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SERVICEMAN’S LOG Mirror, mirror on the door Dave Thompson Our five-year-old car was coming to the end of its warranty. Typically, everything goes wrong about a week after that, with the previously perfect car suddenly becoming one of those jalopies from the old silent movies, where everything literally falls off, leaving the hapless driver sitting on the road with a steering wheel in their hands. This meant we were faced with a relatively major firstworld decision. Having only purchased used cars all my life, and having to deal with the headaches those cars inevitably brought, being able to own a brand-spanking-new car was a real luxury. Anyway, we ended up with a new car, which of course means learning all the new tech onboard and what all the buttons and switches do. Modern cars are apparently more advanced than the 1970s moon lander, and that’s a fact (which I read on the internet, so I am sure it is true). I can almost believe it with the radar, the cameras and all the electronic doodads and gizmos (you can tell I’ve spent a lifetime in electronics). But it is a learning curve, and the manuals that come with these cars are like those olde world phone books we used to get. It took me half an hour to find out how to change the clock for daylight saving time! Of course, once I discovered the appropriate section in the book, it took mere seconds to figure out how to do what I wanted. But my point is that modern cars are hugely complex machines. Saying that, they are apparently not clever enough to switch clocks over automatically, like computers and phones have done for decades when daylight saving clicks in. Or at least, our one isn’t. Maybe it’s because they are all built down to a price these days. I also note that the car’s clock, built into the instrument display, is not tied to the multimedia/GPS display system, so often there are two slightly dissimilar times being shown. That’s not a big deal, of course, but it seems silly that an integrated GPS/computer system and the car’s basic display functionality don’t talk to each other. Or maybe I’m just an older guy pushing the wrong buttons... I have to say this thing is a nice place to be, and a real step up from the original Mini I used to 84 Silicon Chip drive, which almost broke my spine every time I went out in it due to the still quake-damaged roads here. It had all the onboard technology of a particularly low-spec wheelbarrow. Then my 1997 MG-F was great, until it kept breaking down and I was getting far too old to be seen in it, especially with the top down. I won’t even mention the inelegance of me getting in and out of such a low car in public! A computer on wheels So this car is a lot larger than our previous cars, and although it is bristling with the sort of technology and cameras you would expect to see on the latest Apache helicopter gunship, I still try to rely mainly on my old-fashioned (yet increasingly fading) eyesight to make sure nothing is nearby, or that I am not running over or hitting anything that could cause any legal problems. This is the way I’ve always done it, but I can feel the ever-increasing pull of using the onboard tech to compensate for my flagging senses. I’ve also noticed that many younger drivers just rely on the cameras and radar rather than actually looking out the windows, which is very disconcerting. Backing down a driveway by a school and relying solely on the camera display in the centre console is frankly frightening. This was reinforced recently by me driving for an appointment in town with a very challenging car park. It isn’t that the spaces are overly tight, like so many are now (especially when driving a bigger car than a Mini!), but because the building has all these huge square concrete pillars holding it up. It’s like it is on stilts, and there is car parking below. I always avoid parking under structures like this after experiencing some Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au pretty terrifying quakes here, watching similar pillars flex like they were made of rubber and start cracking while we were trapped in stand-still traffic trying to get out of a mall carpark. Once you see a road waving and breaking apart, things are never the same. So, I try to park outside places like this, and fortunately, there were half-a-dozen spaces on the outside edge of the building. The only free space in the line was beside a pillar, so that’s the one I took. It was tight, but using the cameras and my vision, I got in OK, despite the proximity warnings going off madly and filling the car with beeping noises. I went off happily to my appointment, knowing I had a close parking spot, and all was well in the world. I was out in good time and back to the car. In the meantime, someone had replaced the car that was originally to my right. I’m not suggesting they snuck in and swapped it, but obviously the original parker had left and someone else came in. Boxed in This ‘new’ car was a large Range Rover (probably owned by some medical staff if the personalised plate was anything to go by), and they had parked it quite close to my door. It was a struggle to squeeze my no-longer-so-nimble frame into the car, but I did it without marking his car with my door and vice versa. I fired up the steed, and of