Post your worthless and/or pointless repairs

[momaka]

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

Technically even if it splatters (i.e. can receive on more than one frequency), if these pass FCC part 15 rules, they are still legal. Unfortunately it appears that anyone within 200ft line of sight may still get unintentional operation. Should be much less than that if there's something in the way...

Well that's the thing - I wasn't getting any reception on any station I set it to, blank or otherwise, with the way the transmitter was in its stock form. And now with the added "antenna" (piece of quite long wire sticking out the side), I get splatter and really really good reception on any station. Pretty sure I must have annoyed a few truckers on the way in those trips. I imagine the worst must have been when playing DJ Splash from one of my flash drives - great music to drive with when it's 11 PM - 2 AM and stay awake (did that so I could avoid traffic completely... plus, hardly anyone cares when you drive 80-90 on a 65 speed limit then... except maybe deer. )

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

Sigh... I wonder if https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=113251 will end up being a worthless/pointless repair if I end up getting another mainboard for it.

Well, if the TV ends up working for a long time and you get some good use out of it... maybe not. But for $80, that's a little too much for a mainboard. If the seller has a "make offer" on the listing, be sure to low-ball it. Then maybe I can too from my account. Hopefully he/she gets the message, lol.

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

Mainly would like it working again as I'm currently using two 19" 1280x1024 monitors right now... a full 1080p display would actually be an upgrade...

IDK, I tend to dislike large TVs as monitors. Can't view them from far away if you want to do pixel-accurate work and can't be too close because of all the light and just the screen being too big and grainy. I think 22-24" is the best middle-ground (for me.) 27" max. Anything more and it's too big. Below 20-21", the desktop real estate gets a little on the cramped side... but I can manage.

Originally Posted by jiroy

Keep them for a far future , they'll be priceless .. Not much as Vinyl discs though , but who knows !!!

I will be, indeed.
Well-made stuff will always remain well-made stuff.
And I do have fun with them sometimes as well. Have some CrO2's that had pretty terrible recordings on them (improperly done with a deck that probably didn't have Type II/IV biasing.) Might erase them and re-record with something modern, just for kicks. I've already done that with some newer (late 90's) TDK standard tapes, and they sound surprisingly amazing afterwards.

[eccerr0r]

TBH grainy is not a big problem for me. My biggest problem are stupid web and software developers assuming you have a 4K monitor . And even with a 1080p TV, it's still not there yet...

And yeah $80 really is too much. At least with a new TV I get warranty and brand new LEDs instead of hoping the CCFL tubes don't wear out. *sigh* That is, if the tcon isn't also dead or the panel has hidden problems...

[eccerr0r]

BTW transmitter splatter of P"L"L tuners is usually due to PLL not locking correctly or has slop on lock.

[momaka]

Does anyone bother to fix laptop power adapters anymore? I know replacements are pretty easy to find and often quite cheap too – even the OEM ones. Nevertheless, I hate waste, so I still “fix” (cobble / hack / McGyver) these when possible.

For this post, I have a 65-Watt Dell OEM power adapter with a “big barrel” plug. It was a freebie from Craigslist with a box of other adapters, all mostly non-working. As with most OEM adapters, I usually find the failure to be either a short or an open-circuit in the cable on the DC / output side of the adapter. Very rarely it’s something else.

For short-circuit in the cable, I typically see that near the adapter side, right where the cable enters the adapter. And it seems to happen more often with cables that use coaxial construction – i.e. ID wire in the middle, followed by an insulation layer around it, followed by the positive (+) conductor wires wrapped around the insulation, then another PVC insulating layer, then ground conductor wires, and finally the outermost PVC insulation. On the other hand, if the cable has an open-circuit, it’s usually near the plug side.

This one was a bit more interesting though. The Craigslister / person who I got it from already had attempted a repair… and not too bad of job, if I may say (at least the soldering part about it.) The adapter must have suffered from an open-circuited wire(s) near the barrel plug end, because the person soldered new wires from the plug to the cable on the adapter. I forgot to take pictures of this, but the soldering wasn’t bad. Likewise, where the wires were soldered to the cord was also done decently, as seen here.
Dell 65 Watt power adapter - cable repair, as found.jpg

The problem, however, was that the person only used electrical tape to hold / “secure” the newly-soldered wires on the barrel plug. As expected, electrical tape doesn’t provide a rigid support, so the wires that were soldered to the barrel plug all ripped out again. Otherwise, I checked everything else with the adapter, and it was OK.

