As regular readers will know, I usually report my engineering exploits with a subtle, understated presumption that the success of these enterprises is pretty much guaranteed. Of course, I am able to do this because I only write about things I've already finished. There is an automatic editing process which makes things that didn't work out so well seem just a
little bit less interesting to write about than splendid victories. It's the "history is written by the winners" phenomenon, writ small - in my case, very small indeed.
Anyway, in the spirit of honest journalism I feel duty bound, in my role as trailblazer for the wanna-be retiree community, to let you in on a less successful exploit.
I finally got round to fixing the Samsung phone that Ellen was going to sell for spares. It needed a new screen glass, and the headphone jack had snapped off in the socket. She'd been quoted £120 to fix it, because the headphone jack issue would need a new sub-assembly, and it's a pain to take it apart to that extent. I was jolly pleased to finally get all the bits in hand - new front glass with appropriate adhesive film, new rear panel adhesive, and a new sub-assembly complete with with power socket, headphone socket, and soft switches on flying leads. I also splashed out on a 21-piece special phone-mending toolkit (SPMT), mostly to get the big sucker you need to pull on the screen in the disassembly process. Total outlay for all these parts: £14.20. Good so far.
And so I set to. First task it to get the back off, by softening the adhesive with heat, and pulling with the big sucker from the whilst holding on to the frame. It turns out it takes a really surprisingly large amount of heat (from my newly acquired, but not part of the project, heat gun) to heat the thing up enough to make any impact on the glue, and then it's all too hot to hold onto the frame, which is tiny and slippery. So I had to make a special tool to hold the frame:
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| Phone clamp |
Spot the far-from-deliberate mistake? That over-centre clamp has a custom-made jaw to exactly fit the frame of the phone - but it's made from an off-cut of plastic drain pipe. Guess what happens when
that gets hot? Hmmm. It goes as floppy as a floppy thing on a floppy day (as Ben Elton might have said) and doesn't hold the frame at all. However, by only closing it when it was really necessary, and generally being extra careful, I did manage to make it work (as you can see).
Once you have unstuck the back, you simply extract the thirteen tiny screws, and pull the frame off the screen, and you can separate the actual touchscreen from the (broken) glass by yet another application of a surprisingly large amount of heat, plus wedges and picks supplied in the SPMT. Clean everything up with IPA (IsoPropyl Alcohol, silly, not India Pale Ale) and position the adhesive film (tricky) and the new glass (also tricky) and leave overnight. Then we're ready to unclip all the tiny, tiny,
tiny connectors using a delightfully-named spudger from the SPMT, remove one more screw, and get the PCBs off. It really is all quite microscopic in there. Anyway, the new sub-assembly is a perfect fit, and the new soft switches have their own glue on, so it all goes back together very nicely. Replace the fourteen screws, press the power switch, and - nothing. Bugger. Maybe I left something off? Take it all apart again, put it back together again, nothing. Charge it up - red light, then blue pulsing light (fully charged). Factory reset using volume down, power and home buttons - nothing. Drink tea, contemplate, repeat the above with all possible button combinations - nothing. And so we have the current situation - total failure. Pooh!
On the upside, oven cleaning...
A few months ago someone posted on our street's Facebook group (yes, indeed it does!) that their favourite oven-cleaning man was coming to visit, and did anyone else want to book him while he was in the area. The lovely Jackie, ever supportive of local people's kind invitations (not to mention ever reluctant to attempt oven-cleaning herself - it's the asthma you know) said OK. Of course, I wouldn't have, but it was all agreed before I knew anything about it. And so the favourite oven-cleaning man turned up and started work. To my surprise, he didn't use any foul-smelling products or fancy equipment of any description, so I asked him about the process. He was very happy to tell me that he only uses washing up liquid, water, and elbow grease, applied using a variety of things, the fiercest being one of those plastic dish scrubbers which look like coarse wire wool. He assured me that they don't scratch the enamel. There's no smell, no white streaky bits from holes in the oven that sprays get behind, and everybody's happy. We also discussed the merits and ecological footprint of various washing-up liquids, and he told me that his preferred choice overall, after extensive testing, is Lidl's V5. And he pointed out that, having told me everything there is to know about his process, that I wouldn't really need to employ him any more - if I could be bothered to put the required effort into doing the job.
Well, it turns out I can. It's much more rewarding that trying to use those horrible foaming products full of noxious poisons, and it works very well. It does take a while, but approaching it as an exercise for the arms and shoulders rather than merely a chore makes it better in every way. Wax on, wax off, as it were.
Actually I seem to spend quite a large proportion of my time cleaning things these days. There's Layla of course, who needs a dedicated team of attendants (especially if pasta with tomato sauce is involved), but now we are all washing our hands every time we've touched anything, and disinfecting hard surfaces and shared keypads with soap, it's becoming something of a full time obsession. This is all because of the lovely Jackie's history of asthma, which together with our advanced age, makes her
doubly vulnerable to Covid-19, so it looks as if my proposed strategy of contracting it early while there are still some hospital beds available if required isn't going to fly. We are stuck with trying to avoid getting it at all, at least until there's a vaccine or something. Which is going to mean a lot more hand-washing and cleaning things. Still, one upside of all this is that we get to stay at home more, which I quite like actually.
Speaking of Corona virus reminds my of that other Corona from my youth in the 60's:
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| corona virus, 1960's style |
I think it was delivered by the milkman. It was fairly unexceptional stuff, apart from the cream soda, which was strange (in quite a good way). We used to like making ice-cream sodas by floating vanilla ice-cream in it and eating the resulting sludgy mess with a spoon. Very American Graffiti. I can't help wondering what was in it? Today's equivalents don't shed much light. This is Barr's cream soda:
Hmmm. I expect the 1960's response to "What's in it?" would have been "Mind your own business!", but now we have wikiHow, which tells us that the main flavouring in cream soda is vanilla, and the cream part (probably) comes from cream of tartar, which was used to make sucrose into invert sugar, which turns some of the sucrose into fructose, because it's sweeter than - er, sugar. You know - high fructose corn syrup, favourite ingredient of the US diabetes industry, and all that. The fructose also makes the angle of rotation of light when the solution is illuminated go negative, which is why it's called "inverted".
So we've all learned something today. I hope that makes up, in a tiny way, for the dreariness of the incessant rain, scare-mongering of moment-by-moment Covid-19 updates, and general idiocy of Boris Johnson trying to look Churchillean on the telly. Probably not though.
