bigone5500
Well-Known Member
I replaced the ball joints on my truck. And never again will I do that. To a mechanic it will go.
What Did You Do Today???
- Thread starter Tony
- Start date
Tony
Staff member
Hey, look here mister, I'm trying to make room by removing the junk that I'm tired of to bring in junk that has yet to piss me off hahaha.
So whatcha got?
Eh, ball joints are easy as long as you have the right tools. Without the right tools, it's a complete PITA.
RandyDSok
Well-Known Member
bigone5500
Well-Known Member
These ball joints are in a 08 ram 1500 2wd. I had to cut the tops off them to get them out. I ended up ruining a moog upper on accident. This is my first and only time to do this work.
Tony
Staff member
Okay, this is now part 3 of this series lmao. Yea... "series"... ugh...
So you all know that I have had this old 2.1 speaker system on my computer for YEARS and the right channel ended up dying. So while I was in a hurry one day I decided to pull out the soldering iron and reflow all of the solder joints on one of the 3 boards in there. So I did that, I connected everything back up and
all channels were working, Right, Left, and the Sub were all working again. I'm awesome... Lets turn it up and get some bass going... "POP" 
Then the magic smoke came pouring out of the sub where all the electronics live. I took it apart, again, and yup, a cap had completely exploded and a resistor was now black and unrecognizable. Well, I knew it was a resistor lmao.
That is where the second quote came in above. Found out the specs on the components and made two orders, one for the caps and on for the resistors. So now I wait.
A week after making the first order I receive the caps (only ordered two of them) but the resistors were no where to be seen. I contacted the seller (and opened up a case with ebay even though that is not what I meant to do, this time.... More on that in a sec lol) and he said "I'm sorry, I sent them out, they must have been lost in the mail. Unfortunately I'm out of stock of that particular item right now so I would be happy to refund your money". RED FLAG!!! I never received them and now you are "out of stock". I think you were "out of stock" and still sold them to me!!! Whatever, give me my money, I will go somewhere else.
So now we are a couple weeks after the initial order, I have the money back (like it really mattered, it was a little over a buck... Mmm, buck. Makes me want to cook up some back strap) so I make an order with a second company, twice as many resistors (I need ONE!!! lol) for the same price, so I order them. They said it would be delivered by Friday (today is Tuesday) so I sent the seller a message yesterday morning. I'm in america, they are shipping from america so I expect a return to my email during america's normal business hours. I wait, and nothing, no response. So, I open a claim.
By this time I'm pissed. All I need is some simple resistors to put on a board to fix what I had caught on fire lmao. Maybe the electronics gods are punishing me. Yea? Well I have a good one for them. hehe.
I know I have resistors around here which I purchased to bypass the VATS system on my wife's car. VATS is Vehicle Anti-Theft System. Basically it's that little chip in a key. Her chip went bad and I'm not paying $25 for a friggin key!!! So I bypassed it lmao. I searched all over for these resistors, but they are nowhere to be found. Then I see a bag of 5mm LED's, actually 3 bags, and since they are not native 12v LED's, they have resistors to bring down the voltage and the current so they don't blow up. Okay, they don't actually "blow up", they just fizzle out unimpressively.
There were two resistances in these packs, 460Ω and 560Ω. Okay, I can use two 460's and get close at 920Ω. Or I could put two 560Ω in series for 1120Ω. Or, just mix them and get 1020Ω. And that is what I did. The crappy thing is, now I have two resistors in place of one, which looks like crap but it's inside a box and you can't see it. But I still know it's there so my ADD sense (it's like spidey sense, but for things that need to be perfect lol) is going nuts knowing this. It looks like the resistors are having a rainbow party with the board. If you know what this is, shutup and don't say anything lmao.
So I have the resistors soldered in and I solder in the capacitor, cut all the leads, triple check for solder bridges, I'm good, it's time to test. I put it all back together and I set everything on top of my desk that way if it blows up my face is only about 8" from the output port of the sub lmao. But, I'm pretty sure it's going to be fine!!!
I wire it up and plug it into my headphone jack on the front of the computer tower and go go gadget youtube for some BASS. I don't care about the speakers, I care about the sub since that is the board that died lol. I find a 1:50 song and I let it go. Bass sounds good and yea BOI, I have both channels working so no more mono sound lol. So I crank it up and let that song play out. I hit another song with lower notes, it plays out, I hit a third song and, okay, the bass was a little too low on that one and was over extending the sub so it was hitting the grill so 4th song and oh yea, still working. I feel the back and it's starting to get warm which is normal and it's still going. My neighbors thought it sounded to good they invited the local sheriff's office over to enjoy it with us.
Okay, not really but I saw that joke on one of the youtube comments and thought it was pretty funny lol.
But dammit, it works and that is all I care about. It has been sitting apart and blown up for far too long. Of course I have this new system under my desk now so I have no idea what I'm going to do with my old system that I just fixed lmao. I guess it's time to move it away from my desk to make room for more clutter. lol.
Yes, I thought about putting all of this on video, but my personal channel doesn't get any hits and speakers are not really RC related so I just skipped over that. If I can get some chargers or whatever that have went bad, and I can fix them, I will definitely make videos on that to post to the channel. Man I miss making videos...
Tony
Staff member
So I posted that quote above quite a while ago. It did take a very long time to find all of the files because I did a "Deep Scan" which looks at ever friggin point it possibly can to find files that had been marked as "available" which means they were "deleted". So after a very long time of searching, it found the files and I started writing them to the drive. I screwed up and I have no idea how I did it, fat fingered the mouse I guess because I selected to save to the SAME DRIVE!!!
