Apple Mighty Mouse Scroll Ball Fix

Symptom

Mouse scroll ball isn't scrolling properly.



The Fix

Dissassembly is to be avoided since it would involve breaking the gray ring on the bottom of the mouse off and re gluing it. There is a much faster and simpler approach. Get a clean piece of paper, flip the mouse onto its back and rub the wheel around vigorously on the paper.

Maytag Dishwasher - Top Rack Latches

Symptom

Probably due to temperature stresses in the dishwasher, eventually the stop latches on the top rack pop loose.

The Fix

Drill a little hole at the top and thread a zip tie through there. This will keep the latch secure.

Viking Range - All Locked up!

One of my friends in Massachusetts asked me to help fix their Viking's oven door. He reported that just having someone come out to look at it was going to cost him $500. Hey I figured, if I'm in town on business anyway why not add some appliance fixing to round out the adventure!

Symptoms

It started like this... the oven was working fine, they had just baked a pie, so the oven was pretty warm. Then they decided to use the self cleaning feature. This oven has a tricky safety feature that locks the door from the inside during cleaning. After turning on the cleaning feature, they decided to turn it off. The problem was that once the latch locked up the door, it stayed that way. The oven stayed locked shut for a week as I made my way out to the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Disassembly

When I encounter a fix project that I'm unfamiliar with, I spend a fair amount of time just getting in there and looking around. We ended up removing a bunch of parts of the oven to get some visibility into the core problem. That's a typical and I believe good strategy for you to use in your own fix-it projects. Eventually I determined that you need to remove the burners, gas line, and the sheet metal below the burners and above the oven. This gets you access to the latching mechanism.

There is another trick to get in there. Upon close inspection, you'll notice that the top of the oven door has vent slots. Upon even closer inspection, you'll see that just beyond those vent slots is the tip of the latch and that's what is holding the door shut. Trying "picking the lock" by sliding a little screw driver in and pushing the latch to the left. Bing. The door is open.



The latch mechanism is a momentary solenoid activated two position latch. Given command of the control board, the solenoid is momentarily activated to set the spring mechanism into a mode that's either keeping the latch normally open or normally closed. If it's being held normally closed, then even with the power disconnected, you're door is latched closed!

The Fix

The correct fix is to open the top of the oven up, as described previously, and replace the latch mechanism. You can buy such parts from places such as http://www.repairclinic.com/. In this particular case though, we found that a bit of manual "massaging" of the lock mechanism was enough to convince it back into the normally open mode. From there, the owner has received a recommendation not to use the self cleaning mode.

Black & Decker Mouse Sander/Polisher MS500

My sander was purchased from Home Depot. It was orange, not blue/green. I believe the part number reflects the difference, the MS500K is orange while the MS500 is blue/green.

Have you ever looked at the reviews on Amazon and wondered how true all these comments are? I certainly have. About half are 100% thrilled with the product, and the other half are completely negative. I can't claim to completely understand it. I figure it's a mix of people who had just bought the product, not having time yet to see a failure. And a bit of those company sponsored fake reviews that sway results in the positive, five star direction. Then you've got the fact that most people won't review a product unless it's negative.

Anyway, there used to be complaints in the reviews about the reliability of the the B&D sander product. They all said the same thing... it just fails after awhile. Frankly, I had that problem too, but I can say that for the money the sander is awesome. How could I possibly say a product is awesome for the money if it breaks? Well, if all the reviewers are saying it just fails outright, and you're thinking... this thing *is* a vibrating sander, maybe something on the inside has vibrated loose -- just perhaps? :) I opened it up and reconnected the motor wires, and blamo -- I was able to sand an entire wooden log home room with it.



Disassembly

The case is held is held together with four screws on the side. These screws have an unusual head, but can be easily removed with a standard flat head screw driver.



The Fix

Identify or remove loose terminal connections. Using pliers, pinch each connecting terminal slightly so they grip more tightly. You might also decide to solder the connectors on instead of relying upon their friction to hold them in place. I haven't found that to be necessary.

Reassembly

Simply get the wires back in place, put the shell together, and tighten the screws. Product fixed.