In the process of doing so, an idea came to my mind: why not wrap the wires around the plug (after soldering them?) I figured this can provide stress-relief on the solder joints on the plug end.

So I decided to try this idea. Here’s how it looked with the wires soldered and wrapped around the barrel plug:
Dell 65 Watt power adapter cable repair (1).jpg
Dell 65 Watt power adapter cable repair (2).jpg

I tested my theory by tugging on the wires, and indeed they wouldn’t pull directly on the solder joints on the barrel plug. With some glue or potting material over them to secure them better, I imagined (hope) this would allow the repair to last a little longer.

Speaking of potting / gluing, I was debating what to use for this. The standard stuff I always keep on my bench is hot glue and silicone/caulk. JB weld and epoxy probably would work better. However, I didn’t have these in stock. So in the end, I went with the easiest/quickest route – hot glue. I considered silicone before this, but wasn’t sure if it would hold up any better (and I only had one kind left, which was some very cheap stuff.) Plus, I haven’t tested it long term to see if it’s non-corrosive. Most silicone/caulk tends to give off acetic acid while curing, which could be a source of corrosion.

So, hot glue it was! To make the hot glue adhere better to the metal on the barrel plug, I pre-heated the plug with my heat gun. Then, with the plug still hot, I quickly potted everything with hot glue. The result… wasn’t very pretty, but it seemed to hold relatively well (time will tell, of course.)
Dell 65 Watt power adapter cable repair (4).jpg
Dell 65 Watt power adapter cable repair (5).jpg
Dell 65 Watt power adapter cable repair (3).jpg

Finally, I re-soldered the wires on the other side to the ones on the adapter’s cable. Like I said, the person that tried to fix this didn’t do a bad job with the soldering. However, I didn’t like the way the wires were “poking” out, so I re-soldered them. While at it, I also slipped on some heat shrink pieces to put on both ends. The finished adapter looked like this:
Dell 65 Watt power adapter cable repair (6).jpg
Dell 65 Watt power adapter cable repair (7).jpg
Dell 65 Watt power adapter cable repair (8).jpg

Note that I intentionally didn’t cover all of the “new” wires with heat shrink tubing. The reason why is because heat shrink tubing tends to be a little too stiff once tightly shrunk around multiple wires. And for a laptop power adapter cable, it’s probably better for the cable to be a little more flexible, especially around the plug side. In fact, this is what I believe causes most of these adapters to develop open-circuited wire(s) near the laptop power connector (when used by less-than-careful owners, of course.) Dell in particular likes to add large ferrite beads near the plug (or at least it used to on older adapters like these), which further aggravates the issue, IMO.

Another consideration to keep in mind: where the power plug on the laptop is – i.e. on the back or on the side of the laptop. This could matter depending on how/where the laptop is used. Why I mention this has to do with how the wires/cable comes out of the plug. In the case of my repair above, they now come out sideways, almost 90° to the axis of the barrel connector, whereas the original wires came out straight from the back of the barrel connector. When the laptop is used on a flat, solid surface, this doesn’t matter much. But when it’s used in bed or on the lap (like many people do… hence laptop ), the cable can push up or pull down onto the barrel plug, causing stress both on the wires in the cable and on the connector in the laptop. I find this to be the case more often with laptops that have their connector on the back. So this is one reason I put the wires at 90° relative to the barrel plug. On the other hand, if someone trips over the cord, a straight-out cable-plug design would be better, since it can just pull out of the connector on the laptop without causing any side-loading forces. In contrast, a 90° design will cause a lot of sideways forces, both on the cable wires and the connector/plug in the laptop. So both of these designs have pros and cons. In the end, I went with the 90° design, because I left this power adapter as a spare for my uncle’s Dell Latitude E6400, which has a plug on the back and I figured this would suit the design better.

Anyways, not sure how long this repair will last. The adapter is still sitting in a drawer as a backup. However, I also fixed the power adapter for my uncle’s Latitude E6400 after this one (in the same fashion) and I do have the results. But I’ll post that in another post here (need to finish typing it up, though.)

Again, I figured I’d post this here, since it’s probably a “worthless” repair in a sense that it takes relatively long time to do compared to just going out and buying a new / another power adapter. Doing the failure & engineering part was the fun for me, though. I’ve seen many such power adapters fail and also fixed a good deal of them in the past… just never put so much thought into it before as I did now.