course, the usual cacophony of beeps and sirens went off. Radar to the front shows I am nosed into a decorative hedge, and to the sides, there were other cars. It is so distracting, especially as I’m the sort who has to switch off the radio to see better! There were also people driving behind me to watch out for, so a lot was going on. I was most concerned about this huge square pillar beside me, on the left. I didn’t want to hit it, and hitting the Range Rover was not an option I wanted to explore. I very gingerly backed out, trying to take in everything in around me. Then it happened; I touched the very outside of my wing mirror on that $%#%<at>! post. Ironically, there was a rubber buffer on each corner, but that was just out of my sight line. The mirror has a transparent side-light indicator plastic piece that protrudes from it, which I can’t see from the cabin. I just touched it on the pillar, blowing the plastic parts of the mirror off. As you could imagine, the air was blue. siliconchip.com.au I stopped, as there were bits on the ground (I saw them fly off) and I didn’t want to run over anything. It seemed that I had popped the coloured plastic back off the mirror, and two clear plastic lenses that were inside the assembly onto the car park floor. Great. I looked at the bits in my hands and decided that this was too hard while blocking a car park accessway. I did pop the body-coloured plastic cover back on, and it simply clipped into place, but I could see that one of the clips was missing and one of the clear lenses had broken in two. Those extra bits just went in the back seat. Of course, I felt really good about myself at this point. Nice new car, broken bits. Excellent. So that was an interesting trip home, and of course, there’s the inevitable explanation to the longhaired general about how and why something got broken. That went as you would expect. But, I pulled my sleeves up, as I am a serviceman, and something must be able to be done about this! As I mentioned, I’d already popped the coloured plastic housing of the mirror back onto the body. What was missing from that were the clear plastic bits that made up the rest of it. I retrieved them from the back seat to see what damage I’d done. There are two clear pieces; one is thinner and was broken in half. The other was complete, but the concrete pole damaged its end. If I had a 3D printer, I might have been able to make something that would work, but it was apparent that my skills ran out the moment I broke it. On top of all that, the paint on the edge of the mirror had been scraped, and the white undercoat showed through, so at the very least that would have to be sanded and touched up. All in all, this was looking like a ‘too hard basket’ job for me. It’s a shame because the rest of the mirror was fine; the bit under the cover was undamaged, and the guts of it were pristine. There is so much tech in these things. The glass itself has LEDs built into it; cameras, radar sensors, and even the positioning motors and cabling are all packed into the housing somehow. My old Mini’s wing mirror required me to get out in all weathers to adjust it, then get back in the car, then get out again to adjust it further. Half the time I couldn’t see anything in it anyway due to fogging, rain and the wrath of God. Essentially, it was hopeless, but these new ones on modern Australia's electronics magazine August 2025  85 Items Covered This Month • Objects in mirror are closer than they appear • Repairing the cable on a National fan • Fixing a young laser printer • The decorative fix • A voltmeter that only looked perfect Dave Thompson runs PC Anytime in Christchurch, NZ. Website: www.pcanytime.co.nz Email: dave<at>pcanytime.co.nz Cartoonist – Louis Decrevel Website: loueee.com cars are something to behold. Except mine, of course, now that it’s broken. Right to replace That’s the thing, though; it isn’t really broken. Sure, a few cosmetic bits are broken, but it could be repaired and repainted. Still, I expect any repairer is just going to take it off and throw it in the skip. It has a few blemishes, but it still works; the radar and cameras in it still operate properly, and I can still see stuff behind me. The problem is that repair guys don’t seem interested in replacing small parts (if they’re even available!) or repainting the housing. They just charge it up to insurance and put on a new one. Everyone in the system is making a killing, except for the poor chump paying their insurance and knocking wing mirrors on concrete poles. A friend of mine has another new Japanese brand car and had a similar incident in his driveway. He went through the same process, and was told it would be at least a month to replace the mirror and would cost the $1500 excess as well. That seemed ridiculous to him, and so he went and took his car to a local body shop, or collision repair centre (whatever they are called these days) and for 50 bucks and a dozen beers, the guys there plastic welded it, resprayed it and refitted it within a day. I couldn’t even tell it had been repaired. So where is all this juicy insurance money going? It seems like a huge rort. But then again, I suppose it always has been. The system is set up to rip money from somewhere. Rants aside, I thought I might go down the same road and went to a local place. I