Pet hates ?

Heat sink compound is usually very necessary.

One of my pet hates is torx screws with a pin in the center.

Me and white heatsink goo have a very bad working relationship. I only have to walk into the workshop when there's something on the bench using it, and all of a sudden, I'm covered in the rotten stuff, without even going near the bench. At least it seems that way ... :-\

Arfa

conductive

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The harware that I always have problems with in the UK , never organised a stock of, is UNF and UNC nuts and bolts for USA kit. And of course,vice versa, repairers in USA never have metric (and lesser extent BA) for UK and Japanese kit

Poodles.

I once got in a lot of trouble with my boss when I was young and worked for a U.S. based company. At that time, I didn't understand that there was a big difference between British 'tongue-in-cheek' humour, and the much more direct U.S. type. I was talking on the phone to one of the designers of a piece of equipment that we sold here in the UK, and asked the guy if he could arrange to send me some screws for the cabinet, as they were a thread that we didn't readily get over here. He asked if I knew exactly what size they were so I replied, quick as a flash, thinking that I was being funny, "I guess that they are round about 3/16ths APF." "What's APF ?" the guy asked. "American Piss Fit", said I ...

Stony silence on the phone. Half an hour later, I was summoned to the boss's office. Apparently, the guy had been really offended by this, thinking that it was a slur on what he considered to be good American engineering, and had called my boss to complain about me. Just goes to show how easily offence can be caused between nations, even when they speak what's basically the same language ... :-)

Arfa

for

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boss's

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had

It's hard /not/ to interpret such a description as an intentional insult. I can't imagine what it actually means -- in any innocuous sense, anyway.

Overuse of that stuff is worse for thermal conductivity than none at all. I've clean up gobs of it since they started using it decades ago.

--
Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse

Can't afford $5 for a set of security bits?

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

Puddles. Under Poodles. ;-)

-- You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's Teflon coated.

Yes, but given the frequency that I run into those I find my punch set and hammer tend to do the trick - security torx to just torx! ;)

--
-Scott

This is something I'm currently wondering about. I have a fridge-like thermo-electric cooler than has two sections, top and bottom, with different temperatures. The top suddenly stopped getting cool at all, so I took it apart to figure out why. The fans and voltages were all there so I broke down the heat sinks on the bad one to get to the Peltier device. With it isolated, I powered it up briefly and much to my surprise the Peltier device got hot real quickly with the opposite side getting cooler. So the device works, it has to be something with the heat sinks? They did use white goop on both sides, but very little and it was already dried. The heat sinks are milled flat where they make contact with the Peltier device, so my thinking is they need new goop. Looking around I found that Star heat sink compound is about the best you can get, so I ordered some. It just arrived the other day so I'm planning to clean up the old goop, put on some new goop and hope for the best. I don't think too much would be an issue in this case, I want it as cold as possible.

--
-Scott

is

I

As long as there is no liability involved. If someone else opens it with a 'just torx' tool and is hurt or killed, you could be sued. I just carry the security tools in my toolbox and and ready for a loot of different hardware. I even keep Posidrive in the same toolbox.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

ve

Worse, hotmelt glue or cyanoacrylate on a solder joint. Hit it with the iron, and the tip seems like it'll NEVER get clean again.

Oh yeah, GM delco car radios, IMPOSSIBLE to work on those circuit boards due to some resin/glue coating on everything.

--
-Scott

"Nutcase Kook "

** Err - because there are always large areas between fasteners that have air gaps. ** When you separate the metal parts - cover them both with " Glad Wrap".

It later peels off easily and leaves almost all the white grease behind.

Anyone here remember the Bose 1800 /1801 amplifiers ??

Discovered this trick when servicing those horrible POS.

..... Phil

Remember them! I've still got one, still works too. Not that I would use it for anything other than a door stop mind.

Ron

Here in the colonies, whenever I have a piece of unrepairable Made in Japan, Made in Tiawan, Made in Korea kit, or Made in China POS that is going to the landfill, I use some of my 'mental health' time to disassemble the thing and toss all the screws, nuts, washers, shaft nuts and washers, etc. into a bank of 'metric' jelly jars. WFM

Jonesy

-- Marvin L Jones | jonz | W3DHJ | linux 38.24N 104.55W | @ config.com | Jonesy | OS/2 * Killfiling google & XXXXbanter.com: jonz.net/ng.htm

There ya go then ! Anyone from the UK would see it as a quick-fire throw-away line, and would laugh at it. It's sort of intended to be 'barbed', but not in a malicious way. It's a very hard to describe form of humour that is quite prevalent over here.

Arfa

We have that kind of humor in the US too.. But only amongst friends or people you know fairly well. If a stranger uses sharp humor with me (some do) and It gives the feeling of you dont know me well enough to be poking humor at me, and we also usually take the fact there is ususaly truth in humor.. And honestly you probaly think the US standards are idioic and stupid to still be using when the rest of the world is using the metric system. Thats the feeling I get here in Japan at least. People cant understand why the US uses the old system still.

Anyhow.. Just my $0.02