[eccerr0r]

That reminds me, I need to do the same, I broke a plug on one of my power adapters for my laptop, and it just doesn't connect well because the wire in the back no longer contact all the time. Need to solder.

I do have another universal power adapter but don't like it because it has the chance of rotating and blocking the USB port right next to the power adapter...

I had yet another hack - a power adapter that the connector seemingly does not fit. I ground off part of the plastic and forced it to fit...sort of... It works but still very dicey.

Ideally I still need to fix my original adapter.

[momaka]

And here is “worthless” adapter repair #2.(Note: a lot of text but not many pictures.)

It’s the Dell power adapter for my uncle’s E6400 laptop. As mentioned in this post of the ghettomod thread and also here, this power adapter had a broken / open-circuited ID wire. Essentially the laptop would power on and work, but only with the CPU in the lowest power state and the battery would not charge. Running the built-in Dell Diagnostics from BIOS showed the power adapter as “unknown”.

Once again, I forgot to take pictures of the adapter before I started fixing it, but it’s a standard PA-10 adapter (the flat and wide ones with a rubber strap on the side, if that rings a bell for anyone.)

Knowing that the adapter worked but the ID didn’t appear in Dell Self-Diagnostics (“unknown adapter” instead of “90 Watt”), I cut a small 15 mm incision in the output cable, near where it goes into the power adapter. To my surprise, this one did not use a coaxial cable construction design. Rather, the output cable had 3 wires in it: black, white, and green. Using a thin sewing needle, I poked through the insulation of one of these wires and then used my multimeter on resistance mode to check which connection this corresponded to on the barrel plug. I found the following:
Black --> ground
White --> positive (+) DC supply (19.5V)
Green --> laptop ID wire.

But when probing the green wire to the small middle pin inside the barrel plug, I got nothing at all – open-circuit. So I made another small 15 mm incision on the output cable, this one closer to the barrel plug. Checking the resistance on the green wire between there and the middle pin of the barrel plug still showed nothing. I was a little puzzled. Did the green wire not connect to the ID pin on the barrel plug? To resolve my confusion, I did another test. This time using two needles, I checked the resistance on the green wire between the two incision cuts on the cable… and still got nothing (open-circuit). Well, that surely didn’t make sense – why would the green wire not connect to itself?

That’s when I decided to make a 3rd cut / incision in the cable, this time towards the middle. Probing between that spot and the cut close to the power adapter, I did get continuity / low resistance on the green wire. But between the middle incision and the one closer to the barrel plug, I still saw open-circuit. This meant only one thing: the green ID wire had a break in 2 places!

At this point, I knew I had to cut the cable sleeve completely open on the barrel plug side. And so I did… which revealed that the green ID wire was indeed broken off from the barrel plug, hence the 2nd break in the cable as I suspected.

I considered running an external wire wrapped around the output cable to bypass all of the possibly broken spots in the ID wire. I widened the incision that was in the middle of the cable so that I could get better access to the green ID wire and try to solder/attach a bypass wire on the outside. However, this didn’t work out too well. As soon as I tried to stretch / pull out the green wire even a little bit out of the incision, it broke and ripped a little further downstream. great! :\

Not sure why, but the green ID wire used in this cable was quite fragile. Trying to pull it out from an incision further down (closer to the adapter) made it break again. Thus it was clear that I should just replace it entirely… and for that, I also needed to open the power adapter too. For a second, I even thought about replacing the entire output cable… except I didn’t have another one with the same barrel connector. So something else came to my mind instead – try to pull out the green wire out of the existing cable and replace it with another wire inside.

I tried pulling the green wire from the middle incision and it did pull a little, but then became a little too difficult. More thinking, and I made two more incisions on the output cable, with these spaced between the other three. So with incision sections much closer to each other, I was able to pull the green wire section by section out of the output cable – almost like replacing cable/wire in a conduit or wall… but just on a smaller scale.

Once I did that, I was wondering what to replace it with. I had some very thin gauge PVC sleeved wire…. But it wouldn’t slip easily in the output cable in place of the green wire. Then I tried a single solid-core Ethernet strand and that was a little easier… up until the 2nd incision. After this, it too became difficult to pull further. So I removed it and tried a 23 AWG enameled copper wire (magnet wire.) This time, it pulled through nice and easy.

