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.

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 air fryer) itself was working, I removed the control board (which required disconnecting a lot of wires) and found a burnt-out resistor connected to the pot switch terminal. I didn’t get the chance to properly trace where it went, but I suspected it was a pull-up or pull-down resistor. So, I tried to replace it by soldering a 1 kΩ THT resistor in its place, but this did nothing. Looking back, the burnt-out resistor probably indicates some issue with the rest of the control board, since I do not know of resistors that suddenly burn out under ordinary circumstances.