repairing things

i know, there is no way i ever would have started disassembling my laptop for repairs if it wasn't for youtube

fyi i have been watching The Repair Shop on iPlayer and crying at the stories

xp my job includes repairing laptops and I'd be stuck without Youtube teardowns.

i've just spent about an hour with bf repairing brazilian figurines that have been in pieces for over a decade. Now I'm going to figure out why my bread won't rise!

I broke the pressure cooker last night; I left the inner lid off and it overheated. After some poking around I assumed the thermal fuse had gone (as it should) bought a multimeter to confirm and a replacement fuse. Now it works again. I was pretty pissed at myself for breaking it in the first place but I’m pleased I could fix it.

Ico Letting salt and sugar get too close to the yeast before it starts working can prevent it fully rising. I remember having to put it in a different part of the bread machine when setting up a loaf.

I remember the giddy feeling of walking through my house and checking off the things I had made serious, appliance-saving repairs to: dryer (replaced frayed internal wire), washing machine (replaced faulty control board, and stator motor for the spin), fridge (replaced thermal sensors and fans in the freezer), stove (replaced jets, thermal cutoffs, elements, etc.), stereo amplifier (power supply and signal caps), plasma TV (main power board), plus pretty much every computer in the house ...

Turns out I wasn't giving my bread enough time to rise

It's all looking beautiful now

to revisit the saga of my little library stepladder i am having to busk recharging the battery of my black and decker with the only mains lead i can find in the flat that fits (i have no idea if it's the correct one)

i guess the worst that can happen is that i have to buy a new battery which is probably good sense anyway, i've had the drill like 15-odd years minimum without ever recharging it afaicr

(did it once have a lead? i'm guessing yes. is this its actual real lead: i think no, the conversion factor is not what the internet tells me i need tho who tf kno if this matters that much)

Dryer in new house sounded like an artillery barrage. I’ve never attempted an appliance repair before but decided fuck it. From what I saw online it was pretty clearly the roller, so I ordered a new set as well as a tool I had never been aware of before — snap ring pliers. About $45. Watched YouTube videos. Disassembling the drier wasn’t all that hard but the bolts for the roller axles were rusted on and it took a lot of different approaches before I found a way to break them off (I basically attached pliers to a socket wrench so I could get more torque). Getting the belt back on was also confusing (the pattern of my pulley and motor shaft didn’t match the videos and getting the “zig zag” was tricky). Putting it back together was also harder than taking it apart. But after 3-4 hours and having filth permanently tattooed into my skin, we have a normal, not too loud dryer and I probably saved us a few hundred bucks. And it was kind of fun.

I feel ready to take on a lot of handyman stuff now, much of which I think will be easier than the dryer.

The fuse has gone on the microwave, the 5000v fuse.

Search on Google and it links to a video that looks easy enough but it links halfway through the video and skips the bit about discharging the capacitor containing said lethal voltages.

Anyway, I have new fuses and it's been unplugged for 3 weeks and they reckon it discharges itself within a week so...

to remove all doubt you can get one of those twin probe capacitor discharge units for about £20, but you could probably get a new microwave for the same price these days!

I replaced a wall socket the other week, shit was easy

Yeah I’m looking to do a bunch of those soon - I apparently need to rewrite some of them (polarity is reversed?) and also I want to put some usb outlets in for device charging.

Lol usually apprentice electricians are let loose on second fixing the sockets because apparently it's too simple a task to fuck up!

Although I often seen houses where the polarity is wrong at the incoming isolator of the supply side. God knows how that works, I'd guess motors in fans and vacum cleaners all run backwards etc...

I was thinking of replacing double switches where only one worked effectively or removing the actual switch part of the excess switch after finding myself clicking the wrong one recently.

If you don't have any kind voltage tester, always make sure you don't forget which are the permanent lives, switch wires, two-ways etc because if you get them mixed up while swapping the switch, sorting it out without test leads can be a bit of a pisser!

its not repairing things, but me and bf built a new kitchen table a few weeks ago which was fun.

I've got to switch out a fluorescent fixture above our kitchen sink and really don't want to blow myself up.

oh, i fixed a broken lightswitch! Have never done anything that was directly connected to the mains so was a bit nervous even of something that simple!

it was just fixing a loose wire

There was a time I'd casually fault find on switches when they were live, like touching every arcing sparking wire to the live until we'd worked out which was which. Lol my snips have been hung up for 9 years and I wouldn't dare do such craziness these days. Mind you I have had hundreds of electrical belts over the years. Which some say is either a sign that you are either a shit electrician or working with too many shit ones!

lol u mad bastard

It's not like there is anything complicated about a 2 or 3 gang switch or whatever, but if you lose track of what is what it can become a confusing jumble of wires, especially if there is an intermediate switch on there as well.

YouTube videos and the like have been a godsend when it comes to repairing stuff, but I find it really frustrating when a thing I really need isn't some skill or online help but some obscure screwdriver or other tool that has one use. Looking at you, stuff like snap ring pliers, or Apple, with your funky one-off T5 torx screwdrivers.

uh, it's pretty easy to just buy the obscure tools -- most of which aren't all that expensive, in general. ... the most frustrating thing for me is when I can't find the fucking manual online. ... though I did learn that magic chef refrigerator/freezers are the same as three other brands of refrigerators.

