All posts by mrfitzer

New life for a dead HDD

Great weekend project I found on the instructables website. Take an old HDD, a USB hub, and a few thumb drives. Remove the HDD guts and replace with the critical parts of the USB hub. I used a dremel tool to chop the strain relief from the hub housing and hot melt glued it in place.


Almost kept it for myself

A friend who plays a Les Paul wanted some info on a strat. I reccomended a MIM standard. They run around $300 on craigslist. I found this 2007 with a hardshell case for $300, still has buffing compound under the frets and plastic on the pickguard. I owned it for a day!

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Mullard Caps

Experimenting a bit with the tone cap on a strat. Just received an order of Mullard “tropical fish” .039uF caps. The value is in-between the standard Fender .022uF and Gibson .047uF. Should be an interesting experiment. I’ll be dropping them in next week.


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Monitor Repair

My 22″ Acer monitor died about a month ago. I did a little googling and found that this model has an output transformer prone to failure. It was a $20 gamble that paid off (new transformer from lcdparts sitting on the bubble wrap in the photo below ). About 45 minutes round trip, the majority of the time was spent figuring out disassembly. Photos were an important trail of digital breadcrumbs that I used to get the monitor back together.
Awesome video on the basic function of an LCD monitor here.

The only soldering were the 8 pads circled in red above that needed to be desoldered to install the new transformer

OT transformer in red again, the white blobs of silicone popped off with tweezers and glued back in place after soldering with a little roasting with a heat gun.

Back in business!