Category: Repair
Helping other people fix stuff at the Repair Café or Fixit Clinic
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This Repair Café took place at the Saratoga Library. There seemed to be a lot of people. The first item I received was a CD player/radio/speaker that wasn’t playing well. The CD player played very slowly and indistinctly, while the radio played only static. Listening to both through the headphone output produced the same effects. Suspecting that a loose belt might be at fault for the CD player (although the CD seemed to be spinning up alright), I decided to take it apart. However, all the wires and cables impeded removal of the circuit boards, which was required to get…
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This Repair Café occurred at the Central Park Library in Santa Clara. The first thing I worked on was a boom box from the 2000’s where the cassette player was playing very slowly and softly. As suspected, the belts inside were very loose, causing the capstans to turn slower than normal. There were no replacement belts available, and we couldn’t find an o-ring that fit either. The owner declined to purchase replacement belts online. At any rate, we found that replacing the belts would have meant a considerably involved disassembly, so the owner decided to abandon the tape deck and…
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This was a fairly quiet event held at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. library at SJSU. I spent most of the time working on a Thinkpad W530 laptop that another fixer had salvaged from his neighbor’s garbage, wanting to save it from the landfill. He didn’t know how it failed. After running many, many tests on the laptop, we gained the following information: Installing/removing the hard drive, CD drive, and CMOS battery did not affect operation. With the RAM and battery installed and the laptop plugged in, the laptop would run a POST (power-on self test), show the Thinkpad…
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This Repair Café occurred at the Mountain View Senior Center from 11:00 to 3:00. The first item was a Presto heat dish that wouldn’t turn on; the bimetallic thermostat was completely destroyed. Unfortunately, an exact replacement was not to be found in the Repair Café’s store of spare supplies, so I took a thermostat with a slightly different mounting bracket and bent the legs outward slightly until it would fit. the mangled thermostat I also had a look at an air fryer whose pot-detecting circuitry wasn’t working. After confirming that the pot switch (that button at the bottom of the…
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This repair was not completed at a Repair Café or Fixit Clinic, but it was kind of interesting so I’m writing a post about it. Machining often involves arithmetic on very precise numbers. This is very tedious, so having a small calculator is very helpful. Being of a helpful nature, my school’s machine-shop has a few calculators, but nearly all of them are broken for some reason or another. This post is about fixing one of them. The calculator in question is a Casio FX-115S. It is a scientific calculator powered by either a solar panel or a button-cell battery.…
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This event took place at the San Mateo Library. I mainly spent the 3 hours working on a broken IBM Selectric typewriter; I’ve had some experience restoring manual typewriters. The owner had taken it to a repair shop because the keys were a bit sticky, and it had come back broken. It appears the repairman had put a lot of oil and grease in the typewriter, which had gummed some things up. Wikipedia has a detailed description of the Selectric’s mechanism here, though it’s rather meaningless unless you have it in front of you to look at. So …
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This Fixit Clinic occurred at the Maker Nexus in Sunnyvale. The first item was a Saeco Vienna Plus espresso machine. It automated the entire brewing process, including grinding and measuring the coffee, dispensing it into the “brew group” (the removable assembly where the actual brewing takes place), tamping it down, forcing water through the grounds, and ejecting the puck. Essentially, it worked as follows: A burr grinder both ground the coffee and pushed it into the dispenser. The dispenser was a small chamber with a trapdoor in the bottom to release the coffee into the brew group, and one movable…
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This Repair Café took place at the Mountain View Senior Center from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM. First, I worked on an Instant Pot® Vortex® Plus 10 Quart air fryer that wouldn’t power on; the owner said it had just stopped working one day with no major incident preceding it. After some light disassembly (prying off the top vent and removing the top cover), we found that the bimetallic thermostat had been tripped and needed to be manually reset with a little button. I’m not sure why the air fryer was designed the way it was, with a difficult-to-access manual-reset…
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This Fixit Clinic was held at the Hayward Library. There weren’t very many people. I worked with another fixer on a Japanese foot-warming table that wouldn’t temperature regulate and stayed on constantly. It was constructed with two quartz heating elements controlled by a bimetallic thermostat mounted on its underside, with reflectors to direct all the radiation downwards. They were protected by a steel cage, with a sort of felt coating to decrease its thermal conductivity in case someone contacted it. The table was meant to be completely covered by a blanket to create an enclosed space underneath it to be…
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This Repair Café was held at the Museum of American Heritage. First, there was a DeLonghi EC702 espresso machine that wasn’t providing sufficient pressure to push the water through the coffee grounds. Unfortunately, the owner forgotten to bring the portafilter (filter basket), so we couldn’t confirm this; running the machine without the filter in place resulted in very slow water flow. Anyhow, his research led him to conclude that the pump was faulty; he wasn’t able to replace it himself because he didn’t have the proper screwdriver to remove the Torx security screws. We replaced the pump and found that…
