Repairs

Here is one of those electric scooters, already anaethetised ready for surgery. It’s in a pretty sorry state: the front fork has sheared right off and is bent and mangled, while the steering bearing is loose and wobbles alarmingly. The thing is almost impossible to open, but can be forced.

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). Yep, the battery is ageing. What about its internal resistance? Everyone did this at school, right—you put a load across the battery, measure the current through the load and the voltage across the terminals before and after; then you assume that voltage was dropped across the internal resistance and do R=V/I. The trouble is that the voltage drop is tiny, so you need a reasonable current. I couldn’t find any decent loads, but any load will do if you have an ammeter in series, so I disconnected the negative lead and used the car itself. Since the alarm promptly started going off (next time lock the car door!) that formed one data point, and then I turned the running lights on for the other. With the multimeter in relative mode even the subtraction was done for me:

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. The AA had been free (it turned out the car had cover from being serviced at a Honda dealership), but a locksmith wasn’t going to be. Thus I ran to screwfix and bought a screwdriver and removed the plastics in a slightly wet carpark in Bedford: but I couldn’t get the last screw to get the antenna off the barrel, and anyhow it wasn’t coming without more tools. Thus after fighting for long enough it turned, and the car was driven down to London and put in the garage; and we went off on holiday.

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. But this is a quality toaster. I got it half price, but if a tree fell on it tomorrow I would go out and buy the same model. It has the deepest slots of any toaster in the local Tescos (and the local Tescos had many toasters). I know. I measured them all. (Back then nobody bothered you in shops. Now of course they’d probably arrest me for touching the merchandise and spreading the coronavirus.) And I was going to award Russel Hobbs full marks for making something with no hidden screws and only standard heads, until lo and behold! there was one hidden screw with a star head. Well I have screwdrivers a lot more exotic than star heads, but that’s one black mark against Russel Hobbs. So the toaster only scores 19/20.

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. Here is a dud thermostat:

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…

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.

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).

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. The handle drooped, faded and expired with a great groan. Already it had broken off when the pot hit the floor at a velocity not specified in the design; now its weakened frame gave up the ghost. (Why do they use thermoplastics for these things? Because this aluminium pot cost ~£6. But it came with not only an (ungrammatical) warranty, but also a spare silicone sealing ring and filter! So all is not lost.) Here is the dismembered carcass:

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. Hmm. Here’s the very crude power supply: