OT: Kodak AC adaptor failure

If you know what's wrong with it before you look at it, you can't fix it in six minutes. Maybe one. Maybe two, if you're all set up, but not 8 hours a day.

That's this A1265 here:

The 10:1 mark-up is a bit on the low side, usually the middle-thieves go fo r 50:1. The Chinese usually want a $1500 USD minimum bulk order which is ne xt to nothing for a re-seller. The electronics is nothing, the really dange rous stuff is their food, and the leech re-sellers are pushing that hard to o. The world is bloated with middle-thieves looking to make a killing while doing little more than pecking a keyboard.

com

com

good.

They have a a good design, power factor corrected flyback with opto isolate d feedback. But I hardly call mutilating the package and changing out obvio usly damaged components, without regard to their specification, and no chec kout beyond a VOM measurement of output voltage under steady state load, a repair.

You should try Mikeselectricstuff's way of opening these cases by hitting they with a screwdriver handle. I tried it and it works very neatly.

Closing the case securely after the repair is the remaining problem, which might be solved using adhesives, depending on the type of plastic involved.

Chris

On a sunny day (Fri, 24 Jan 2014 17:51:36 +1100) it happened Chris Jones wrote in :

Cool, will try it when the next one fails ;-)

All that video needs is captions in English! Mikek

On a sunny day (Fri, 24 Jan 2014 08:44:39 -0600) it happened amdx wrote in :

I actually had no problem decoding that. It is English the way it is spoken by many in England (UK). I had a lot more problem understanding the Altera sales talk by some Indian sales person trying to speak US English for example, actually mentioned that to them in the fgpa group years ago. But the guy does carry on a bit...

Chuckle.. all that flint napping as cavemen in our past was good for something. (about 6 minutes into the 43 minute video.)

George H.

Thanks, but that's not it. The above coulomb meter is actually digital. If you look at the 2nd photo on the eBay page, it has an LED bar graph display calibrated in 100's of hours. That's certainly more accurate than an electrochemical timer, but much too large and expensive for terminating a products useful life, which would affect future projected sales.

they should have put some of the glue slop on the output filter cap, to prevent it from venting.

Why is everybody obsessed with that nasty glue when it comes to making horrible power supplies?

I've only seen those in expensive equipment from around the time you mention. I don't know who made them, but they were called "chemical timers", which is probably the layman's term for them.

(AFAIK) should be safe

charger in a bathtube...

Or anywhere at all.

?-)

relying

checked

That is the high priced ones. I am much more nervous about the $3 ones.

?-)

Because the yellow (acrylic) glue eats parts and becomes conductive when it turns brown. It' also makes it very difficult to make repair and replace parts. I hate the stuff, especially since ordinary hot melt glue would have done as good a job:

Besides, you already know the answer:

I've seen one of those things, once, I think, in a Tek scope.

Of course you'll die from Chisso-Minamata disease if you use one of those poison-filled hour meters from hell.

Still available from Lithuania ..

This guy said they were never actually used for anything useful in the Tek scopes:

"I've seen these PCB-mounted hour meters on just a very few Tek products, more on the upper end items. The newer 490-series spectrum analyzers were one; there may have been on installed in the transient digitizers of the 1970s and 1980s, but I'm not sure. I really don't know WHY they ever installed them. It had nothing to do with warranty (we always looked up instruments by model and serial number on microfiche if there was a question of when it was sold -- and to whom it was sold in some rare cases of suspected theft) or with any kind of maintenance or CRT life (the microchannel plate CRT of the 7104 comes to mind here). I guess sometimes engineers get a wild hair ("Hey, look at this cool device! Let's design it into the 492s!")."

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Some government contracts required the hour meters. Mostly mil contracts.

I guess it would be pointless to ask why, but why? They were hidden inside on a PCB.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Maybe there is a MTBF specification? When I worked at Bendix in the late

No problem. Just attach a warning label "DO NOT EAT". Skimming the patents, I didn't see any mercury but the Russian made meter certainly is full of mercury. I guess I could make my own:

Nice, but the one I recall was nearly flat. It should work, but 2500 hrs is too little.

Ok, let's do some reverse engineering. Tom Miller suggested that it may have been required by some MIL spec. If that were true, the logical location would be on the rear panel of the instrument, or accessible through a removable hatch or panel where it can be read without disassembling the instrument. It seems that on a PCB is a rather odd location.

In my never humble opinion, the most reasonable reason for burying it on a PCB is that it may have once been intended to serve an electrical function. One of the patents for an electrochemical timer that I found offered a pair of contacts that closed at EOL (end of life). It could easily be used as a warranty timer. My guess(tm) is that Tek may have wanted to offer a warranty based on runtime, but changed their mind before the product was released. It would be interesting to check if there were any "extra" traces running from the device to something that would display "Renew your warranty now or this instrument is going to die".