Sandbox
Capacitor plague![edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 25 January 2014 at 18:37 |
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This post has the following tags: Our second year on the land
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Beth was drying the washing with our portable 500W centrifugal spinner dryer when all of a sudden we heard a loud bang and then the horrible familiar smell of burning electronic components! I took a look and saw that smoke was coming out of the 800W inverter!! luckily this is not our main inverter that we use for running the lights and computers, the 800W is only for tools and other high power appliances, but it's still a major problem to have it blow up because it would take weeks to get a replacement.
 After doing a bit of research I found that the problem was most likely the "capacitor plague" which affected millions of capacitors made about ten years ago and used by many companies in all sorts of devices from vacuum cleaners to computers, and the typical symptom is capacitors exploding well before their normal lifespan and well within their specified voltage. The problem is that there's nowhere in Canela or Gramado that sell electronic components and ordering by net would take at least a week, probably two to sort out. But as luck would have it, I saw an old TV at the side of the road in a pile of rubbish, and TVs always have loads of capacitors in them! so we threw it in the car and when we got back I pulled it apart and pillaged all the capacitors from it - they're probably thirty years old, but they're Siemens which is one of the best brands in the business and things tended to be made better back then too :-) I found a couple that would do just fine and they were rated at 40v which is nearly triple what's required so there should be no problems. I installed them in the inverter and sure enough we're back in business! |
Vagalumes & Pyrophorus beetles[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 25 January 2014 at 17:32 | |||
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This post has the following tags: Our second year on the land
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Vagalumes are a kind of firefly that make a green light at night, sometimes stable and sometimes flashing. There's a lot of them at this time of year and they make excellent natural Christmas lights :-) Vagalumes a flies about a centimetre long with a glowing tail, but last night a different kind landed on the window and I was able to get a close photo of it, I was even able to hold it in my hand for a minute or so! This one was a different type completely, it's a very big insect about 4cm long and it looks like its eyes are glowing, but actually I think the glowing parts are further back than they eyes. I looked on the net and found out that these are Pyrophorus beetles, they look really sci-fi like some kind of robot bug!
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Fixing Nivinha's ignition barrel[edit] | ||
| Posted by Nad on 25 January 2014 at 15:37 | ||
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This post has the following tags: Our second year on the land
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 We talked to one of the neighbours who said that it was the ignition barrel needing to be replaced and that a Fiat one should would ok. Beth sent me to get the replacement from a shop on the main road when we were in Canela with her parents, but I miss-heard the instructions and went to our 4x4 mechanic Fernando instead. Luckily he was really helpful and even though he didn't have the right part, he explained that I could temporarily fix the problem by attaching a wire from the positive of the battery to the positive of the coil and remove it when we want the engine to stop. This worked very well and we were able to get Nivinha out of the forest back home :-) This was a real breakthrough for me with my Portuguese learning too because this was quite a complicated conversation and I was able to successfully explain the problem in detail and answer questions about the symptoms and then understand what he said I should do. Since I have all the manuals with the wiring diagram for the car I was able to then work out what exact connections were failing in the ignition barrel. To fix the problem properly, I first removed the ignition barrel (this short video shows how to do that). The main catch is that the key must be in the ignition and turned to the first clockwise position before it can be removed, also there's a small catch that has to be depressed by poking a screwdriver into the hole (a little above the left hand mounting screw on the barrel). I then opened the barrel by removing the metal ring from the end with the contacts. I found that there was some bad corrosion on one of the copper plates causing it to lift off from the contact. I filed off the corrosion and also added some solder to the contact and the plate since the copper was also very thin and cracked. I then tested the connection with a multimeter and saw that the problem had been solved, so I put it all back together and reinstalled it into the car!
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