I Fixed It!

You've all heard stories about overspecialized engineers - an electrical engineer who can't change a light bulb, the mechanical engineer who has no idea how to fix a car, and so on. Well, we are a bit more hands-on than some, as you'll recall from an earlier post. We've managed to fix another couple of items in the past few months, with a bit more finesse than the last one.

First off, my sewing machine. I used it quite a bit for the couch cover, after realizing I had insurmountable tension problems with the one I brought from the US and buying a new one. About 10" from the end on the final seam of the couch cover, it gave out on me. I finished it by hand, because there was no way I was going to give up that close to the end, but I was quite annoyed with the (new, expensive) machine.


It turns out that the problem was a set screw that wasn't set tightly enough, in the bowels of the machine. Lee assisted me with taking the case off, a much harder task than you might think, to get at the innards and fix the slipping set screw that was messing with the timing of the needle. It seems to be working well enough for now.  This picture does not capture the full drama of the disassembly; we had the whole case entirely open, but didn't take pictures during that stage.  The part was NOT casually accessible.

The second item you might not want to try to fix yourself that we dealt with was my laptop. The webcam started acting screwy, turning itself on and off as the case was opened or the screen tilted. It was no longer reliably working for video chatting, and this was a problem. We looked at quite a few tutorials, but as I tend to destroy electronics by looking at them funny (not being too facetious here) Lee took charge of this expedition.


After getting to all of the wires connected to the webcam, which happen to be below and/or behind every other component in the laptop (not kidding, the monitor panel came out and you could see through the main chassis because of the stuff I removed), we tested the connections to see where the problem was, and determined that one of the wires was in fact broken. This is likely due to the fact that the wire for the webcam runs through the hinge on the laptop and therefore has a bit more stress put on it than it likes. This should be fixed by buying a new wire, or stripping the wire, soldering the bits, and re-heat-shrinking it, but we had no solder. We substituted twisting the wire and adding and hot glue.


After gluing the wire together, we tested the connection some more with the computer still in pieces, because we were not going to open it back up once it was fully together again if it was at all avoidable. It did work (kind of creepy to use a laptop in pieces), so we taped the outside of the wire with some lovely red duct tape for heft and padding and managed to squeeze it back in to the case in the correct position.


Amazingly enough, no electronics or people were harmed and everything works (for now).  There was a slight bulge in the laptop control panel but Lee hit it and it went away.