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

STONE NT310-H laptop - broken hinge repair

Bit of an odd one this. Tonight I have been fixing a broken screen hinge on a laptop. Two things were odd.

First was that this was a "Stone" brand laptop. I've never of them before but the laptop seems like a nice one. The laptop is nice and thin and comes with a chiclet type keyboard. The specs on this model weren't massive but once I'd finished the repair, the laptop started up quickly, ran quietly, and seemed to function fine.

Second, it didn't appear that the hinge had actually broken. Rather, a bunch of screws from the casing had dropped out at some point. The resultant slack had resulted in the complete hinge popping out:

And here is the popped-out hinge. It looks as though the only thing stopping the whole thing popping apart is some wiring that passes from the main board into the screen surround:

So, now it was time to take it apart. I couldn't find anything on the net about this so I just unscrewed the (few) screws that were left  in the lower casing. I also removed the two access panels and removed the memory and HDD. I also had to remove the wireless card to access the flexi connector for the keyboard. There were two other flexi connectors which also needed disconnecting. All three passed through slots in the main board. I made a mental note of their configuration:

The next picture is of the "broken" hinge. The hinge is still attached to a plate that ought to be screwed to the inside of the lower case. This plate had become detached from the case. The brass "sockets" for the screws had pulled clear of their plastic housings in the case:

So with the aid of a pair of pliers I removed the brass sockets and super-glued them back into the case:

During dis-assembly I also noted that one of the mouse pads mounted on the underneath of the top panel had become detached. This seemed to be a failure of a plastic weld. I super-glued it back in place. No idea how long that part of the repair will last...

I left things to harden and then began the re-assembly. This was a bit tricky because I was about six screws short. Moreover, it was evident that several of the screws were into plastic rather metal thread. The screws wouldn't really tighten. I therefore dabbed a bit of super glue on each one. As far as the top corners go, I found that the screws holding my Dell Mini 10 together were a perfect match. I borrowed a couple which I put through the case and into the hinges. End result: a fixed laptop :)

More soon, no doubt...

D

Samsung RV511 - Windows 10 Upgrade fun

So, I'm asked to "sort" this very nice looking Samsung RV511 laptop. I'm not entirely sure of the specs but the keyboard and screen are very nice. The laptop is running Windows 7 Home Premium. I offered to clean up the OS and take it through the free Windows 10 upgrade process. Having started the laptop up, it was clear it was heavily infected with malware and probably had a virus too. It's performance was woeful, and the three browsers (Chrome, IE and Firefox), had various hijacks. In my experience, that's fairly typical for a teenage girl's laptop and the root cause seems to be "free" emoticon packs. No doubt I could have spent some time cleaning the thing up but I decided a re-install of Windows 7 was the first order of the day. The install (Win 7 with SP1) was uneventful and within 30 minutes I had a laptop with (re)activated Windows 7 which was really flying.

Now for Windows 10. Since its release in August, I have been asked to install the Windows 10 upgrade on numerous machines (old and new). I therefore have all the various incarnations of the Windows 10 installation media on numerous USB keys. For this laptop, I slotted in the appropriate key and began the upgrade from within Windows 7. That part of the process completed successfully and the machine rebooted. It was here that things went awry. The process simply stopped on the Windows start screen. I left the machine running like that for an hour but with no apparent progress, I couldn't resist rebooting and trying again. Same problem. So I did a quick google for RV511 and Windows 10 upgrade and it appears I'm just one of many who have hit the same snag. Moreover, the issue is actually with the Broadcom WIFI card in this laptop which seems to prevent the upgrade. The specific card is the BCM94313HMGB and appears to be a dual WIFI/Bluetooth card. The solution, then, is to take the machine apart and swap the WIFI card for something else. As it happened, I'd recently been given a faulty Dell Mini 10 which needed a new motherboard. The second-hand replacement from Ebay came with a WIFI card still attached. This was also a Broadcom card BCM94312HMG. So, I followed this excellent tutorial on youtube and took the laptop apart. I swapped the WIFI card over, partially re-assembled and switched the machine on. This time the upgrade completed without any issues. Windows 10 even installed the driver for the new card. Happy days.

Some pictures:

The picture above compares the two cards (top - original equipment, bottom - from the Dell mobo)

More soon, no doubt...

D

Android tablet - broken power /charge socket (Part One)

Amongst everything else last week, I did a favor for a friend and installed the free Windows 10 upgrade on his Acer One netbook. It ought to have been more straightforward than it was but his copy of Windows 7 was corrupt. I ended up reinstalling Windows 7, activating it, and then doing the Win10 upgrade. All good. By way of payment, I suppose, I was presented with this Android tablet. It's just had a new screen fitted but the battery is flat and won't charge. It's mine if I can fix it. The problem is clear - the tiny pin inside the power/charge socket has broken off. It looks like a straightforward repair if I can find a suitable replacement surface mounted socket. The question is "should I bother?" Other than it being a tablet running Android, I know nothing about it (spec, version, etc). I'll probably sort it anyway. I don't need a tablet but I was thinking about adding the Plex app and then fixing it to the wall in the kitchen and hooking up to my pioneer A400 amp which lives in the kitchen. One can never have too many gadgets...

More soon, no doubt....


D