N
[email protected]
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
A short tale of taking extreme measures to try to fix electronic gear.
"N_Cook" oughta especially appreciate this.
So I found this receiver in the dumpster where I live--Aiwa
"home-entertainment"-type of unit, meaning probably medium-fi for people
whose idea of good sound is lots of thumping bass: has presets for
"dance", "rock", "pop", "hall", "arena", etc., etc.
Plugged it in and the display lit up with "AM 12:00", but no response
from any controls. OK, time to open it up.
Inside, everything--every circuit board and component--was covered with
a fine light-brown powder, with a couple of leaves here and there.
Evidently, the whole thing had been submerged in muddy water at some point.
Hmmm, what to do? Got $0.00 in it so far. So I did the only reasonable
thing: drug it outside, hooked up the hose, and sprayed it liberally
with clear water. Got all the mud out, so far as I could tell.
I took it inside, let it dry for 2 days. Today, I powered it up, and
whaddya know? It responded to the "power/standby" switch. Heard the
relay click and everything. Responded to every function. Even the tuner
appeared to work.
Of course, the downside is that the damn thing doesn't work. No sound;
obviously some serious problems there somewhere. And the tuner wouldn't
lock onto any signals. But I was surprised that so much of it functioned
normally. I expected the display to be toast, or the logic completely blown.
So I'm just sayin', if you ever encounter a piece of equipment that's
been in a flood, and if you need to get at least part of it working for
some reason, you could try this method.
At this point, it's not worth my time or effort to attempt any further
repairs on this unit. But at least it was fun.
Been there, done that.
Long ago, in a time when a Motorola Motrac was current two-way mobile
radio technology. I was given two VHF (130-175MHz) units that had
been in a truck that went into a river.
I used a toothbrush and water to clean the circuit boards and even
cleaned the mud out of the front end cavities. Since the radios were
without the control heads, I built a nice one with both pulse and tone
dialing built-in. Eventually I had a very good 2 meter mobile ham
radio.
It's been a long time since my ham gear was commercial
state-of-the-art ;-)
John