Randy knows what that means, but for those that don't, if you are recovering deleted files from a drive, and you try to save to the same drive, it is going to write to the exact same sectors you are trying to recover from. This means, files are going to be corrupted and there is NOTHING you can do about it. It's like double exposed film, you are never going to get the original image out of that double exposed image. Yea, this was stupid on my part!!!
So I found another drive where the files would fit and I wrote them to it. It was just a 200GB drive from an old laptop which is pretty slow, but whatever, they are being backed up.
Once that finally completed, about 14 hours later, no lie lol, I open it up and holy hell, it was all individual files in no particular order other than alphanumeric order. Great....
I know I had talked to Randy about this, but I can't remember where it was, may have been in a conversation which I have not looked at yet. But I remember saying something to him about it saving non structured files and he didn't say anything other than "yup, that is what sucks about it". Well, I went poking around today and in the advanced settings of Recuva I found a beautiful little check mark that said "keep file structure" or something like that. Oh yea....
So you know what I"m doing now... Yup, rescanning (quick this time, forget that overnight crap... Although I may still do it just to test lol) all of the files and writing them to my NEW 8TB drive. Yes, NEW because I want a backup drive just in case something like this pops up again. My luck though, I will need both drives for files and will have to purchase two more as a backup to these two lmao. It's a never ending battle.
So there, I'm trying to get all of the files I can back and once I do, I absolutely will NOT do a duplicate file deletion unless I have the entire drive backed up, which I should have done in the first place. Brain fart from hell...
Even on this quick scan, it is saying it is going to take 7 hours+ to write from one 8TB drive (in my computer) to a USB3 drive plugged into the same computer.
Someone punch me if I make this mistake again...
bigone5500
Well-Known Member
Tony in the past I have successfully used a program called zero assumption recovery. You might try that one out some day..
bigone5500
Well-Known Member
I used it on a laptop drive that had MBR issues and was completely inaccessible. I recovered all files for the person who used it for their business.
bigone5500
Well-Known Member
I finally ordered a set of skids for my 270. They should be here Monday.
Tony
Staff member
So I have mentioned my 24" monitor with no backlight before in this thread. I finally received my mosfet (the part that caught on fire) so I soldered it in place and there are more issues than just that. I did find a bulged 220µf capacitor so I replaced it and still the same issue. There is a flash of the backlight then nothing. This monitor is LCD not LED (which LED is still LCD but with a different backlight lol) so it has CCFL (Cold Cathode Florescent Lamps) and it is possible the lamps are bad, but for all 4 of them to go out all at once is quite rare. But, I can keep chasing this issue by replacing the driver board with a universal one, I can replace the CCFL bulbs if I can find this configuration and risk them getting broke in shipping (they are very thin, only about 2mm wide) but we are still working with old lighting.
So I completely disassembled my monitor screen. Man, there are a lot of layers in this thing. More than I thought there would be. But it's all to disperse the light evenly. I removed the CCFL bulbs which was not easy (no I didn't break them lol) and I measured the slot in the top and bottom where they were located. I have just over 4mm of space. I did a search and sure enough I can get some cool white LED's in a strip that is only 4mm wide. Cool white may be a bad idea, it may be a little too blue. If this is the case, I may have to find a filter to warm it up but that is for another random post lol.
For now though, the order for the LED's has been placed and I'm just playing the waiting game again. Time to play with the stream deck for a little bit and maybe fire up a quick live stream to test everything out.
So I completely disassembled my monitor screen. Man, there are a lot of layers in this thing. More than I thought there would be. But it's all to disperse the light evenly. I removed the CCFL bulbs which was not easy (no I didn't break them lol) and I measured the slot in the top and bottom where they were located. I have just over 4mm of space. I did a search and sure enough I can get some cool white LED's in a strip that is only 4mm wide. Cool white may be a bad idea, it may be a little too blue. If this is the case, I may have to find a filter to warm it up but that is for another random post lol.
For now though, the order for the LED's has been placed and I'm just playing the waiting game again. Time to play with the stream deck for a little bit and maybe fire up a quick live stream to test everything out.
RandyDSok
Well-Known Member
I finally got to order a replacement drive ( 4Tb ) for the 3Tb drive that I had that was causing my work computer to BSOD.... I'm still "freaked" that copying to or from the drive itself would cause that, so it's likely something electrical and not just a bad spot on the drive causing it. Anyhow, I'll probably get the drive in about Monday.
The drive is primarily used as just a backup drive for either myself or my clients data.... so my system isn't reliant on it for actual work like accounting etc ( that's all on a SSD ).
The drive is primarily used as just a backup drive for either myself or my clients data.... so my system isn't reliant on it for actual work like accounting etc ( that's all on a SSD ).
bigone5500
Well-Known Member
Today, I went to work, then came home.
bigone5500
Well-Known Member
Just bought a set of ball link pliers on ebay for ~$6
bigone5500
Well-Known Member
It would be nice if there were some that were long nosed that could reach into tight spots such as the one servo on my 270.
bigone5500
Well-Known Member
So get this, I got up this morning and went to work, right? When I got done, I came home again. It's like the movie groundhog day. The same thing every day. Work, home, work, home. Something tells me that I just might do it again tomorrow. We'll see when the alarm goes off in the morning.