Repairing things
Dec. 30th, 2007 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alitalfWhen anything technological fails, I am inclined to take it apart and attempt to repair it. Sometimes it is not practical, sometimes I don't have all the necessary knowledge, but more often than not I have succeeded. BUT, things have occasionally turned into an epic, so in recent years, I have tried to temper the tendency to fix everything myself with a policy of paying for repairs for things which the full time repair person can do much more efficiently.
This has worked for car repairs, because it doesn't take a lot for someone to do it more quickly than I do. I can get down on the ground under the car fairly easily, but, increasingly, standing up again afterwards is difficult and I need a rest. All the right tools to hand, and a hydraulic ramp, not to mention the practice of doing the job, wins most of the time.
A while back, after a quick look at the innards of my video recorder, I decided to have it repaired by people who probably had prior experience of the (largely mechanical) problem it had. Big mistake! They damaged a transistor in the power supply section and told me that it was effectively not repairable. I repaired the power supply and replaced the mechanical assembly.
There have been other incidents. For example, I recently repaired my cousin's flat screen TV, after the repair shop told him it was not repairable. There was only one fault; a surface mount mosfet in the power supply had failed and carbonised itself. It wasn't exactly rocket science!
This is relevant to the latest repair;![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rustica's laptop computer. Months ago she asked me about something inside rattling, and I told her that it was probably the heatsink from the graphics chip (which turned out to be true) but that because it was still under warranty, it would be best if I didn't fool with it.
A couple of days back I removed the easily removable covers underneath the computer, now out of warranty, to find out if it had a place where an internal wireless card could be fitted. No such luck, but I found the heatsink from the graphics chip wedged in the air outlet from the processor cooling assembly. Come the warmer weather, it would have kept crashing, if it did not fail completely. It was the most difficult laptop to dismantle that I have found so far, but there was no point in paying a repairer who had not fixed the problem previously, to make a pigs ear of it again.
As I took the machine apart, the total lack of signs of disturbance indicated that the repair people had not taken it apart previously. I surmise that, at best, they had fixed a strip of double sided adhesive tape to the heatsink, and wangled it into place on the graphics chip with a pair of tweezers. Given the angle and length that would have been required to get at the chip without any dismantling, it would have been impassible to clean the top of the chip, nor to put enough pressure on to make the adhesive stick properly.
The repair almost turned into an epic, but it seemed that there was no reasonable alternative.
I can't quite see how people who don't have a good idea how most of the technology they use works can avoid ending up throwing away and replacing things which fail, no matter how small the fault. Thus the volume of waste to be buried or recycled grows. Sadly, reliability is likely to be lower now that environmental legislation requires lead free solder in electronic equipment.
Luckily lead-free solder is not yet required in avionics, but I suppose that if you wanted to discourage the more cautious among us from traveling by aircraft, introducing this would work.
This has worked for car repairs, because it doesn't take a lot for someone to do it more quickly than I do. I can get down on the ground under the car fairly easily, but, increasingly, standing up again afterwards is difficult and I need a rest. All the right tools to hand, and a hydraulic ramp, not to mention the practice of doing the job, wins most of the time.
A while back, after a quick look at the innards of my video recorder, I decided to have it repaired by people who probably had prior experience of the (largely mechanical) problem it had. Big mistake! They damaged a transistor in the power supply section and told me that it was effectively not repairable. I repaired the power supply and replaced the mechanical assembly.
There have been other incidents. For example, I recently repaired my cousin's flat screen TV, after the repair shop told him it was not repairable. There was only one fault; a surface mount mosfet in the power supply had failed and carbonised itself. It wasn't exactly rocket science!
This is relevant to the latest repair;
rustica's laptop computer. Months ago she asked me about something inside rattling, and I told her that it was probably the heatsink from the graphics chip (which turned out to be true) but that because it was still under warranty, it would be best if I didn't fool with it.A couple of days back I removed the easily removable covers underneath the computer, now out of warranty, to find out if it had a place where an internal wireless card could be fitted. No such luck, but I found the heatsink from the graphics chip wedged in the air outlet from the processor cooling assembly. Come the warmer weather, it would have kept crashing, if it did not fail completely. It was the most difficult laptop to dismantle that I have found so far, but there was no point in paying a repairer who had not fixed the problem previously, to make a pigs ear of it again.
As I took the machine apart, the total lack of signs of disturbance indicated that the repair people had not taken it apart previously. I surmise that, at best, they had fixed a strip of double sided adhesive tape to the heatsink, and wangled it into place on the graphics chip with a pair of tweezers. Given the angle and length that would have been required to get at the chip without any dismantling, it would have been impassible to clean the top of the chip, nor to put enough pressure on to make the adhesive stick properly.
The repair almost turned into an epic, but it seemed that there was no reasonable alternative.
I can't quite see how people who don't have a good idea how most of the technology they use works can avoid ending up throwing away and replacing things which fail, no matter how small the fault. Thus the volume of waste to be buried or recycled grows. Sadly, reliability is likely to be lower now that environmental legislation requires lead free solder in electronic equipment.
Luckily lead-free solder is not yet required in avionics, but I suppose that if you wanted to discourage the more cautious among us from traveling by aircraft, introducing this would work.
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no subject
Date: 2007-12-30 12:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-30 01:41 pm (UTC)by reusing/recycling/repairing stuff with it in?
no subject
Date: 2007-12-31 08:08 pm (UTC)I believe that there is just one Chartered Engineer in the UK parliament, and maybe a couple of people qualified in one or another sciences, but I don't think that the EU Commission has that impressive level of scientific and technological expertise among the actual decision makers, so that might explain the occasional manic EU law.
RoHS would probably ban low consumption lamps except for the fact that the EU is set to ban filament lamps in favour of low consumption lamps. Given the electronic components, solder, and mercury used in low consumption lamps, and my observation that the real equivalence in light output has a 21W low power lamp giving the light of a 60W filament lamp, the low consumpt6ion lamps are at best a much smaller advantage than the publicity would have you believe. More energy is used in both manufacture and disposal of low consumption lamps than filament lamps. Since there is no proper recycling for them in most areas yet, low consumption might evedn be worse for the environment than filament lamps, as well as having worse colour rendering properties.
I think that at least some of the environmentally inspired legislation will be beneficial, but there is also some that is counterproductive, and I don't know what the balance will be in the future. Certainly in decades gone by, manufacturing has been cleaned up a lot, and that is very good. However, too much legislation does not seem to take proper account of the facts, and some must be politically motivated. (For example, the insistance on catalytic converters - burn more fuel to cut pollution - instead of using technology that was inder development at Rover to cut pollution by burning less. I had hoped that when a German company bought Rover, it would have become politically possible to revive that concept, but apparently it did not.)
Maybe, as and when problems caused by the bits of counterproductive legislation become severe, changes will be made, but don't hold your breath. I think that the only way around such problems will be for technology to move on so that the legislation is no longer relevant. Technological and economic development will be hampered to some extent, but I think we shall muddle through despite the politicians.