about buying a Suzuki Intruder if one would come up for a reasonable price. While I was determining what those models were going for, I spotted one that was only half the price of the average. The reason for this was that it was running on just one cylinder. This was apparently caused by rust on the inside of the gas tank. As the rust flakes got to the fuel lines they clogged up one of the carburetors. 

We ended up buying the bike to repair together. Since I was broke at the time my contribution to the project was my time and knowledge. Also the fact that I already had all the tools needed, excluding a few model specific ones, meant that the overall budget would stay considerably smaller. 

We rented a trailer to bring the bike from Jyväskylä to Mäntyharju. The trailer came from Jyväskylä and it had to be brought back the same day so I got my fair share of gripping the steering wheel for one day. 

The next day we got to work. My brother placed an order for a tank repairing kit containing acid to remove the rust and some kind of teflon compound for coating the inside of the tank to prevent it form rusting again. We also remove the carburetors and gave them to a friend of ours having more knowledge on how to maintain them. While the carbs were being overhauled we concentrated on changing fuel filter.

As we waited for the ordered stuff to arrive we also swapped the air filters for new ones as the bike was already taken so far apart and we had access to them. 

Once all of the parts and accessories required were within our reach, Janne started working on the gas tank. We decided to leave that job to be done by just one of us since it required attention every couple of hours and there was no point for the both of us staying up all through the night. This process took about 24 hours and after that there was the agonizing wait for the compound to set.

During this wait Janne had to leave for Jyväskylä as his vacation came to an end. A few days later I came back to Mäntyharju to put the bike back together. This simple task that I wasn’t even performing for the first time took me more than 10 hours. The biggest challenge was attaching the new air filters to the carburetors because the cone shaped rubber barrels were reluctant to fit over the intakes. This fight alone took several hours.

I finally got the bike put together and synchronized the carburetors. The day had been long and I was tired so I decided not ride the bike to Mikkeli that night. I rested the next day and planned a tactical attack at the bike for the day after that.

The adjustment for idle was completely missing. There were two options: the engine running at full throttle or shutting down completely. This combined with difficulties to start the engine lead me to suspect that the fault was in the air-to-fuel-mixture. This needed to be adjusted just by the feel of it because there was no meter to check it with. I turned the adjusting screws half a turn at a time on both carbs and went for a test ride in between. After three or four tried I got it right and after that I double checked the sync. When everything was in order I went to enjoy my last couple of days with the bike before Janne took it to his tender care. 

The bike was mostly with Janne and I got to ride it when he came to our neighborhood until he moved out of the country and gave me full custody of the bike. I had it for a couple of years and it had its fair share of problems which finally culminated in the bike catching on fire and burning beyond my repairing abilities so it had to be sold to someone who had the time and resources to fix everything that was destroyed by the flames.

Marshall JCM800 4211 & JCM900 1960A

An offer you can’t refuse sounds like a clishé, but every now then they come along. I got one of those offers when I was asking my friends for broken guitar equipment. One of my friends mentioned that he had an old Marshall JCM900 4*12 cabinet lying around. The price was very budget friendly since there seemed to be some defect that caused the sound quality to suffer. In later conversations it came up that he also had a faulty JCM800 2*12 combo that had served as a cabinet and the amplifier was just dead weight since it was unfunctional.

I got my hands on the JCM900 cabinet first and I took it apart right away. As I got a peek inside I noticed that almost all the screws holding the speakers in place had come undone. At most the gap between the chassis of the speakers and the cabinet was about 1/8”. This meant two things; the backpressure inside the cabinet was escaping from the gap and the speaker chassis were moving around absorbing the energy that was supposed to move the speaker diaphragms. I predicted that this did not improve the over all sound quality. I tightened the screws and put the back plate of the cab back in place. 

Since I didn’t have an amplifier at my disposal, I returned the cabinet to its previous owner and took the combo with me to have a look at that. Later he said that te sound quality of the cabinet was improved dramatically by my operation.

I took the combo home and plugged it in and turned it on. I was almost thrown up on the wall when I switched the amp on. Not because of an electric shock, but because of sound pressure. The speakers started to hum extremely loudly. I tried plugging into another outlet, this time a grounded one, but the result was the same. At this point I got orders from higher up inside the family to not do that again in our apartment. I didn’t really mind this since I had to take amp apart anyways. After I got the amp opened I stood there for a while observing without finding anything out of the ordinary that would cause a fault detected earlier.

While putting everything back together I discovered that one of the power amp tubes was discolored and stood out from the rest. On closer inspection I noticed a small crack in the glass envelope of the tube.  Considering that this is supposed to be a vacuum tube I figured that this check might have something to do with the less than optimal performance of the amp, so I placed an order for a set of new tubes for both pre- and power amp sections.