It's super easy to buy the obscure tools! But then you have an obscure tool that you use once. Like my own snap ring pliers, I'm pretty sure I bought them to repair a gear in our stand mixer. And that's literally all I have ever used it for. Repairing that stand mixer, once, 10 years ago or whenever. Was the repair easy? Yes. Did I save a bunch of money doing it myself? Yes. And that was maybe my realization that so many repair shops are really in the end just convenience stores. They're not necessarily selling skill, they're not selling knowledge, they're selling that one weird screwdriver that you don't have or have the time to research and order. I have an oscillating tower fan I once wanted to disassemble to clean. Something like 15 regular screws ... and one weird screw. Why the one weird screw? To make it hard to do yourself.

I've had a couple of instances lately where there were actually two manuals, the consumer manual that comes with the product, but then a repair manual that repair people have access to. The former was no help, the latter took me forever to dig up, And that was only once I learned it existed.

my most recent repair was unclogging the defrost drain in our side-by-side refrigerator ... no more ice on the bottom of the freezer or water on the kitchen floor

the owner's manual was useless, but sifting through YouTube videos got me going in the right direction

the funniest "repair" or more like rough-as-fuck bodge in this case, I ever witnessed was: when some dodgy fucker I worked with had put an electrical distribution board way too close to a front door to the extent that if the door swung open with any force it might smash into it. The clerk of works was wandering about and if he noticed this the whole board would need moving, which would be a massive pain in the arse and some of the cables might not have been long enough to do it. So he improvised by screwing a plastic coca cola lid into the floor as an improvised doorstop and his pièce de résistance was then colouring it black with a sharpie marker pen!

I once saw the same guy fixing a lighting pattress to a ceiling with decorators caulk, by wedging a sweeping brush on a toolbox on a bed to hold it up till it it dried! He was one of these cowboys that took a perverse pleasure in doing terrible work!

I recently "repaired" a slat on an outdoor table by holding the slat in place with a paint stirring stick that I wood glued under it.

My fave DIY story was when I had to change a lightbulb in my car, which shouldn't be that difficult except that everything is more difficult in cars these days because they all require computers and stuff (which is ironic, because the computers make things easier ... for the people with the right program/disc/whatever; see: special screwdriver). I look up a youtube video and it was a bit trickier than I might have expected but even so, the video was something like 45 minutes long, which seemed a bit high to change a lightbulb. I get what I need from the store and dive in and ... it takes me more like 10 minutes, because it turns out that the only reason the video was 45 minutes was because the dude was filming himself with one hand while he did the lightbulb change with the other. With two hands, it took 10 minutes.

screwing a plastic coca cola lid into the floor as an improvised doorstop and his pièce de résistance was then colouring it black with a sharpie marker pen!

omg this is hilarious!!!!! hahahah

a repair manual that repair people have access to.

yes, this was what I was trying to find online for my fridge/freezer ... and how I learned that so many fridges are the same fridge with different names.

Can't find one for my sewing machine either.
Drag.

one thing I did discover online, which was cool, is there are websites for repair people that are like, diagnostics-for-dummies kinda? ... like, "it is 50% likely the problem is actually this" vs. "it is highly unlikely that when the thing has this problem, you will need to replace this part" ... that's how I figured out what was wrong with my fridge sans manual.

Having gone down the rabbit hole of this sort of thing for cars, I was happy that my assumption that there would be the same for household things was correct.

At some point I need to take a sewing refresher course, or just sew some things again. it has been awhile

join us on ILX Sewing!

Four weeks after I replaced the support roller in the dryer, the drum stopped spinning. Presumably it's the belt. It's something I could fix (especially now that I already know how to take apart the dryer), but then what's going to go next? It's clearly an old dryer. So I said fuck it and ordered a new dryer.

I fixed my dyson (new battery)

microwave still sat behind the sofa, waiting for me to change the fuse. will only take 30 minutes, if that, and will pay for itself, timewise, within 3 cups of coffee / 2 bowls of porridge, but still...

I had (to me) a kind of fascinating microwave fix to do a year or so ago. I'd noticed that the microwave every once in a while would kind of behave as if there were a small piece of metal in it. Basically freak out and force me to turn it off. I could't figure out what was going on, and while a close inspection didn't reveal any answers, it did reveal this little square of relatively flimsy cardboard on the side that I'd never noticed before. It turns out this thing is called the waveguide cover, or magnetron cover, and is actually not cardboard:

It covers the magnetron (which is what generates microwaves) from food splatter and debris. It is not made out of cardboard, even if it looks that way on some models. It's made out of Formica-molten rock and shaped into a sheet.

What had happened, or what I was able to surmise, is that over the years the thing did its job, but in the process got a bit of splatter stuck to it, and that splatter of food, over time, got cooked and cooked over and over again until it essentially carbonized, and *that* is what was causing the sparking. Once I figured that out it was easy enough to take off and clean the waveguide cover.

done the microwave, was easy enough to put a new fuse in without touching anything metal, not even the fuse... (the wire was stiff enough that i could hold it by the insulation and push it over the fuse, then pick the fuse up by the same wire and push the other wire onto it). but haven't plugged it back in to test it yet - i wiped down the cover and am waiting for it to dry before reassembling.

win. after 2 months the microwave makes things hot again.

(i also wiped down the mica window over the magnetron, just in case)

bless you both!

I didn't know that the cover was mica, I always assumed it was cardboard.