Hackerspace News

News

Fixing an Electric Shaver and some Battery Investigations

🇮🇪 · TOG · gary

Nothing terribly complicated here. Just replacing the batteries inside a Phillips electric shaver. The batteries had gradually been deteriorating. Not even giving enough time to have a shave! Time for some replacements. We bemoan the fact that so many things are un-repairable nowadays. There was a time when repair services and shops for many household things were common. There are still actually repair centres for shavers however, where you can get a battery and heads replaced. TOG itself is no stranger to the Repair Cafe movement. We just had a big one this month, and our next one is in June. We repair things for free…. to keep things in-use for longer and to reduce waste. Surprisingly, the batteries inside the shaver are just AAA nickel metal hydride cells. Albeit ones with solder tags for soldering to the circuit board inside. Replacing the batteries and putting it on-charge, we’re now back in action. The circuit board inside seems remarkably complicated, but we didn’t delve into why. In replacing the batteries however, we came across something interesting. We found a brand-new, old-stock battery. Manufactured in 2021 and still sealed in it’s original packaging. So we were wondering would it be entirely dead, or would there be any life left in it after over 4 years unopened. On opening the package, we found the battery sitting at 0.4 volts….. completely discharged! Not sure what lying discharged for so long has done to the battery chemistry, but we wouldn’t use it in anything important, even if it does take a charge. We’re going to put it on the Imax charger and measure how much capacity it still has.

Repairelectronics

Bringing a Cracked Flymo Back to Life

🇮🇪 · TOG · tdr

With summer on the way, you might be thinking about cutting the grass again and dragging the lawnmower back out of the shed. This Flymo Easi Glide 330 came into TOG on a Tuesday night with a fairly serious problem. The outer case was badly cracked. It was manufactured back in February 2014, so it has clearly done a good bit of work over the years, but this kind of damage could easily make you think it was ready for the bin. But what do you do with a crack like that? Glue was never going to be enough here. The plastic casing takes a lot of stress and vibration in normal use, so this needed something stronger. Out came the plastic welder, with our member Ambrose taking on the repair. A tool like this works by heating the plastic and embedding metal staples or pins across the crack. These act like reinforcement inside the case, giving the repair strength and helping bridge the gap where the plastic had split. As you can see from the photos, this one needed quite a few of them. The nice thing about this repair is that Ambrose was able to do all the work from the inside. That means the outside still looks great, while the inside now has the strength it needs to keep going. It is a lovely example of the kind of repair that becomes very straightforward when you have the right tool and the right knowledge. That is one of the great things about a hackerspace like TOG. We have a wide range of shared tools, but just as importantly, we have people around who know what tool to reach for and are happy to help figure things out. This was all done on a normal Tuesday open night at TOG. If you have a project of your own, something that needs fixing, or you are just curious to see what goes on in the space, Tuesday night is a great time to drop in.

Repair