Tracking down a faulty ABS sensor
Posted on June 17, 2022
| John Morris
Like many ageing Honda Civics our VSA and ABS lights have been coming on sporadically for the last few months. Now they’re stuck on all the time.
First I suspected the battery, so I duly measured the no-load voltage (~12.6V: not great, but not awful either), the voltage dip when running the fuel pumps, (~11.6V) and the voltage dip when starting (briefly around 10V, but I didn’t have a scope on it).
[Read More]Ignition Barrel Repair
Posted on December 31, 2021
| John Morris
Halfway down the country, at 7.30 in the morning (having been on the road since 5.30) the key stopped turning in the ignition. We have an old (‘06) Honda Civic, and the AA man blamed the age. He was able to force the key round, doing much the same thing I’d been doing, only more effectively, and we drove on, to repeat the same rigmarole the next time it was started.
[Read More]Toaster
Posted on October 11, 2020
(Last modified on August 13, 2021)
| John Morris
Somebody has bent the toaster. It shouldn’t be looking like this:
It should be looking rather like this:
Oh well. It’s only mild steel and it bends easily. Some springs got out of place too, but it’s easy enough to ping them all back, particularly with the unbent side for comparison. The hard thing is normally taking toasters apart—cheapy ones are frequently held together with bent metal tabs, which sheer if you try to unbend them—and of course it’s always messy.
[Read More]Thermostat
Posted on October 11, 2020
(Last modified on August 13, 2021)
| John Morris
Our thermostat has an annoying feature. If you press any button—but particularly the ‘OK’ button you have to press a lot to change anything—it reboots. Worse, it loses everything you’ve just entered. Last night it started doing this without my pressing anything. I first thought a dead battery might be to blame, but even with a steady 3V from my bench power supply it refused to work. I put it aside, and when it came back on ten minutes later, very carefully increased the temperature till it turned on.
[Read More]Microwave Repair and Volume Control
Posted on October 11, 2020
(Last modified on August 13, 2021)
| John Morris
My microwave went on the blink, a few days before I got married. It started turning itself on, randomly, as soon as it was plugged in. You could use it—I did in fact use it—by putting something inside, waiting for it to turn on, and then opening the door after the required time had elapsed. Hardly ideal. I unplugged it and left it for later—there were other things to think about after all…
[Read More]Shaver Repair
Posted on April 18, 2020
(Last modified on August 19, 2021)
| John Morris
My father’s electric shaver wasn’t holding charge; he asked if I could have a look at it and see if the internal battery could be replaced. Here’s the exploded view:
The green battery is a NiMH, not NiCad as I’d expected. I suppose it’s not that old. Which is as well, as I couldn’t find any NiCads in the drawer when hunting around before, and was planning on gutting it and fitting a LiPo battery and tiny charging module.
[Read More]How To Break a Freezer
Posted on July 28, 2019
(Last modified on August 13, 2021)
| John Morris
I arrived back yesterday to discover that the fridge, or more specifically the fridge-freezer, had been off for at least a week.1 The same week, coincidentally, that temperatures in the range of southern France on a cool day have lead to pantograph cables all falling off. Oops. Hopefully the repairs will be more heat-tolerant… Thus in this heat wave2—well, it was certainly warm—the inside of the fridge/freezer got to goodness knows what temperature (fridges make good beer-brewing ovens, as google will show).
[Read More]CoffeePot, short and stout; here's my handle...
Posted on May 23, 2019
(Last modified on October 6, 2020)
| John Morris
One should not over-brew one’s coffee. This is a fault (mea culpa) I occasionally commit. One should probably not use one’s coffee pot to reheat coffee, and if one does, one should pay some attention to how long it is on for. Else it will boil dry, and then that heat has got to go somewhere… In this case, it went into the handle, the silicone rubber seal between the two sections and the knob.
[Read More]Radio repair
Posted on December 2, 2018
(Last modified on August 13, 2021)
| John Morris
The radio we use in the kitchen to make washing up bearable stopped working. Specifically, it wouldn’t turn on, but the power LED was constantly flashing on and then fading off. What makes me think the power supply might have died? Lo and behold, after purchasing a cheap multimeter (it’s incredible how cheaply one can get some things now: in ten years the price of test equipment has plumetted): the ‘8v’ output was about 3v, and the ‘15v’ output was 0v.
[Read More]CD Player Line-In
Posted on July 31, 2018
(Last modified on October 5, 2020)
| John Morris
This is a very simple project indeed: add a line-in input feeding the amplifier in my sister’s CD/Tape/Radio, which has much better sound than the ‘device’ she mainly plays music from. How hard can it be to find the amplifier IC and feed in directly?
Taking the thing apart was none too hard, and it’s cheap ’90s hardware so all through-hole and single-sided PCB. I found the mode switch, traced it back to the amplifier, paid careful attention to the pinouts and soldered a small cable onto one input, the other end going to a 555 ‘signal generator’ kit I had lying around.
[Read More]