Ford Mondeo ST24: towing conundrum

My car broke down the other day. The fuel pump has packed up. Weather permitting, I'll be fitting a new one over the weekend and no doubt there'll be some pics of that on this blog at some point. Anyway, the breakdown meant I needed a tow home. And since there was, to my horror, no towing eye bolt to be found in my car, I had to borrow one. Since ST24's are a bit thin on the ground, I was looking for a bolt from any MK2 Mondeo. I couldn't find one, but my brother did manage to cadge the two bolts in the picture below. The black one is from a 58 plate Fiesta. The other is from some sort of Vauxhall. Turns out that both fit the ST24. Just sayin' :)

More soon, no doubt....

D

ASUS X5EA (K51AE) - baked to perfection....

As with all posts on this blog, I'm typing this entry up on my trusty ASUS X5EA laptop. I've had this laptop for about 18 months, given to me for free by a friend who had upgraded. I think it's about six years old. Specification is ok or, at least, perfectly fine for my requirements. It's had some issues though and I've lost count of the number of times I've had to open it up and fiddle with something inside. One problem that I've never managed to resolve is with the boot-up. If the laptop is up and running, it will reboot without any issues. However, if it is shut down or allowed to go to sleep, it is a real pig to get going again. Indeed, the problem is such a pain in the ass that I've set it to never sleep and I have it running 24 hours a day. Of course, sometimes it does end up inadvertently being switched off and then I spend an hour or two trying to get it going again.

This was the position a couple of days ago however, try as I might, it simply would not start. On pressing the power button, the power LED would light up. The hard drive and DVD would power cycle and then nothing. It just sat there, seemingly not even reaching the BIOS stage. After two days of arsing about with it (including leaving the CMOS out for a day and leaving it in the freezer for 6 hours), I was ready to chuck it. Once that stage is reached, when all seems lost, I find that it is time to switch the oven on. Whilst the oven was warming up to 220c, I stripped the laptop down and removed the motherboard. I removed all the plastic parts and stickers, and covered delicate components such as capacitors and SATA ports with tin foil. I also ran some liquid no-clean flux under the GPU and Southbridge chips and around other areas where the existing solder looked a bit iffy. And then I baked the f*ck out of it (for 8 minutes). Re-assembly was straightforward using the photos I had taken when I was pulling it apart (see below). Started first time :)

I've no idea whether this is any sort of long-term solution. However, lappy is working and that's enough for me right now.

More soon, no doubt...

D

Parkside Cordless Multigrinder PFBS 9.6 A1 (Lidl) - overheat repair

I got this multi-grinder thing from Lidl about 18 months ago. I think I paid £20 for it.

It's ok, but I don't think it's anything like on a par with a Dremmel (which I intend to buy as soon as funds permit...). Anyway, I was using my multi-grinder the other night and to be fair, I was asking a lot of it (and, as things turned out, too much of it). I thought I was trimming some low-density fibre board but on closer inspection, it actually seemed to be some sort of laminate. Anyway, I'd started the cut so thought I'd persist with it. After about a minute at full chat the motor simply stopped. All the charge lights were still working but the unit was basically dead. There was also a fried-electrics smell in the air. I let the grinder cool down but it still didn't work. Naturally, I then took the grinder apart for a look:

The grinder is in two halves. Remove the five self-tapping screws, the end collet, and the wrist strap. Then break open but keep a hand or finger over the button for the spindle lock as there's a spring under there which will ping off if you're not careful...

With the grinder in half, one problem was immediately apparent. The (what I now know to be) motor speed controller (NCE50N06) had got so hot that the solder around it had melted and it had slipped off its pad!

That was a couple of weeks ago. Tonight I had a spare hour so I got my soldering station out and hit the chip with some hot air. It's solder melted (again) and I re-positioned the chip. I then re-soldered it and partially rebuilt the tool so I could stick the battery back in and test it. It worked!

So, it's now all back together and working fine. Easy!

More soon, no doubt...

D