Proper care and feeding of the Intermatic Electronic Programmable Timer

Background

My experience is with the Intermatic SS8. This model is powered by a single AA battery and includes an astronomic clock. I’m currently under the impression that mechanical clocks to figure sunset and sunrise (astronomic function) are in the $700 range and this is the first commercial, packaged digital switch that performs the function for us mere humans.

Much of what I’m presenting probably also applies to the “simpler” electronic wall switch timers from Intermatic, such as the EI15 and EI20.

This is a very cool device since it can figure sunrise and sunset for you (given the date and longitude) and turn your lights on and off without an exterior sensor. This is particularly useful for controlling banks of exterior lighting from an interior wall switch or maybe even controlling an aquarium lamp for sunrise and sunset.

The problem is, I like many others, had the misfortune of the switching failing on short order with the dreaded “no op” “see inst” message. A quick search on the net produced nothing other than a bunch of complaints (see epinions, amazon, etc). This is not exactly a cheap light switch (the $35 range) and although it has a one year warranty by the looks of other’s experiences I’d just get another of similar quality if I went to the trouble of returning it.

I decided to open it up. Perhaps something could be addressed I thought. I had a similar experience with a Black and Decker Mouse sander: several reviews stating that it just died. Well, I popped it open and it wasn’t a big surprise to find that the failure on my vibrational sander was simply that the power wires on the motor had vibrated loose. A quick tightening and before I knew it I had literally sanded a whole wood paneled room!

Disassembly


Front compartment



Rear compartment

The unit is fairly easy to disassemble. There aren’t any glued parts, just tabs on the sides holding things together. The front and back can be removed separately. A word of warning here, there are two small springs in the front compartment which could become easily lost.

The mechanicals
This switch is advertised as an electronic switch. We’ll that might be a little of a misnomer since technically it’s electromechanical. There is a 1.5v pager motor gear which powers a cam through gear reduction, and then a MicroSwitch to do the heavy lifting for the AC switching. It seems that the unit could have been designed with a solid state relay (are there any at 1.5V?). In any case, the fact that the whole back half of the switch case is filled with a mechanical switch apparatus isn’t that much of a surprise. This is after all Intermaic, a company that’s 100 years old and famous for it’s mechanical timers.

The failure
The instruction manual states that a “no op” could be several things. Cold temperature? I just don’t see that, maybe if it’s below freezing in your house, but then you have other issues like frozen toilet bowls. Battery? Well that’s easily replaced. And the final suggestion “return for replacement”.

What “no op” really means is that when the electronic portion of the switch tries to change the mechanical switch state, it can’t. Yes, there is feedback. There is a little wire which comes back off the switch telling the electronics whether or not the mechanical switch is open or closed. It uses this to know when to shut off the cam motor when it’s changing the switch state.

The Fix

It seems to me that there are two easily repairable failure modes. These are likely manufacturing issues not design issues. Therefore, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Intermatic having fixed these reliability issues in short order for future (or more recent) lots.

1. The cam part isn’t well secured to the final gear. If you have this failure then what you’re probably experiencing is a “no op” following some amount of motor sound. Here I recommend supergluing the cam to the final gear. Do this off the shaft obviously. And don’t get any in the gear’s hole.

2. The contacts aren’t connecting from the circuit card to the motor well. Here your failure would have been something more like a silent “no op” failure. I found that the bottom rung on the spring could be firmly seated in the little plastic pinch at the bottom of the plastic leg. This helps keep good contact between the relatively small motor wires and the springs themselves. Soldering the wire and spring would be a good idea too. Don’t melt the plastic post.

Reassembly
Front: You didn’t loose those small battery compartment spring contacts did you?

Rear: Put all the gears back in. Pinion sides up. It doesn’t matter which way the cam is oriented during assembly since the system has feedback as discussed above. But it’s easier to put the rear case back on if it’s at it’s lowest point with the MicroSwitch arm since they will interfere.


Testing
You can easily test your work by applying 1.5v directly to the contacts which drive the pager motor. If all is well the motor spins, and the cam operates the switch arm on the MicroSwitch.