1202 ALARM

I treated myself to a decent PCB holder for soldering, something I should have bought years ago. This is especially useful now that I have a hot air soldering station for working on surface mount and other small components. I still need practice with the hot air gun, but it's fun learning and the repairs are always interesting (see posts on the Samsung Galaxy Tab E tablet repair ).

I needed a rear number plate to hang on the bicycle carrier or to fix to the back of a borrowed trailer. The stick-on number plate was £6 on eBay ready made up, but I needed a lightweight plastic something to stick it to. A lightweight plastic something which had been dumped in the forest a couple of miles above where we live after a failed oil-drilling exploration (yes, in Ireland, I kid thee not!) and it was exactly the right colour for a UK rear number plate. The 2 thin pieces glued at each side are to give the plate a bit of rigidity. A sweet upcycle. I'll put a couple of small holes at the top corners to feed cable ties or twists through.

This Sharp 22-inch widescreen was as dead as Dillinger, but that's not a bad thing as it usually means the power supply has gone which is easier to fix than a backlight inverter. After checking the obvious things that might be a problem including the fuses and the ON/OFF switch I took the power board out. A quick search online revealed (as usual) a common failing, not bad capacitors in this case, but a failed diode. There were 3 large, high current (5A) diodes on the board wired in parallel and after unsoldering one leg of each diode from the board I was able to test each one and right enough the middle one was shorted out. A lot of searching of old boards yielded up a 4A diode at a slightly higher voltage rating which I figured would do as a replacement to test the television, so I soldered the 2 good ones back in place and replaced the bad one. With everything back together the set works a treat, especially with the Freeview HD box on the right which can power an amplified a...