Power amp tubes being biased

I took the amplifier with me to my work place for the tube replacement and biased the power amp for optimal balance between sound and durability of the tubes. After this the amp worked just as it was supposed to so I sold for a nice profit. Some time later the new owner called me to tell that the capacitors on the rectifier circuitry were faulty and demanded me to return half of the money he had paid. He wasn’t willing to show me any kind of proof of the fault or let me take look at the amp and have chance to repair it so I’m guessing he was trying to swindle me out of the money. Especially since he had told me that he hadn’t told his wife about being new expensive gear and predicted that it would cause some turmoil at home.

For this project I had to learn how to bias a tube amp, which proved to be quite a profitable skill later on. The guys at our local music store heard about my ability to bias amps and after that they directed all their customers searching for such a service to me.

Sony Bravia KDL-40U-2000

Sometimes things break in a way that it’s no longer reasonable to fix them. That’s what happened to the projector I repaired earlier. Constantly powering on and off the device and the change in temperature caused by it made the mirror rods’ gluing loosen until it collapsed. This caused the whole image projected look skewed and warped.  I tried to glue it back together but it proved to be futile since in needed to be perfectly aligned, which was impossible to achieve with the tools at  my disposal. The only solution to this problem would have been to order a new mirror rod from the other side of the globe, which would have been unreasonably expensive. It was time to start considering other cheaper options to view the video from my game consoles. The simplest solution seemed to be trying to find a broken flat screen television that had a functioning LCD-screen. I spent about six weeks searching until one day I went for a walk and wandered to a nearby recycling center. From there I found exactly what I had been looking for. This was the first device that I fixed that wasn’t given to me as a donation or I had found discarded in a waste disposal unit.

I bought the TV and dragged it home. After plugging the power cord into a socket I switched it on. I was a bit baffled when the TV turned on without a problem. This had to mean that somewhere inside the television there was a component that either over heated or lost its charge. My diagnosis proved to be right in just a couple of minutes as the TV powered off and began to blink one red LED-light in Morse code kind of way. At this point the story was running out of pages. The next couple of nights I spent surfing the internet and Googling while trying to deduce where the problem could lie in. Every once in a while I took my multimeter and tested spots where other people had found their TV:s to have problems. One of those spots was the current that the power board fed to the inverter for the backlight. From this point it was easier to move on. I found out that the issues on the power board were caused by a malfunction on the inverter. All the measurements I made after that pointed once again unsurprisingly to a bunch of faulty capacitors on both the power board and the inverter. With fairly small effort I found schematics of the television which helped me to determine which of the caps needed replacement. Finally I got everything done and the whole TV put back together. Plug in the power cord and power on, right? Well… No. I was disappointed and got a little mad. Sisu kicked in. Franticly clicking the power button hoping that maybe the 78th time would be the charm. It was. Or it could have been the 83rd time but never the less, it powered on. Being afraid that I just got lucky I didn’t celebrate yet. I left the TV on for a while and let it warm up before turning it off. Another try and another success. I tried this a couple more times and felt like I had reached some stability. Apparently the capacitors needed the current to rise gradually in small increments until they were at level they needed to be for proper functioning. A couple more on-off-cycles everything was running smoothly so I put the TV up for a testing period. When I initially was ready with writing the blog entry the TV had been in use for two days with no problems. All in all I spent €19,10 on the whole project of which €10 was the television itself.

This was where the story was supposed to end, but it wasn’t. After using the TV for a couple of weeks the faults started to reappear. Backlights wouldn’t light up and the red LED was blinking again. As the first measure I checked all the soldering joints I had soldered before but found nothing wrong with them. I spent a couple of days pondering the issues while staring deep into the PCB:s. I finally decided to remove the signal processing board for a check. On the underside of the board right next to a leg of a capacitor there was a small lump of solder which I assumed was a consequence of a cold solder. I re-soldered the joint and once again put the TV back together. This caused the TV to work even less than before.

A couple of weeks went by and I couldn’t come up with a solution to this issue. It was only after I brought the television to the place I interned at and testing it out with an external power supply that I got proof that the power unit of the TV was functioning as it was supposed to. I directed my attention once again to all the places I had tinkered with. My predictions were right. It wasn’t an actual defect but instead my own fault. While putting the TV back together I had accidentally pressed the pins of one connector  out of place and they were causing a small shortcut. After bending the pins back I tried powering the TV on again. It turned on so I put everything back together and started using the TV. I had the TV for a year or two until it broke beyond my repairing skills so I sold it my more skilled friend who insisted on paying more than I had spent on whole project. I learnt a lot by messing around with this project. The best part was when my interning supervisor saw me staring at the circuit boards for 20 minutes and the picking up a soldering iron to re-solder that cold soldered joint he asked me if they could hire me. It was only for a couple of months but this TV made me a small profit and got me a job. I was pretty happy with this outcome.

