The Durango is Dead
We called her big red, or the big red car, Durango Lela among others. After many trips and hauling many things, IT’S DEAD!!!
The engine is literally broken. If you look right in the middle of the picture below, the actual head broke. Crazy. I’m debating what to do. It was such a good car. We were just our running errands and at one of the stops, it shut down fine, we shopped, went back out and it cranked, but no start. No noises no jolts, just nothing.
Small Things, Big Anxiety
I have two fossil watches with dead batteries. Both have sat neglected for years. I just don’t wear watches any more.
Years ago, my oldest found them and liked the look. He asked to wear one and didn’t care that it didn’t work. But when he left to college, he left the watch.
My second oldest then took an interest in the watches, but he did care that they worked. Plus he wanted the band adjusted. Well, he kept persisting and his persistence paid off since I finally fixed both of them.
But fixing them wasn’t as easy as changing a battery. I wish.
I had forgotten that the more expensive watch had been tossed onto the bed, probably one too many times, and a tiny hand popped off. This tiny hand, eventually knocked off the other tiny watch hands, these watch hands then got jammed in the seconds hand, bent it, which then got stuck against the minute hand and the watch no longer worked
I removed the mechanism from the housing and dumped the tiny hands on the countertop. When I say tiny, I mean tiny, like smaller than a typical wood sliver, tiny. And like a wood sliver, I opted for using tweezers to try handling them.
First problem, I didn’t create a work area and was just working on the watch at the kitchen counter. Not a good idea.
First tiny hand fell off a couple times and I kept grabbing it with the tweezers. The hand is slightly triangular and sits proud due to the collar that is used to attach it to the mechanism. When I grabbed it with the tweezers one time… Poof!!!! It was gone!
I looked all around the work area, knowing not to move. But I just knew the tiny hand was gone. While I felt gutted about that fail, I pressed on.
It was time to get more serious. I asked to have things brought to me to set up a proper work area. I didn’t want to get up in case it had landed on my clothes. With the help of a light, tweezers, magnifying glass and patience, I got the tiny hands reseated properly. I bent the other hands so the movement was unrestricted. But I was bummed that the tiny hand was gone.
Annalisa offered to help look for the tiny piece along with my daughter. My daughter found it almost immediately! It was right on top of my pants in the middle of my thigh – I was right not to move. What an amazing little girl!
I got the last hand installed, installed the battery, cleaned the case and reassembled it. Did I mention how tiny those hands are? That was bad, but I sighed in relief that all I had to do with the other watch was change the battery and add some links to the watch band. The watch band is not super easy nor super hard to remove links, it just needs the proper force to remove the pins.
Finished!
My son came home later and tried on the watch. He said, it’s a little big, can you adjust it? I was laying in my bed, relaxing and said sure, I decided to see if the micro adjusters would be enough for him. They’re spring loaded, but I’d be careful. As I was adjusting, my daughter climbed up on the bed to see what her daddy was doing. The watch moved in my hand ever so slightly and…. It’s gone! The micro adjuster got free from the housing with the movement and the spring sent it flying.
It took a while, but I actually found the tiny part. It’s really hard to explain how tiny these parts are. This part was smaller than all screws in all cell phones I’ve worked on. It’s small like saw dust.
Anyway, getting that micro adjuster back together was a super high stress fix for me. The spring sent this tiny piece flying twice more, each time ratcheting up the stress and fraying my nerves. There’s probably some easy way to do it with some tool that I don’t have, but I was just using my fingernails.
Finally…. Success.
Doctors say I should be limiting my stress… 🤔
Here’s the watch that was all jammed up from the tiny hands that fell off. Tic tic tic.
A Discount Tire Swindle
About three years ago my wheels needed an alignment on my BMW. I let it go for a little bit, which, knowing me was likely months. Anyway, I finally took it in. One tire was toast and had completely worn out the toe. I didn’t notice it was that bad because is was on the inside edge. I took pics of them, verified they were factory OE tires and went to order some, they were about $350 EA Installed!!!
I was more than a little startled. I then find out my car does not include a spare tire, it does not include a tire repair kit or air compressor. No, my car relies on run-flat tires.
I was searching the web for any type of deal and came across two used run-flats and snatched them up. When they arrived I took them to Discount Tire and had them swap them out. I asked to keep the good tire since it was almost perfect with plenty of tread. When I picked up my car, they said they threw the tire in the trunk and I went about my merry way.
Fast forward to today, I’m dealing with some bad road noise. The noise that you get from a wheel loose. However, the wheels weren’t loose. I suspected the brake rotor since the noise was almost exclusive to low speed and changed with braking (also pretty noticeable brake shake). Anyway, I raised the car to verify my suspicion and just generally check everything.
The brake rotors were definitely warped, so problem solved. Brake pads were pretty low too, so I figured I needed to order both new rotors and shoes for the front. So how were the tires? Pretty good, but again, the toe was a little worn on one tire. I thought, huh, let me compare it against the tire I’ve been holding onto in my garage for three years.
I retrieve the tire and start comparing, but I kind of scratch my head because the tread doesn’t look the same. I just stared trying to figure out what was going on. I finally looked at the side wall and the tire brand said Arroyo, not Bridgestone. All this time, I had never inspected the tire after they gave it back to me. Since they are pretty low-profile, it’s not easy to read the markings so I completely missed it.
I’d never heard of Arroyo. The Arroyo new is an $80 tire while the Bridgestone is $285. Used, maybe $40 for the Arroyo and $175 for the Bridgestone. You do the math.
