Pickabar Blog

About a year or so ago, my here-to-fore perfectly working Samsung 225BW computer monitor started taking a very long time to turn on. At first it was only a few minutes and I could live with it. Eventually, a few minutes became up to a half hour and the situation became unworkable. I was learning about electronics and specifically capacitors at that time. My gut told me that the problem, slow warming up, might have to do with a faulty capacitor.

I contacted the service folks at Samsung and they informed me that the repairs might cost a couple of hundred dollars. At that point, it made more fiscal sense to just purchase a new monitor and I did. I got a Dell 2208WFP from NewEgg for a reasonable price and I was happy again. Well, pretty happy. It still bothered me to throw away what was an otherwise perfect monitor.

The electronics we use and throw away so easily now-a-days often contain toxic substances like lead and even the plastic that makes up so much of them requires petroleum AND will probably outlast our civilization. In my own life I’ve owned maybe 20 computers and eight or nine cellphones, not to mention VCRs, stereos and tons of other things that are sitting in a landfill rotting as we speak. More than that, I’m a die hard packrat and hate to throw anything useful away.

So, the monitor sat in our hallway gathering dust.

In the last few weeks Sarah and I have been making a real effort to clean up our apartment. We’ve got about ten things sitting in our apartment with no real purpose. We’ve talked about throwing these things out, or finding the right place to recycle them, or finding a place to donate them, but it’s never progressed beyond the point of talking. Then, yesterday, I decided to put the monitor on craigslist. I figured that it would be better to give it away for free to someone who might have the skills to fix it, rather than letting it go to waste.

Then it hit me. Maybe I could fix it myself! A quick web search for “Samsung power problem” brought up 13 million results. Obviously, this was a pretty common design flaw with many Samsung monitors. One particular article on the Earth Info site really made me think that this was a fix that I was capable of doing myself. I haven’t done much soldering, but I’ve been tinkering for about a year and this seemed within the range of my skillset. Anyway, what did I have to lose?

The biggest mental obstacle for me was opening the monitor’s case. I’ve been building computers since I was eighteen or so, but I’d never even seen the inside of a monitor. Like a lot of people, I tend to treat electronic things as sealed magic boxes. It was a little daunting opening up what could have been a Pandora’s box.

I needn’t have worried. Opening the case required only loosening a few screws and prying off the front with a butter knife. I took pictures as I went along in order to make sure I’d be able to put things back together. Unfortunately, I deleted the pictures from my camera before I realized how useful they may have been for the future. In fifteen minutes the monitor was in pieces on my coffee table. I was surprised at how simple the monitor actually was. Just a case and two pcb boards, really.

There were three blown capacitors on the power supply board just as I had seen in the articles and YouTube videos. It took about five minutes for me to de-solder them. Only at that point did I remember that I would actually need need replacements for the capacitors I removed. Some engineer I am! I contacted RadioShack near my house, but RadioShack isn’t really the same hobbyist friendly place that it used to be. I also contacted a place called Leeds Radio that was near my house. The curt person who answered the phone seemed completely uninterested in talking to me. He indicated that he didn’t have the appropriate capacitors and quickly hung up on me.

Note to business owners: Even if you don’t have the item I’m looking for today, you may have the item I’m looking for tomorrow. I’ve you’re not interested in talking to a potential customer, why are you even in business?

You can imagine how frustrated I was. How could it be so hard to find electronic components in NYC? I could have ordered the capacitors online, but I was heart set on completing the task that same day. I also wasn’t looking forward to explaining to Sarah why our mission to clean out our apartment had instead led to me having monitor components strewn all over the place. After some additional digging on the web, I found a place at 269 Canal Street called, imaginatively enough, 269 Electronics. They confirmed that they did have the appropriate caps. A quick subway ride to Chinatown and back and I was in business. I bought one extra of each type of capacitor and the grand total was $12.00. It took about fifteen minutes for me to install the new caps and a few more minutes to re-assemble the case.

I evidently forgot to take at least one picture, because I wound up with a small metal piece which I wasn’t sure where or how it re-attach. So, I just threw it in my junk drawer and crossed my fingers. I reconnected the monitor to my computer and I was back in business!

