Category: Hobbies

Things I do for fun

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Back to candle making

We’re doing an Advent wreath this year, so I offered to make the candles instead of buying some. I think it will add a nice personal touch. The candles I’ll be making are short round pillar candles about 4 cm in diameter that should be a good match for our wreath.

Apparently Advent candles are purple and pink, which seem like kind of odd colours to me. Our Advent wreath will be nice and simple. A green wreath from the craft store and four candles that I”ll make using pink and violet that I found in a stash of wax dye blocks that used to belong to Connie’s mom. A fifth candle will be just plain white. Now it should just be a matter of getting the colour intensity right. Wax dye blocks are pretty concentrated and it doesn’t take much to colour a batch of wax, but at least now I don’t have to worry about mixing colours to get what I need.

It’s been a while since I last made candles. My candle making gear has been sitting in a box in the garage for a few years, so I’ll have to spend some time cleaning them up before anything gets melted and poured. Will be fun to make a few candles again.

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Monitor repair Part 1

It was off to the operating tableworkbench with the dead monitor. In case you haven’t been following along, the Samsung 226BW monitor I picked up a while ago from EBay died a couple days ago.

Samsung226BW_01.JPG

Following this very helpful disassembly/repair guide, I got the covers off and the display panel separated from the chassis. In the process I discovered evidence of either a previous repair attempt, rough handling or just fragility from old age, since holes for two of the three screws holding the case on were broken.

Samsung226BW_02.JPG

After disconnecting the wires and separating the display panel, I made it to the circuit boards.

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Samsung226BW_04.JPG

Right away, I could see four bulgy capacitors. My board must be a different revision than what was posted in the guide because that board had three caps. They are very bulgy indeed. It’s a good thing they didn’t explode or anything.

Samsung226BW_05.JPG
Samsung226BW_06.JPG

Note the very domed looking tops of the capacitors. The other brown thing in the middle of the capacitors is an inductor.

Fortunately the back of the circuit board has the capacitor positions labeled, so there’s no need to guess which joints need to be unsoldered. I’ve outlined them here in the yellow boxes.

Samsung226BW_07.jpg

Inspecting the other capacitors suggested they were all still good with no signs of bulging. There are a couple others that I could probably replace, but some of the others, like the big black 100μF 450V capacitor, are glued to the board or other components and I don’t want to risk damaging the board just to replace them. So now it’s off to do some shopping to find some replacement caps.

Here’s the shopping list.

Two of the 820 μF and the 22 and 47 μF still seem to be in good shape, but I figured since I’m replacing capacitors, I might as well replace those too. I’ll probably order at least two sets of each so that I’ll have them on hand in the event my other monitor (which is even older than this one) dies in the same manner.

Parts are on order from Mouser and should be here in a few days. Stay tuned for part 2 (or maybe 3), in which the capacitors are replaced.

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Dead monitor

The monitor finally gave up the ghost. It powers on, but no backlight. Fortunately there’s a spare monitor, but I’ll need to scrounge up a VGA/DVI cable or find an adapter (think I’ve got one somewhere). It’s a smaller monitor, but it will do for now.

I think I’ll take this monitor out to the bench and poke around inside to see if I can find anything easily repairable. A bit of Googling suggests the primary culprit is some bad capacitors on the power supply side of things, which should make it a repair well within my skill range.

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Fluke 75 DMM repair

I think my skills at the workbench have progressed to the point where I’m feeling pretty good about being able to make minor repairs to some of my electronic gadgets.

I’ve had this Fluke 75 autoranging DMM sitting in a toolbox for a bunch of years because it never worked properly. Brought it out to the workbench the morning and cracked it open to find the 9V battery inside had leaked, and the battery posts had corroded.

Fluke 75 digital multimeter

Should be a pretty easy fix. I’ve got some 9V battery connectors with leads in the parts bin. Heated up the soldering iron and removed the old posts, then soldered in the leads for the 9V connector. The original battery posts had three connections, so I used some hookup wire to jumper the other two connections to where the connector leads were going to go.

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Radio Shack deals for builders/makers

If you happen to be near your neighbourhood Radio Shack, stop in and you might find some good clearance deals. Look for the items with blue or tan on the price tags.

I stopped in today to look for an audio transformer to build a sound card interface for the radio, and ended up coming out with a couple pieces of 4.5×6″ perfboard, a resistor component pack, and a capacitor component pack that were on clearance. The perfboard was less than $1.50 each, and the resistor and capacitor component packs were $7 and $6 respectively. The component packs are normally in the $25 range I think. Although I’ve already got plenty of resistors and capacitors, it was really the boxes that I wanted. I think of it as a two good component boxes that come with free resistors/capacitors.

My store also had a few Arduino shields that were clearance marked as well.

Might have to pay a visit to some of the other Radio Shacks in the area.