do like to support local businesses, as many locals have supported me over the years. I pulled up into their car park and asked them about the mirror. The guy looked at it and the parts I presented, then hummed and hawed and said it would be cheaper to replace the whole thing. I asked for a breakdown of what it would cost to touch up and cover and replace the plastic lens parts, and he basically said those parts are not available. They’d have to organise a whole new mirror, but not to worry; insurance would cover it. This seems incredibly wasteful, just to throw this monthsold part into the bin (if that’s really what they do with it). So it seems I will be going down the mainstream route and playing into the system. I don’t approve, but in this case there is nothing I can do. I can’t get the parts, I can’t repair what I have due to bits missing and even if I could do it, it would likely look shoddy and vex me for as long as we owned the car. 86 Silicon Chip A wasteful system This reeks of this whole ‘right to repair’ debacle. In the old days, they would simply repair something like this with all their skills and return it to the car, all without creating a mountain of waste. If that ‘old’ mirror doesn’t end up under the bench for spares, where does it go? In a skip and then a landfill? What a waste of resources, with all that tech in it, all for the sake of a few dollars’ worth of plastic parts. I understand these companies don’t want to invest capital into parts only to have them sitting on a shelf somewhere gathering dust, and then when the model involved isn’t about anymore, those components are wasted anyway, selling very rarely. But I am sure there was a law here that any cars sold in this country had to have a 20-year supply of spare parts. That could be just folklore, and any spare parts laws might be legally bent to mean just tyres or complete wing mirrors or even bulbs for the headlights. I recall going to local parts places with dad and asking for a flange valve regulator for a 1959 Standard 10, and the guy would just go to the shelf and get one. Then say, oh, sorry, you want a right-hand one, then go back and get it. I think those days are gone. And that’s a shame. This is exactly the same as computer manufacturers now. The only real parts you can source now are from used models bought by companies who disassemble the machines for parts and sell them on. Unfortunately, in my experience at least, what I get from them is often not what was shown on the website. Long story short, I had to take it in and got a loaner car for a few days while they swapped out the mirror. Of course, it looks exactly the same; we haven’t had it long enough for any sun-faded colour mismatching. Still, the whole experience, from the shame of doing it in the first place and the having to resort to the repair system, gave me some pause for thought. National fan cable repair My wife recently found an old National fan at the local tip shop recently and asked if I wanted to get it. These old fans are very reliable, and I thought it had a very good chance of working, so we did. The only visible problem was that someone had cut the plug off the end of the figure-­ eight power cable. Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au I knew I had a plug at home that was designed for this type of cable, so we got the fan and headed home. We have several old fans at home that are not in very good cosmetic condition, but they are reliable. Some must be over 50 years old now. The fans available in department stores these days are incredibly unreliable. They have a non-resetting thermal fuse buried deep within the motor windings, so if the fan motor gets too warm, the fuse blows and that’s the end of it. There is no way to repair them, short of replacing the motor, which is not available. They are cheap junk. I couldn’t find the figure-eight plug I knew I had, and decided not to fit a regular plug to the cable, as it would not be secure due to the smaller size of the cable. Instead, I would just replace the cable with one I pulled from another defunct appliance. I found a nice cable with a two-pin plug that matched the fan well. It would look original and better than the old figure-eight cable that the fan came with. The fan’s bottom panel was held on with five screws, one in each of the four rubber feet near the corners and one in the middle of the base. With the screws removed, I set the panel aside. The old cable was secured with a cable clamp and wired into a terminal block. After unscrewing the four screws, I had the old cable free, and I prepared the new cable ready to install. A short time later, I had the new cable installed, replaced the bottom panel, and the fan was ready to use. It worked straight away, so the cut-off plug was the only thing wrong with it. This fan only has two speeds, unlike most, which have three speeds. It’s amazing what shows up at the tip shop from time to time. However, I have found that in more recent times, that there seem to be fewer people throwing things out and more people shopping at the tip shops. This means fewer goodies are available for purchase, although it’s still possible to find a variety of useful items. It’s just a matter of being there at the tight time to nab a bargain. Bruce Pierson, Dundathu, Qld. Servicing Stories