Remington HC500A hair clippers: battery replacement

Here we have my trusty Remington hair clippers.

I've had them for about 7 or 8 years.

They've saved me a fortune in hair cuts and must have paid for themselves many times over by now. However, for the last few years they've been suffering from a knackered battery. The battery does charge but I only just manage a single hair cut out of it. My concern is that one day I'll only manage half a cut....

So, I thought I'd have a look inside and see if the battery could be replaced. I opened these up a couple of weeks ago and it turns out that battery replacement is quite straightforward. In short, the original battery is actually three rechargeable (NiMH) AAA batteries soldered together to make a pack, and then soldered to a circuit board. I've got a drawer full of rechargeable AAAs so my first thought was to make something up. Then, for reasons unconnected to this project, I joined Amazon Prime and thought I'd have a poke about to see what was available. Eventually I settled on these from BAKTH which at 900maH have slightly more oomph than the Sanyos that are fitted into my clippers. A triple pack (3 x 3) comes in at £6.99 delivered so I thought I'd take a punt.

As I say, I've already had these clippers open once so taking them apart today was very easy. However, taking them apart last week was a bit harder. This is because it is difficult to see how they are actually put together. In the picture below a screw hole is clearly visible. However the holes are actually bunged up with plastic. Stick a sharp screw driver into the bungs and lever the plastic out. This basically destroys the bungs but they are only there for aesthetics.

With the bungs out, remove the screw from each hole. Note that the longer screw is fitted at the charging point end. Then remove the blades by undoing the two small flat screws...

If this is the first time you've had the blades off, now would be a good time to give this area a good clean :). The knob on the side which angles the head is next. Remove the plastic cap and screw inside...

Now remove the orange trim which is just clipped on...

In the picture below I'm splitting the clippers in half. Note the area that I've circled - there's a (probably rusty) staple in there which needs pulling out first...

The clippers are now in half. Back to the head. Remove the white gear....

Remove the head itself (after noting where the cam on the motor shaft fits). Note also the small spring-loaded brass thing (which has become detached in this picture)...

Undo the screw for the battery retainer and remove it...

Slide the old battery pack out. Remove and retain the foam padding...

Note the polarity of the wires, cut and trim them, and solder the new pack in. Replace the foam and slide the new battery pack in...

Before re-assembly (which is the reverse of the above procedure), check your handy work has been a success by pressing the little blue button inside the clippers (highlighted below). If all is well, the motor should operate and you can reassemble.

Easy!

More soon, no doubt...



D

STONE NT310-H laptop - hard drive replacement

This post is as much for my own records as anything else. This fine Stone laptop came back to me having been dropped. Symptoms were permanent hang on the boot-up splash screen and an unpleasant clicking sound coming from the hard drive. The OS was/is Windows 8. Diagnosis - knackered hard drive. Having obtained a replacement drive (same WD Blue but 500GB rather than 320), I set about the repair.

Here's the laptop from the top.

The hard drive is accessed by removing the two screws and small panel from underneath:

Ta da!

The hard drive is just wedged in. The two screws towards the right-hand side simply hold the plastic dust cover on. The top side of the drive has some foam pieces on it to take up the space in the enclosure: 

It's about as budget as humanly possible...

Here are the old and new drives (with the foam pieces swapped over):

So, with the new drive slotted into place, I re-fitted the cover. Easy. But what about re-installing the OS? I knew from a previous pic I'd taken that the machine had been running Windows 8.1 before it went wrong. But with the old hard drive broken, it was impossible to check for the license key and Windows 8 machines don't have COA stickers. What to do? I started the machine:

Eh? So I ducked into the BIOS (F2 on start-up). Turns out this machine is running UEFI. Since I've never had to deal with that before I did a bit of reading. The good news was that the Windows 8 key was hidden somewhere in the BIOS. The bad news was that I had no idea which version of Windows 8 was previously running and installing the wrong one would mean the key stored in the BIOS would not work. So I took the plunge with bog-standard Windows 8.1. I downloaded the ISO direct from Microsoft (by way of the Media Creation Tool). I then burned the ISO to a USB stick using Rufus and the special settings required for UEFI: 

Installation went smoothly (with these details in mind) but it did ask me for a key. This meant I was on the wrong version of Windows 8. I continued with the install using a key borrowed from this site. 

The installation completed and Windows 8 was up and running. I then ran ShowKeyPlus with the following results. You can see which key I used to get the install done. You can also see the actual OEM license key on the machine and which version of Windows 8 I should have installed:

So, I went through the process again but first downloaded Windows 8.1Pro from Microsoft for the install. No key was required during the install and once up and running, ShowKeyPlus returned the following result and Windows activated itself:

Happy days. I ran windows update and the first thing it suggested was the free upgrade to Windows 10. Obviously, this was always on the cards and having obtained consent from the owner, I'm putting the laptop through that process now:

More soon, no doubt...

D 

[Update - the upgrade to Windows 10 Pro went without a hitch]