It’s often nice to have the ability to fix things when they go wrong, get yourself out of a jam when needed, or avoid costly service calls.
On the other hand, being kinda handy can be kinda a pain in the ass. 🙄
A recent example, my sister invites us to her place in Havascrew ( which is actually our old house that we sold her when we moved-but that’s another story 😄😄) for a Christmas get together right before Christmas.
Cool!
Except “ Hey, seeing as you’re coming down here anyway, could you look at this thing we’re having problems with? Pretty please?”
Aw crap. 😄😄🤷♂️
It’s my sister-how am I supposed to say no?!
( Actually, my sister and I are very close, and neither of us have much issue telling the other to fuck off when we need to. 😄😄 But that actually rarely happens, and we often help each other. ❤️)
So anyway, she’s acquired some old screen printing equipment, and the ink curing heater has unknown issues. But the fact that it’s got issues is apparent when you go to plug it in.
The fact that the cord cap has obviously suffered some damage is readily apparent. But perhaps more disturbing is the fact that it was a 120 volt twist lock on a 240 volt machine. So someone had been doing some pretty questionable electrical work on this thing.
We opened up the control panel to see if we could figure out what else might be going on with it.
There was plenty to find. 😄😄😬
The first thing were these heat damaged loose crimp terminals. Loose electrical connections can do some strange things.
It’s not real obvious in this picture of the dubiously re-wired controls that someone did, but this machine had suffered at least one significant electrical failure where magic smoke had been let out as was evidenced by the black carbon trails all over the inside of the cabinet.
Here I am tracing the mess and figuring out what is what. There was obviously no schematic For this thing that someone had gotten creative with in the wiring department.
Once all the loose connections had been addressed and a new and correct cord end had been installed, we fired up the heater/conveyor to see if it would work or if more magic smoke would come out.
It worked, but one of the two ceramic heating elements wasn’t coming producing any heat, so time to take it further apart.
The heating elements issue was pretty apparent-the victim of yet another loose connection.
We salvaged as much of the high temperature wire as we could, crimped on a new high temperature terminal, and then attempted to drill out the heating elements connector to accept a ring terminal with a nut and screw.
Turns out it was made out of stainless steel that had been heat cycled too many times and after smoking two drill bits we realized there was just no way we were going to successfully drill a hole in this thing that had become so hard.
So out came the welder.
One carefully placed tack weld and it was as good as it was ever going to be.
So we put it back together.
Then it was time for a couple of beers ( hey-technically we were on vacation!!) while we let it run and monitored the temperature with a heat gun.
Success!
It was working as good as it was going to, now she will just have to figure out the adjustments.