Wanted Do you have any good servicing stories that you would like to share in The Serviceman column in SILICON CHIP? If so, why not send those stories in to us? It doesn’t matter what the story is about as long as it’s in some way related to the electronics or electrical industries, to computers or even to cars and similar. We pay for all contributions published but please note that your material must be original. Send your contribution by email to: editor<at>siliconchip.com.au Please be sure to include your full name and address details. purchase. There was a CD-ROM used to install it, which I had forgotten about, so I immediately inserted it to reinstall the drivers. It also checked for updated firmware, but the updates made no difference; the Brother printer continued refusing to print. I checked the print queue after trying to print documents and also several test prints, but there was nothing in the print queue. So it would appear that the data flowing from the computer was not being processed because of some fault at the receiving end. The disc supplied had an easy setup for wireless printing so I figured that if I could re-route the data via wireless, I could bypass the input from the USB cable and establish that the printer was functioning and maybe able print pages wirelessly. After going through the time-consuming setup and having to restart everything, including the household server, a page was finally printed successfully, but it was not the end of the problem! When I tested a photo or graph, I got nothing, or sometimes a fraction of a printed page and it took forever to print just a letter. Brother HL-L3230CDW laser printer repair Normally, this is a very reliable printer. In fact, it is the best colour laser printer I have owned. After only about two years of use, I was shocked to get a weird message and a failure to print. Every time I pressed “print”, the printer lit up the green “data” LED, but after about 10 seconds, the yellow “error” light began to flash. Then it just stopped and showed “ready” on the LCD panel. Checking all the connections and restarting both the printer and computer changed nothing. The troubleshooting option on Windows 10 printers and scanners proved worthless. I checked on the Brother website and downloaded the updates, but still no cigar! So I brought in the previous colour laser printer, an HP CP1025nw, which I had stored in the large Brother cardboard box to keep it in good condition to use as a backup. It was retired in good condition and with plenty of ink, but it was a bit slower than the Brother and sometimes had problems grabbing paper when I was doing big runs for my labels. When I lifted the box down, apart from a huge friendly Huntsman spider that jumped out, I noticed that the Brother box had a picture of the items included with the siliconchip.com.au Australia's electronics magazine August 2025  87 Silicon Chip kcaBBack Issues $10.00 + post $11.50 + post $12.50 + post $13.00 + post January 1997 to October 2021 November 2021 to September 2023 October 2023 to September 2024 October 2024 onwards All back issues after February 2015 are in stock, while most from January 1997 to December 2014 are available. For a full list of all available issues, visit: siliconchip.com.au/Shop/2 PDF versions are available for all issues at siliconchip.com.au/Shop/12 We also sell photocopies of individual articles for those who don’t have a computer As luck would have it, I accidentally pressed “print” via the USB connection and bingo! It printed OK. I was just about to pack up the backup printer back into its snug box when I noticed that a document failed to print and I got the same error message as I received on day one. Why? Checking the cable connections again, I noticed that the particular cable I was using looked a bit old and had square and faded plugs at both ends, so I thought it was a good idea to replace it. Everything then worked perfectly! Replacing the old cable, the fault returned. How could I have not done this before? I think it is a lesson that we think that USB cables are bulletproof, even though we jerk them in and out and stretch them when we move computers and printers around. My daughter has wrecked so many chargers by pulling USB connectors out at funny angles, and so it seems my printer cable that had been used for years on five or six different printers ultimately suffered the same fate. My initial analysis of the situation removed any thoughts about a simple cable, because my previous experience was that computers have computer problems and printers have printer problems and the humble USB cable was too humble to worry about! These days, when you buy a new printer, the USB cable is rarely included. I think in future I will buy brand new ones instead of cheap old ones from op shops! Allan Linton-Smith, Turramurra, NSW. Decorative village repair A friend asked me if I could look at a family heirloom that stopped working. It is a ‘village’ house with many decorative lights. A light source shines through a colour wheel driven by a 12V AC motor. The light is diffused onto many fibre light pipes scattered throughout the display. It’s simple and effective. Someone in the past had ‘fixed’ it by shoehorning a 20W halogen lamp into the house; the original lamp was an 8W MR8 halogen lamp, with it and the