Never do this. I mean it. It is dangerous, it is wrong, you may get hurt, your tools, your stuff or your house may be damaged. I did this because I didn’t have proper tools at hand and it was a do or die weekend situation. You must use proper air soldering and desoldering tools. In Youtube you can find excellent videos on how to do this in a better manner.
Bear in mind, I’m not suggesting you do this either, for all the reasons listed above. However, it is an interesting process to observe.
iFixit: The free repair manual kicks off Earth day with opening up their repair guides to the public & going for the e-cause…
Today iFixit is changing repair forever. Today — Earth Day, 2010 — we are launching a global repair community. Our goal? To teach every person on Earth how to fix every thing they own. You know us as the folks who take apart new hardware and show people how to fix Apple products. We’re not going to stop doing any of that, but starting today we are going to massively expand our scope: We are relaunching iFixit as the free repair manual that anyone can edit.
Repair is stuck in the 20th century. Service manuals are almost never available online, and the few troubleshooting forums that exist are rife with spam and ad-baiting. Reliable parts suppliers that understand e-commerce are few and far between.
Making repair accessible to everyone is the best shot we’ve got at reducing e-waste and starting to make our high-tech lives sustainable. We can’t keep throwing away cell phones every 18 months! We need to get every last bit of functionality from the things we own before we toss them aside. What if everyone had free access to a repair manual for everything they owned? How much longer would our things last? Our mission is to give people the information, parts, and tools they need to make their things work as long as possible.
We showed our vision to officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, and they were ecstatic. Andrew Fanara, Product Development Team Leader for the ENERGY STAR Program, commented that “the EPA would like to see more done about the growing e-waste problem, and iFixit has a novel, community-driven approach to make electronics work longer. We are encouraged by their solution, and are looking forward to observing the environmental impact of iFixit’s platform.” Join us, and together we’ll fix the world!
Celebrate Earth Day 2010 with Adafruit – we’ll have posts all day and night with fun power/earth/green related projects and we’re having a one-time only sale on solar panels! Get a 2W solar panel 6V, 330mA out for $20, today only!
In this video (m4v) we show you how to take a $10 pager and make “pager scanner” – it can see all the pages and pager data on the pager networks – surprisingly it’s still used for a lot of interesting things and for transmitting data to many devices. Breadboarding diagram for 2-fsk decoding here & download PDW here.
A few years ago, after my plastic portable machine broke, I bought a Singer 20u73, light industrial sewing machine. I was pretty tired of slow, weak machines with low torque. Going through 4 layers of fabric was a struggle so of course I went all out and got this nice machine.
Unlike little portables which turn on the DC motor when the foot-lever is pressed, industrials use a clutch motor. The motor is running the moment you turn it on, and when the foot-lever is pressed, it moves the clutch towards the motor, engaging it. This means higher torque when you turn it on, thus getting rid of the frustrating “have to help the machine along” stuff necessary with small sewing machines. Great. only problem is that the motor runs at a perky 1750 RPM and the clutch is very sticky. This means it requires some practice to get used to the foot pedal: instead of being linearly related to stitch speed, its much more ‘exponential’. Seems like either nothing is happening or its going at a ridiculous 2000-2500 stitches a minute — much too fast for someone out of practice.
The solution? Basically everyone says “you’ll get used to it with lots of practice.” Which is another way of saying “this design really sucks”. (There’s DC servo motors that have no clutch because they can give high instantaneous torque but I’m not 100% sure they solve the speed-control issues)
Another solution is to change the pulley, which will bring the max speed down, and tweak the clutch setup for better response. For $20 it’s a nice simple fix. I spent a few days figuring out how the hell one does this. I figure if I post all of this now it will possibly save someone else the hassle.
p.s. You could screw this up and hurt yourself – 1/3 HP motors don’t stop for you or your hands. If you aren’t comfortable with this sort of mechanical assembly and disassembly, maybe have your sewing machine repairman do this for you?
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