Interactive toy repair

How can you fix stuff, without taking it apart first.

What kind of engineer are you ??

We all know, it can not be fixed without looking at every chip inside and laugh at the engineer that created this little toy.

Does NIH mean anything to you !!

;-)

hamilton

"If it's broken, I can fix it, if it's working, I can break it"?

On a sunny day (Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:33:20 -0700) it happened Tim Wescott wrote in :

Many years ago somebody asked me to look at a defective BW TV. I checked it, and all seemed to be working normally, including all voltages on the CRT, but no picture, black screen. So I sort of decided that the CRT was kaput, and said: The picture tube is defective, I cannot get inside it, only God can do that. While I said that I put my hand on the TV, and a big flash happened inside and the picture appeared.

A tech. I'm one of those guys that gets those blue-sky designs from the engineers and makes them work in real life. ;-P

The only thing I can think of is "Not In Here."

Thanks! Rich

It occurred to me recently that the way techs are trained is basically, "in the real world, this is what needs to be done to make things work... but we don't really have time to address all the 'whys and wherefores'..." whereas engineering education is closer to, "starting from these abstract, idealized models, we can build up all sorts of fancy theories and techniques to design widgets ostensibly for the real world," with an implicit, "...just address any and all 'real world considerations' as they present themselves..."

Not all engineers succeed in that second part very well -- hence the value of a good tech to get the clueless engineer's design to actually work!

Not Invented Here.

If I didn't invent/design it, then it must be wrong.

I remember a fellow techy getting his balls ripped out for some shitty soldering, he let the engineering manager finish berating him before he told him that the work was actually done by one of the senior engineers. We all found it quite amusing.

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Oh for the days of tube TVs, when most problems could be fixed by a trip to Radio Shack.

Radio Shack? What's that? We'd pull all the tubes and take them to the corner store, where the tube tester was. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

If this were true, there would have been no TV shops. Tubes were well under 10% of the parts we purchased every month and you didn't get most of the others from Radio Shack.

Then take it to a TV shop after you put the 'GOOD' tubes back in. All that type tester showed was emission and it might have a low grade leakage tester. People used to pick up the bad tubes after a repair and run to the nearest U-test-um tester then come back and claim they were ripped off. Or they would put them back in the TV and cause more problems. The only time you could trust one of those free tube testers was when a tube didn't light up, and only if the sockets were still good.

this?"

it

I can now say, with a wink...

You return the tubes to the customer that you replaced during the repair (actually I'd call it "maintenance" when only tube replacements are required).

However the filaments are zapped :-) ...Jim Thompson

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and

boom, it

miracle.

We simply recorded the brand and date codes for when they brought the set back to complain, then offered to call the police so they could complain. If they were stupid enough to make the call, we had the evidence. :)

That's delicious. :-)