motor powered by a 12V AC 1.25A plugpack. The overloaded plug pack eventually failed. AC plugpacks are not very common, and halogen lamps were phased out years ago! After many phone calls, then 45km of suburban traffic, I sourced both original rated items from two widely spaced dealers who had old supplies. The lamp was the MR11 size and would fit OK. Later, I sourced an MR11 LED replacement lamp from Bunnings and fitted a diode in series with it (hidden inside a red sleeve) to convert the AC to DC. The diode also reduces the power to the lamp for a longer life with little effect on the light output for the display. A good deed by the non-technical resulted in hours of time and parts to repair! Victor Duffey, Rosanna, Vic. HP410C voltmeter repair I am an avid collector of old HP and Tektronix test equipment, so when a friend offered me their HP410C in exchange for some Marconi RF coil standards, I jumped at the deal. It was in fantastic physical condition, but had some problems that deserved my ministrations... Firstly, it was inaccurate; the meter reading was either too low or too high depending on what range I set it to. I tried a quick calibration, which highlighted the many problems that I was about to find. One of the main PSU capacitors was bad. It was a rather large 2400μF 20V part. I replaced it with a 4700μF Kemet electrolytic capacitor, which mounted on one of my oval capacitor adaptor PCBs for retro work, as the original ‘big can’ type is not cheaply available anymore. This capacitor filters the 6V rail that supplies the heater to the probe valve diode, among other things. At this stage, I discovered the big T03 germanium series pass transistor was worn out to the point that it measured as two leaky diodes! Luckily, Rockby had 2N1544s on sale a while ago, which turned out to be the exact equivalent of the original Motorola 1850-0098 PNP germanium transistor. Shown at left is the decorative village, and the original MR8 lamp is visible in the adjacent photo. 88 Silicon Chip Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au The last part I replaced in the PSU was a 38V zener diode which decided to avalanche at 32V these days (I guess 50 years is a bit much to ask). At this point, I thought I was really getting somewhere. However, there were three other problems. The first was simple: a 100W resistor at the AC probe telephone-style plug that sits across the heater rail was burnt out and making intermittent contact, causing the needle to behave erratically when measuring AC voltages. When this was replaced, the 410C settled down nicely. Next, FSD (full-scale deflection) on the lowest of the three ranges was impossible to get right. I found a 6MW resistor with a tolerance of 0.5% on the attenuator switch that was reading 6.3MW. Luckily, I had a junk 410C with one that was OK, as I don’t think a 6MW resistor was in my parts box. Now I was getting really close, but the most interesting repair was to come! The final hurdle was the moving meter itself. As some people know, HP eventually made their own meters, and they were individually calibrated by having someone print the label on each and every face when testing the meter movement. This incredible feat of engineering, combined with the taut-band movement, made HP simply the best money could buy; even AVO meters didn’t come close, as they just selected from several differently scaled faces to ‘best suit’ the chosen movement. This meter had lost magnetism in the ‘permanent’ magnet. When I should have gotten an FSD reading at 1mA, I only received about 85% of full scale. Due to this, and possible slackening of the taut band, the other readings were well off. So there was no way to make it work by calibrating the 410C to this particular meter movement. I decided to have a go at re-magnetising the meter. I carefully disassembled the inner workings of the moving coil meter and removed the magnetic core. I wound this with several turns of thick multi-strand wire and then shorted this across a large 12V AGM battery. However, that was not enough to make an improvement. I went for broke and got a second 12V AGM battery and put them in series for 24V DC at considerable current; I estimate that the surges were over 100A! This had the desired effect, and the permanent magnet was now strong enough to make the needle read FSD <at> 1mA. There was still the small detail of the meter now being different enough to not line up with the previous graduation markings. I decided to calibrate this in a similar way to the HP of old by connecting my current calibrator to the meter and running it at 0.1mA, 0.2mA, 0.3mA all the way to 1mA. At each point, I marked the meter face to show where the graduations should be. I handed this to a friend who knows far more about vector diagrams than myself; he created a new meter scale to accurately reflect the current calibration of the meter. This was printed on a quality vinyl sticker and placed over the original face. After that, the calibration went smoothly, with all attenuation scales are bang-on, and the unit cleaned up like new. Yes, it was a lot of work, but very interesting at the same time. It’s quite satisfying to have repaired a classic and still very usable meter. SC Deon Vandenberg, Torquay, Qld. siliconchip.com.au Australia's electronics magazine August 2025  89