Topfield TF500PVRc

Sometimes  these fixes are so simple that when the device is back in working condition it’s almost annoying to realize that there’s nothing more to do than to put the device in use. This was one of those cases. The word of my hobby had started to spread and one day I received a message from a friend on Facebook about DVR that had taken a habit of losing all recordings from its hard drive. Once I got this top field TF500PVRc in my hands I started to look for a fault in hard drive itself since it seemed to the most logical place to start. I took the casing apart and removed the HDD for reformatting on a PC. Since the DVR was new to me and already broken I saw no point in trying to save any remainders of the pre-existing recordings. Before doing anything else I thought it would be easiest to let the DVR format its own hard drive. As a theory this was a brilliant one. Unfortunately that was all it ever amounted to; a theory. Each and every time I tried to format the drive it got stuck at 14%. After inspecting the hard drive a little more it became abundantly clear the hard drive had come to the end of its road. In my collection of spare parts I had a hard drive suitable for this device so I replaced the old one with it. The replacement was a little smaller in capacity but it was sufficient. When I proceeded to power the DVR on it asked me if I wanted it to format the hard drive. After the formatting I had myself a fully functioning DRV by pretty much no cost at all.

iMac G5

Our story starts once again at our school’s lab where these once so reliable workhorses are brought when they turn into impractically shaped paper weights to receive some usually futile CPR until they, stripped of all dignity, are turned over to EoLC. In this case it means that the equipment is taken apart to be recycled properly. This Apple iMac G5 was brought in because its operating system had gone MIA and along with it a students diploma work. After a couple of day examining the computer’s now pretty far faded soul I came to the conclusion that it was not reasonable to try to recover the file considering how much effort it would take and how probable succeeding would be. As a very helpful individual I offered to recycle the computer on my own at home and maybe salvage some spare parts for my own projects from it. 

For starters I checked if the hard drive was working correctly and tried to re-install the operating system and ran through some other ways to get the system to boot but none of the most common steps of troubleshooting helped.

Further investigation pointed again towards faulty capacitors as was the case with the video projector I had fixed prior to this computer. Only this time the caps were on the motherboard and there were about 30 of them instead of three or four. Every now and then the computer turned on and loaded BIOS without a problem and then froze completely. At some point the iMac ceased to boot even that far so I had to let the computer sit for a week. Once again I contacted my affiliate and asked for bag of new capacitors. The parts arrived in due time and installing them onto the motherboard proved to be a simple task. New set on problems started to arise after replacing all of the 30 caps. After the operation the computer wouldn’t boot at all. Since I had now tried all of the solutions I had found so far I directed my attention to the power supply. Some people had had problems with the caps on the power supply so I replaced them as well. Before that I had emptied some unknown part of the computer of its magic smoke that all electronic devices run on. They usually stop workin after said smoke escapes the circuitry. This obviously didn’t help my cause at all. 

I left the iMac in storage for some time to wait for new ideas and inspiration but after some time I had to throw it away because I needed the space for something else. 

InFocus LP600

This project got started when I was interning at our school’s computer lab. As I passed by a recycling bin for discarded electronics I spotted a video projector in there that seemed to be mostly intact. I asked my teacher and the schools’ tech support who worked in the lab why the projector had been thrown away and got the answer that it blows fuses. I then asked if I could take the projector home to take it apart and try to figure out how to fix it. I got the permission and brought the projector home with me. This was followed by three days that went well into the night of franticly searching for information and troubleshooting.

After making sure our apartment was equipped with circuit breakers I went on to see what happens when the projector is turned on. Nothing happened. At this point it became pretty obvious that the power board wasn’t in mint condition. Quite a few message boards told stories of  projectors that were successfully resuscitated by replacing a couple of old and tired capacitors with new ones. It was time to start doing instead of just thinking.

Opening and taking apart the projector was a routine screw-off-the-screws-and-rip-stuff-away-kind of operation. The power supply consisted of two printed circuit boars decked on top of each other. The faulty components were on one of these boards. This was a good design since it left me plenty of space to fool around with a soldering iron. The soldering itself and replacing the capacitors took me about 15 minutes. After putting everything back together it was time to see if I had achieved any results by doing all this work. To my surprise the projector turned on and started to project an image onto the wall. Who would have guessed? All in all I spent about 21 euros on the whole project of which 17€ was spent on an M1-DA-to-HDMI adaptor. For that amount of money I got myself a video projector and a little scar from burnin myself with the soldering iron.