Comments on: Ghetto electronics repair

By: edric

edric — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 06:03:32 +0000

guess this is a necro bump here but who cares. long ago my dad and I were on a hunting venture, in the old junky truck. Come to find out, my friend and I who’d worked on it to ready it for adventure had bolted the intake manifold on top of some important wires. 500 miles later and in the middle of nowhere, the thing catches fire, shorts out and drains the battery. The wiring repairs were pretty easy, but we overlooked the need for having a battery charger handy. We did find an old vacuum cleaner in the behind the hunting cabin though, and there was plenty of 110v outlets handy. A quick ghetto rig and an hour later, we had charged the battery by spinning the alternator with the vacuum cleaner motor. Made it to the deer stand the next day, and killed our deer. Rednecks ftw

By: h-bomb

h-bomb — Fri, 14 May 2010 16:24:17 +0000

Have a cell phone charger that only works when the phone is dangling from the wallwart, putting tension on the cord. Too lazy to resolder.

By: Alex B

Alex B — Thu, 13 May 2010 18:53:00 +0000

I remember back in the 90s resetting of password protected detachable face mercedes car stereos required placing the faceplate in the freezer for a day or so.

By: catsaiyan

catsaiyan — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:42:20 +0000

2 days ago i fix my friends psp that the screen was b&w till hit or booted upsided down i opened it up and fiddled with the screen it worked till i put the home pause ect buttons back on it went back to b&w till i put the buttons on it worked next fix a wd ipod touch

By: Captain Zilog

Captain Zilog — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:26:20 +0000

Don’t be a doubter…

This is the sh!t.

I baked a systemboard from a Gateway 450SX4 as a last throw against purchasing another systemboard. I could push the video chip and the video would scramble and/or clear. After baking it – viola! A working laptop. Survived a 24 hour system stress test and my niece on Christmas day for several hours!

So, I wreckless eyeballed my old IBM Thinkpad T21 which would just lock up and die, yet when you pushed the power button, it would reboot and restart, just to lock up again. Let it cool down – and it would work for maybe 45 minutes before crapping out again. Baked the systemboard, and I watched Reservoir Dogs this afternoon and am posting from the T21 right now!

Hey – if you have nothing else to lose and have the skill to disassemble and reassemble it – give it a try! All you’ll waste is time – or, like me – resurrect two dead laptops!!!!!

By: xavieronassis

xavieronassis — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:49:12 +0000

This isn’t as cool as most fixes here but I was pretty proud of myself.
I had removed a hard drive from my homebrew computer and found that the molex plug was so tight on one of the power pins that it pulled the pin out of the plastic on the hd.
I had an old dead drive (never throw anything away!) so I desoldered one of it’s pins and was able to push it through the good drive’s plastic connector and get it soldered into place. Actually, that was my second attempt as the first time the connector end of the pin bent then broke off when I straightened it.

Great stories – keep ‘em coming.

By: anon

anon — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:02:06 +0000

one i remeber ding is using paper clips to build a hard drive caddy for my pentium. it only had one hard drive spot, so i used the paper clips to mount one drive to the next. shes still running a vpn server to this day. id have to say the worst one ive done was to a micro computer. it had some proprietary seize power supply, and i had one that almost fit, but was about an inch too long. so out comes the dremel tool to cut the case, and a notch out of the 3.5 drive. its still running to this day afaik

By: jimmy

jimmy — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 04:29:50 +0000

I took my old legend of zelda game for the NES and stuck 2 AAs in it to replace the original battery that keeps the saves.

I also ran 2 wires in my car, one from the battery to the front seat, and one from the front seat to the fuel pump connecter in the trunk, i would twist them together to run my fuel pump, worked for almost a year after that.

By: Cliff

Cliff — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 03:43:04 +0000

I can coincide with the failed PSU fan hack, I had used not only electrical tape, but a standard drywall screw to kludge a spare one over the back to keep the supply from overheating and knocking off the machine. Worked till I had finally upgraded to a slightly faster machine.

Half the wiring in my car is rigged up by now thanks to a hosed wiring bundle going under the engine.

By: noviewon

noviewon — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:54:41 +0000

I have a hp laptop that had a bad hd. I tried the freezing it and it worked pretty well for about 6-8 months. I was very pleased with myself.

By: bill

bill — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 20:05:25 +0000

That’s 1980′s, not 1908′s! Jeez.

By: bill

bill — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:43:29 +0000

Back in the 1908′s a couple of friends and I went camping WAAAAY out in the woods. The site had electricity, but no phone, and this was before cell phones were ubiquitous.

Being dumb teenagers, we pulled the battery out of the car and used it to troll all over the lake for two days. Surprise, the car wouldn’t start. Couldn’t push-start it, because every direction that wasn’t uphill was into the lake.

I pulled the tail lights out of the car and began poking around inside the old “hi-fi” (complete with turntable and 8-track!) in the cabin until I found a voltage that lit a bulb up nicely without blowing it. Sliced up an extension cord to make jumpers, and charged the battery overnight.

If that had failed, my backup plan was to suspend a bicycle in a tree by bungee chords so that the back wheel rested on the alternator pulley in the car, and then pedal like mad! Fortunately, I didn’t have to try that.

Just yesterday I pulled a Dell 1907FPt monitor out of the trash across the street. It appeared that someone had been stabbing the on/off button with a screwdriver to get it to start. I pulled the button out and enlarged the hole to expose the little button on the circuit board, and it works fine. Using it now.

Also pulled a DVD player out of the trash. It had been rained on, so I opened it up and placed it in front of a fan for a few hours. Haven’t tried to use it yet, though.

By: shuttle128

shuttle128 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 04:24:24 +0000

I’ve fixed two cars with the same problem each costing exactly one penny.

On a few older cars the brake lights will light up and stay lit after the car is parked and off. The problem is that the brake pedal arm no longer reaches the switch that opens the circuit to prevent the lights from coming on. Being the practical guy that I am, I superglued a penny onto the brake arm just above the switch to add the extra millimeter of range needed to depress it. It’s been 3 years and both cars are doing just fine with the ghetto solution.

I’ve also done the pot adjust on the PS2 laser to get some extra life out of my dying gen1 PS2. The thing’s still chugging along.

I fixed my girlfriend’s laptop’s screen hinges on several occasions. The hinge design of the HP Pavilion ze2000 are complete crap. They are held to the base frame by 4 quarter inch screws. These quarter inch screws take lateral strains that no screw of that size should take and the heads consistently shear off. After looking around town for replacement screws and finding none I finally cannibalized an old Dell we had lying around for parts. Lo and behold the screws taken from the Dell worked like a charm.

By: drr

drr — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:54:00 +0000

My T-Mobile MDA is the Franken-Phone… reassembled from a “parts phone” and re-soldered here and there. Mostly works. I just can’t stand the idea of entering another contract to avoid paying full price for another PDA phone.

By: signal7

signal7 — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:25:03 +0000

I think everyone has done a ghetto repair at some point or another. No technical training is required.

A LOT of things die due to faulty solder connections. Easy to fix, ghetto or otherwise.

I used to fix old Sun4 workstations where the BIOS battery would die due to age. Just pop out the BIOS chip, use a dremel tool to remove the chip casing until you get to the internal battery contacts (these chips had integral batteries encapsulated inside the chip casing). Solder on a CR2032 battery holder, reinstall the chip, reprogram the system id, and you’d be up and running for another 4 years.