Technician Strange for you, bastard.

Soundtrack:

Patient presents absolute lack of sensitivity on one of it’s moving members, can’t tell it’s position, open or closed. X-Ray reveals broken blood supply and nerve:

Closeup, it’s really a mess:

Boss prognosis: Irrepairable.

Me: Nope, it can be done.

Boss: No, it’s too close to the base.

Me: Watch me.

Inductive sensor is sedated:

I carefully cut the sheath of the cables:

Exposing as much as possible (later I removed as many resin as I could up to the metal).

Cable is completely destroyed, it is missing like half a millimetre of wires, all broken in pieces.

Apply some solder paste and heat with a really fine tip, repeat as needed to extend the solder up the cable in both directions.

There, it’s not pretty, but will hold.

Cover in shrinkwrap:

Next!

Same, expose, apply paste, heat, repeat:

Much better, ain’t it?

I did the same for the third cable, but it is pointless to show it.

Aaaaand, of course, it worked.

BTW, this post is funnier if you actually saw the movie. ;)

 

The F word.

That’s what you utter when this happens:

There’s not much to be said for a repair other than “rape”:

It is important to note that the integrity of the face surface must not be compromised. This is one of the oldest repairs and I used quite big drills, nowadays I use more and smaller holes.

Aaaand that’s it.

Tin Whisker

Of course this doesn’t have anything to do with the satellite killer, but it is surely going to avoid being detected in visual inspection:

Here’s it’s big brother (same production run):

I wonder if someone’s hair got covered somehow in solderpaste and it just shortcircuited everything…(it may not be even possible for a hair to survive oven temps, who knows?)

All the wires were cut and the boards worked fine.

There, I fixed it! (II)

So, a small piece of plastic broke in the scoring machine:

It’s just a limiter, but we fiddle with it a few times each day, so it is not surprising (to me, cos I’m the only one who really knows the ins and outs of the machine) that it broke. I had already changed the set screw for a levered one, so I didn’t need a tool to adjust cutting depth. Basically, this machine is made to be set once in a loong while, and leave it alone.

And thus, we where waiting for the replacement part…but it’s been three weeks since, and enough is enough:

This is NOT a shark bite. XD!

Since I made the piece at work, and didn’t had infinite time to do it, it’s a bit…well…that’s the best I could do AT work. (It’s fun when you can do better metalworking at home than at work, it makes life weird).

Anyhow, here’s the temporary piece:

It sort of works, altough we’re not cutting aluminium boards, just in case.

Lightfuck II, the total internal reflection breakup.

So, we were working on these light fixtures wich have glued optics…until someone found that glue was seeping below the lenses and causing all sorts of light artifacts (basically fucking up the light pattern)

Aaaand…who you gonna call? Yep, ME!

At first I was afraid I might have to remove all the optics, wich might be a pain in the ass. After I got to it and did two units (of 25) in about an hour, that wasn’t the way to go.
On a second thought, I was able to seep a steel gauge underneath and lift the optic around the glue. That was sort of Ok, altough it scratched the plastic a bit, and I couldn’t reach some spots.

As a stroke of luck, I did something (can’t remember exactly what), wich led me to nottice that aplying a very thin flat screwdriver in between lenses, efectively lifted the lens as the gauge did, but was quickier and didn’t damage anything.

Yeah, much better.

Oh, and by the way, I was the one who glued those 25 units. ^^U!!!!!!!!!

The last metalbender

What to do when you find one of your big-ass heatsinks, wich already has attached an expensive led board, has bent fins?

You un-bend-it!

Use two aluminium plates to avoid damage by scrapping, then, wedge with lateral movement a phillips screwdriver.

There  you go (white dots in the slot are just residue from scrapping the sacrificial plates).

v

Overclocking

-“This board lights too much”

Well, there’s your problem.

Seriously?

This came as a new board from the assembler.

Dear Mr. Fabber, FUCK YOU, and I hope it hurts.

Palsy patients can do better soldering than that, man!

Board status: REPAIRED

Six degrees of separation

Okay, not that the tittle corresponds to an angular measurement, but look at the following picture:

Guess what.

Yup, topmost board has too much spacing, and needs to be repaired to look like the bottom one. Since my bosses refuse to buy a hot air soldering station, I always have to resort to alternative ways of repair.

Using Weyland Yutani alien removal technology, it’s easy, altough slow, to move 0,5mm backwards the connectors:

However, now picture having to do it for 1k boards…

Yup…I’ve spent already 12 hours doing that…and went just over half the boards. I must say, tough, it is an interesting exercise in concentration and patience. I’ll tell you my feelings when the job is done.

The deaf millipede.

If you train a millipede to come on voice command,
and rip all his legs after training,
It will become deaf.

    – Old proberb I just invented –

This is how I change chips from boards when I don’t have a hot air station.

1st: Cut the legs. CA-RE-FU-LLY

 

 

2nd: remove legs with a soldering iron:

Didn’t take a photo of third step, wich was clean with solder wick, solder new chip. (If you needed photos of that…seriously, go somewhere else but this blog)

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