Maybe it was an honest mistake, two cars with similar tires next to each other? Maybe? But I think it’s incredibly unlikely. More interesting question is tech or manager. Oh well, what do you do?
By the way, I’ve got an Arroyo tire for sale. Great deal, $40! Like New!
I Think This Repainted PS3 Looks Better
The trashed ps3 that I bought months ago got a new coat of paint and a new outlook on life as a console. A brief summary of what happened. I saw a very blurry pic of a blue ps3 locally listed for pretty cheap. I thought it would be neat to own a blue ps3 and went to check it out. The house was totally dark and it was difficult to see the console, but they showed it worked. I gave them the money and left. After stepping outside, It was immediately apparent the console wasn’t blue from the factory and was very beat-up. The paint was chipping, it was painted haphazardly, gunk was in the corners instead of paint, scratches were all over, the ps3 logo looked destroyed. But I blamed myself for not being more thorough and just left.
Fast forward a couple months. My son had a bumper he needed to repaint and I suggested we paint the ps3 to match his car. He was a little worried about using paint on the ps3 and running out, but I convinced him it would be fine.
I took apart the ps3 and put the parts into bags, then went about prepping the shell. I sanded off the paint in the larger areas and used various chemicals to try to remove it from some of the more difficult areas. I then taped it up and he sprayed undercoat. He quickly realized that the ps3 was a great piece to practice on before his car parts.
The undercoat was pretty lumpy and I sanded it down ok, but it wasn’t perfectly smooth. Then the base color coat was sprayed. Which I realized is far thinner than I ever imagined. Then some coats of clear coat went on. It ended up pretty orange peely and I sanded the clear coat and tried polishing. This is all new to me and I ended up kind of burning the clear coat, or at least it was very close to burning. The corners went through the clear and color in a couple places, but it’s a ps3, so… not that big a deal.
I think if I were to redo it, I’d hit it again with undercoat before color and get it totally, completely smooth. I stopped sanding because in many places I sanded through the undercoat. Plus, hitting it again with the undercoat would have totally covered all scratches and problems the previous owner had created. We all agree that the color coat alone probably looked the best on the ps3, It looked awesome mat metallic blue and textured, but there’s no way that would last being so delicate. Plus the color coat was too thick and ended up “spitting”. We fixed that problem before painting the car parts, but the ps3 retains that issue. All in all it looks far better than it did before.
Anyway, to the pictures!
Before/after
Before
After
PS3 Drive Wasn’t Reading a Disc
We sat down to watch a Blu-ray on the PlayStation 3 and the disc went in, spun a bit, made a single clunking noise similar to eject and it never showed up. I remembered that I tried a game a couple weeks before and that it didn’t spin up as well and at the time I assumed the disc wasn’t reading due to possible scratches. This was the PS3 I had just brought back from the dead and I think it had been reading discs in the vertical orientation but I had since moved it horizontally.
(more…)New “Used” Wiimote and Nunchuck from Ebay… Surprise! Not Working
So with the new-to-us red Wii, we had two red controllers, however, one of the controllers is a knock-off brand. Not necessarily bad, but it bothered my wife. The plastic is a different shade of red, the A button is white and not red and the paint is surface applied without a glaze to prevent it from being easily worn away. So it has worn away.
My Weird “No Boot” Dell T1600 Home Server Troubles
I disconnected my Dell T1600 local server and had it disconnected for about a week. I went to reconnect it and it wouldn’t boot into windows. I remembered this issue was because the coincell battery was dead and I had meant to change the battery the next time I disconnected the server -which was now. So, I changed the coin cell battery and reconnected it. Now, the computer wouldn’t post, so not only could I not get into windows, I couldn’t even get in the bios. The post codes would go between 1,4 and 2,3. Both are proprietary Dell post codes for this model that pretty much say your board is fried, but the codes kept changing, so who knows. Anyway, I took the computer to my desk where I do my repairs.
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565 × 448“New” Used Red Wii with Hidden Eject Problem
So I’ve been looking at used Wii’s and Wii U’s. We have two, but one is in the guest house with our boys and the other is our original launch edition Wii that doesn’t output component. I’ve done enough reading on the subject to understand that the gen 1 Wii’s have an issue with overheating and the AVE chip getting damaged. Apparently this leads to the component video signal no longer being available. They got better with each gen, but made a big step in gen 4 and even bigger in gen 6. A trick to quickly find the motherboard revision is to look in the coin cell compartment for the numbers 10-60 with each increment representing the gen. i.e. 10 = 1st gen, 20 = 2nd gen etc. But the easiest way to know you’re getting a gen 4 or gen 6 is to buy a red or black Wii. I would have fixed my launch edition gen 1, but I had already done a case swap with a different Wii that I had bought used and the case had been trashed (I case swapped the two wiis because the mangled case one could output component and mine couldn’t), plus the disc drive on my original could use a replacement. I had already fixed the disc drive a couple times and it still works, it just isn’t perfect.
(more…)“New” old PS3 and my PS3 revival
After a couple years of my PS3 sitting due to no picture from HDMI or composite. I decided to buy one from the classifieds. I actually had the parts for an HDMI fix because I’m pretty sure I know what’s wrong with it. Right now the composite shows up briefly but it’s like the HDMI keeps trying to engage.
Anyway I just wanted to have a working ps3. So I saw a blue one in the classifieds for $60. It came with a controller and three games. Plus a blue PS3 is kind of rare, so extra bonus. Or so I thought.