All in all, the repair cost me $12.00 and a few hours of easy work. The only tools needed were my soldering setup, a screwdriver and a butter knife. In the end, I feel incredibly satisfied to have been able to DIY it. I have a much better idea of what I’m actually capable of doing with electronics and I am even more interested in hardware hacking. I feel like the mental veil that I’d had towards electronic devices was lifted a little bit. Most of all, I feel like I contributed some small bit to fight the overwhelming air of disposability that’s infected our world these days.

America! Let’s get our hands dirty again.

p.s. Samsung, you should probably fix this. It’s pretty embarrassing.

Awesome fixed monitor on the right.

I have a hard time with animate objects, so I shower my love on things that give me pleasure without asking for anything in return. Quite often those things have to do with producing or re-producing sound.

My grandmother Nancy always spoiled me, even when some of those expenditures weren’t the most financially prudent. I don’t remember when or where we bought these speakers, but I do know that from the day I got them they have been a pair of loyal friends.

Then in May I started to hear a buzzing sound from one of the speakers. At first the sound was slight and Sarah thought I was obsessing over nothing. Little by little the sound got worse. When I removed the screen from the speakers, several bits of orange foam dropped to the floor. After years of pumping out the low end, the foam around the speaker had finally given out. I jury rigged a temporary solution with tape and started looking on the internet for repair options. A couple of weeks later the foam around the woofer on the other speaker started to crack as well.

At that point I switched to using a pair of Onkyo speakers that I’ve had in a closet collecting dust. They were smaller, at least ten years younger and sadly they did not rock. There wasn’t a huge difference when watching movies or television, but the ripping sound of electric guitar + Marshall amp just wasn’t the same. My reggae 45s just didn’t have the same oomph to the stomach even when playing at the same levels. Maybe this is all in my head, I’ve never done any blind A/B testing to scientifically prove that there is any difference in the sound.

I spent a few hours surfing the web in consideration of a new speaker purchase. I even got excited about the thought of saving space with a new set of space age micro speakers built using the latest carbon fibers and psychoacoustical advances. Then I remembered my old friends. The thing is, like those old speakers, I am big in a small world, brown and old fashioned. I had to stick by the old timers.

I emailed the kind folks at Cerwin-Vega and received a prompt reply suggesting that I contact a company to have the speakers re-foamed. It took some digging, but I was eventually able to find a repair shop in Bensonhurst that would be able to perform the work. I hopped on the train and headed out to Heavy Electronics and Security. I took two magazines for the long ride.

The very friendly folks at Heavy made me feel a lot better about spending a lot of money to fix speakers that most people would have just replaced. The husband showed me the difference in construction between the speakers in my CVs and the speakers in even high end new models. The feeling of solid heft was missing from the newer speakers, which felt like they could be twisted by a man with strong enough hands. The older speakers were built like tanks. Then he showed me the molding on some new reasonably priced speakers. The casting was sloppy and asymmetrical and it was clear that the newer speakers were assembled by people for whom quality wasn’t a major focus. I’m not sure that the poor appearance makes any difference in sound, but it definitely tells you something about how the creators felt about the items they were creating. I wouldn’t be surprised if other shortcuts are being taken.

They also convinced me to go full bore and get the speakers completely reconed instead of just having new foam added to the old speakers. The people at the company seemed genuinely interested in what they do and sincerely motivated by the desire to get my babies back to their fighting shape, so I trusted them. I will admit gasping just a bit as the owner pulled out a razor blade and sliced off the old speaker cones.

  A few weeks later, I had two new woofers ready to woof. I took them home, cradling the bag with the two speakers on the train and eagerly awaiting the first tune back with my old buddies. I slipped the newly coned guys back into place and dropped the needle on Dice The Boss “Brixton Cat”. Then I danced around my living room in my stocking feet with an ear to ear grin on my face. Things were right in the world once again for the low cost of two hundred dollars.

We’re living in the disposable age. Things are sold cheaply because they are made cheaply and without any focus on long term quality. When things break we don’t fix them, we throw them into a magical box that transports them to the land of “someone else’s problem” and we whip out our credit cards to spend money on the newer version with ten new features we’ll never use.

Just try getting things repaired now-a-days! The repair shop seems to be going the way of the dodo. There was a time, though, when spending your hard earned money on something assured that you were going to receive an item that would stand the test of time. Even when things went wrong, a quick visit to a skilled repairman would get things right back on track.

Times change, I guess, but I don’t have to like it. For one day at least I feel like I pushed back against the tide.