I soldered it inside the adapter, as seen here (lower left corner of the PCB):
Dell 90 Watt power adapter cable repair (2).jpg

Next, time for the barrel plug end. Just like the previous power adapter repair, I wrapped the three output wires around the barrel plug and then soldered them to it.
Dell 90 Watt power adapter cable repair (1).jpg

Before proceeding to pot everything in hot glue, I connected the adapter to the laptop and gave it a thorough test, This time, the ID of the adapter (Dell 90 Watt) was identified correctly in the E6400. With this out of the way, next step was to pot everything in hot glue and add some heat shrink tubing.
Dell 90 Watt power adapter cable repair (3).jpg

Now remember the discussion in my previous post above about how it might matter which way the cables come out of the barrel plug? Well, this one I also did in a slightly more different manner: I angled the wires at 45° relative to the barrel plug. I figured / noticed that with the previous repair (where the wires come out at 90° from the plug), the cable would sometimes get stuck down when placed on a table and exert extra force on both the wires and the laptop’s plug. So with a 45° angle, this seemed like the perfect compromise between the 90° and straight-out design. When laptop was placed on a surface (from standing in the air), the 45° angle on the wires would naturally allow the barrel connector to rotate inside the laptop plug by itself. Also, when the power adapter cable was tugged hard from the laptop, the barrel connector would pop out much easier compared to the 90° design. And if the laptop was tilted on a flat surface, the 45° design still allowed plenty of tilt (well, 45° really) before the flat surface would cause the wires to bend or exert extra force on the barrel plug. So the 45° design seemed like the best compromise of them all.

Finally, like a true live patient, it was time to close up the power adapter and incisions in the cable. The power adapter case was easy to – just add a few spots of rubber cement glue here and there, and it shut back nicely. I probably could have used PVC glue / PVC cement too, since the adapter’s plastic did contain ABS. But the rubber cement held it down pretty well and would be slightly easier to open, should I ever need to go back in there again. As for the output cable… since it is actually made out of PVC, I certainly used PVC cement for that. Basically, I applied a small drop to each incision and then clipped it together with small clips.
Dell 90 Watt power adapter cable repair (5).jpg

After a few days of R&R (for all of the glue to cure), the adapter looked pretty normal (save for the hot glue on the barrel connector.)
Dell 90 Watt power adapter cable repair (4).jpg

I even considered painting the hot glue with black to make it match… but decided to leave it as-is, so perhaps I could see easier if a break in the cable occurred again on the barrel end.

In terms of longevity, this repair didn’t do too bad. Done in December of 2021 and checked back in the summer (June) of 2022, everything was still mostly holding up. A crack in the hot glue on the wire right before the barrel connector had started to form. But my fix was partially to blame for this. Remember how I said not to put too much heat shrink and leave some of the wires exposed for better flexibility? Well, I didn’t do that here. And with a choke / ferrite bead very close to the barrel plug, it’s obvious how this contributed to the early damage. On the positive side, one of my nephews is now old enough, has a hot glue gun, and loves to use it. So we re-melted the glue with him and I gave him the task to keep an eye on that power adapter. After all, he does go to my uncle’s house quite often.

So there it goes… another one saved from the landfill for a little while longer.

[jiroy]

Originally Posted by momaka

Does anyone bother to fix laptop power adapters anymore? I know replacements are pretty easy to find and often quite cheap too – even the OEM ones. Nevertheless, I hate waste, so I still “fix” (cobble / hack / McGyver) these when possible.


Again, I figured I’d post this here, since it’s probably a “worthless” repair in a sense that it takes relatively long time to do compared to just going out and buying a new / another power adapter. Doing the failure & engineering part was the fun for me, though. I’ve seen many such power adapters fail and also fixed a good deal of them in the past… just never put so much thought into it before as I did now.

For this kind of repairs , I always solder the wires by their ends , so they take their original shape , then use laptops or batteries pvc bodies with a solder tip to reconstruct a like original shape . A fine sand paper and there it goes .

[eccerr0r]

Worthless repair:

I noticed one of my (working) 40W-equivalent LED A19 bulbs had a loose bottom end (this is one of the older ones where the heatsink and plastic base were distinct pieces. So I twisted and pulled it to see why it was loose .. and broke the bottom contact connection (it's one of those press-in-place "tacks"). I broke it, it was working before now it doesn't!

So I twisted and pulled it more to try to pull it apart. No dice. So I took a screwdriver and pulled off the "ice cream" cap in this ice cream cone lamp. Pried it off, appears to use RTV to glue the cap together. Then I had to desolder the PCB from the wires and removed the metal LED PCB from the heatsink, finally able to separate the bottom half with the PSU and the LED PCB.

Now I could find the wire that should have connected to the bottom contact an reconnected it. Then I put everything back together as much as I could (no RTV, probably will have to use epoxy but didn't glue everything together yet).

Off to testing. So what do I do to test this to ensure it doesn't go up in flames?

Now I need to get a dim bulb tester to test this light bulb!



Sorry no pictures... should have taken some...

[momaka]

OK, this one is self-explanatory.




Seriously, how much is a simple wooden pencil worth these days? A few cents, maybe? Does anyone even care to use wooden pencils anymore? My guess is, probably not. But even 2-3 decades ago when I was still in school, I remember no one cared about them back then either.

In the case of the above pencil… wind back about 15 years to my high-school days. Some kid was just goofing around and took another kid’s pencil, then broke it in half and threw it around in the classroom. No one bat an eyelash, of course. Inner me: grrr… must not waste! Must fix!. So of course I had to I pick it up… and I guess I’ve always been a master hoarder after all.

Anyways, since I picked up all of the pieces, I was able to glue it back together with wood glue in one of the engineering elective classes I was taking. The repair lasted me through the remaining two years of high school. Then the pencil broke again (I suspect the classroom wood glue was a little “expired”, as many times people forgot to put the caps back on – another grrr to trigger my OCD. ). Regardless, I glued it again (this time with a slightly different/better wood glue of my own.) And it’s been fine since then. Believe it or not, the pencil was actually almost twice as long as seen in the above picture. I’ve just used it for many years afterwards. In fact, it didn’t even dawn on me how worthless of a repair this was until I picked it up again the other day to write something down. It needed sharpening, and that’s when I noticed I’m about to grind away at the broken part soon.

I guess it’s because I consider a pencil to be a tool – one that let’s you write stuff down… and I’ve always had respect for any kind of tools.

So there’s that worthless repair.

On the up side, I NEVER had to ask my parents to buy me pencils or pens for school. I was always loaded with all kinds. In fact, many kids knew me as “that kid” who they could regularly “borrow” a pencil from. And if/when they forgot to return it – no worries! Sooner or later, the same pencil would find its way back to me / my backpack again.

[jiroy]

This is or was a Sony x317 VHS system , given to me one year ago for free . They told me it's intermittently working , and gradually became frustrating to deal with . When I had a chance finally to take a thorough look into it , I made many mistakes as taking the whole thing lightly . I've already have a good system for converting into DVDs and so , so it was a light repair to begin with.. First mistake was tryin'it with an important tape for me , although it worked well for 15 minutes or so . Ejecting and inserting repeatedly only worsened the situation and at that point , it was put aside for later disassembly .

When I opened it some weeks later , I took my first measurements on the power supply unit under load then some measurements on main-board and things turned out very normal . My thoughts gradually went into the mechanical system being the one causing the real problems .
And here came my Second mistake when I broke the soft 4 plastic wires from the read head to the main board . Although it could be an easy repair , but further disappointments were when I disassembled the mechanical systems and more weary belts and clutches started to put on heavily on my thoughts .
further on , three dead roashes was it ..

So I decided to change my priorities to salvage my precious tape and extract the magnets (I love magnets ) , dynamos and any other things useful for my projects . Next , it was a full tear down to the last screw and ring , testing my old times speed and abilities at it , lol ..
By the way , I didn't forget to extract a good quantity of grease since this is best quality you can ever find and don't tell anyone I told you so

[eccerr0r]

Originally Posted by momaka

OK, this one is self-explanatory.

LOL Yeah nothing should be wasted, I remember when "pencil fighting" was a "thing" (am I that old or are kids still doing this) and the pencils that lose usually end in the trash.

I always thought it was a waste of a perfectly good tool...

[eccerr0r]

Well, a salvage:
I had a 3 way 50-100-150W-equivalent CFL lamp. The tube had a weak spot on it and cracked

I opened it and took the ballast board out, rest of it probably goes to trash, I think all the mercury is gone after leaving it outside for a week.

The ballast board has two IRF630 clones on it, yay more spare mosfets!

[foxer]

I don't like spending money

[eccerr0r]

lol good job, alas I think I'd draw the line at that because I can't - with a no longer straight or accurate ruler...

[momaka]

Originally Posted by jiroy

This is or was a Sony x317 VHS system , given to me one year ago for free .
...
further on , three dead roashes was it ..

Ugh!
Yeah, anything with roaches is where I draw the line.

Case in point: I found a MW oven with a blown HV fuse on the HV output (5000V, 0.5 Amp.) Cap checked out OK. Diode - not sure. Electronics and door latches - all OK. MW was dropped, though (probably when it was thrown away), so the door was on slightly crooked. No gaps, but you could tell the front "face" was not quite right. The plastic button area on the side had cracks and was missing a piece. All in all, it was a fairly recent MW oven (2-3 years old, maybe), so seemed decent enough to fix up. However, the shape that it was in made me starting to doubt if I should. But once I got to the electronics / main PCB and found roach poop everywhere, then a few old roach eggs in the chassis - those were the final nails in the coffin. I stripped what useful parts it had and left it all outside in the freezing cold we had over Christmas. It was probably clear and free from roaches to work on afterwards... but at that point, I just didn't feel like putting more energy into it. If the fuse had blown due to a shorted magnetron, it surely wouldn't be worthwhile to fix. Perhaps I could have tried by shorting the fuse with a piece of thin wire... but again, I had drawn the line already and just scrapped it for parts. There are plenty of free MW ovens on CL here that another one was simply not needed. I already have a spare (that I also need to give away) and the following week also found another one that I donated shortly after (it was an old Samsung from the late 90's, and it worked just fine.)

Originally Posted by jiroy

By the way , I didn't forget to extract a good quantity of grease since this is best quality you can ever find and don't tell anyone I told you so

Can't go wrong with re-using good Lithium grease.
I used to do that a lot... but about 2 months ago, I just got tired of doing this all these years. So I went to Home Depot (hardware store chain here) and bought a big tube of Lithium grease for $5.

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

The ballast board has two IRF630 clones on it, yay more spare mosfets!

Glad to see I'm not the only one collecting dead bulbs for various projects.
CFLs seem to pack the best assortment of parts.
LEDs are kind of boring most of the time.
Incandescent are good for collecting the Tungsten. If you collect enough, it may be worth a good $ for scrap (or if building your own vacuum tubes?? )
I've also collected a few meant for recessed lighting. I've had this idea for a long time now to build a front light for my bike using the body of the dead recessed light bulb and some LEDs inside angled to make use of the reflector part. I suppose that would be more of a ghetto mod / creation than a worthless repair.

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

lol good job, alas I think I'd draw the line at that because I can't - with a no longer straight or accurate ruler...

Well, it's still accurate... so long as you use it for relative measures only (i.e. if you measure something to be 11" with this ruler, then you must use the same ruler when measuring something else. Otherwise, you'll get a disagreement.)

I also have a (soft) tape measure that suffers from this - the plastic has stretched, making the first 4-8 inches (10-20 cm) a little longer and more "stretched" than what real inches / cm should be. I used it like this for a long time without knowing when cutting various small lumber pieces for a few projects, and still didn't get more than a mm or so error... so I guess it's still somewhat useful. Now that I know, though, I don't use it for stuff where I need really good accuracy. In some cases, I can get up to 2 mm difference, which can be very annoying and not work right in some cases.

Originally Posted by foxer

I don't like spending money

Nice one foxer!

[jiroy]

Originally Posted by momaka

Ugh!
Yeah, anything with roaches is where I draw the line.

Case in point: I found a MW oven with a blown HV fuse on the HV output (5000V, 0.5 Amp.) Cap checked out OK. Diode - not sure. Electronics and door latches - all OK. MW was dropped, though (probably when it was thrown away), so the door was on slightly crooked. No gaps, but you could tell the front "face" was not quite right. The plastic button area on the side had cracks and was missing a piece.


Can't go wrong with re-using good Lithium grease.
I used to do that a lot... but about 2 months ago, I just got tired of doing this all these years. So I went to Home Depot (hardware store chain here) and bought a big tube of Lithium grease for $5.

Yep , roaches actually done lot of damage in the mechanism area , so no prob.. I've always have like 50-60 different devices to decide upon , either full tear-down or repairing . Actually , it put lot of stress on me , lol .. Once something is arranged in some box or drawer , find it if you can

I'm working now on many projects including a solar project ; actually an experimental one , deep into solar cells what's and what'snot .
About grease , I won't change my habits ,