This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in
1995; any technical information is probably outdated.
"unfixable" Car Stereo
Article: 7463 of alt.hackers Newsgroups: alt.hackers From: kelly@cray.com (Matt Kelly) Subject: "unfixable" Car Stereo Message-ID: 1995Mar1.123916.25935@ned.cray.com Lines: 43 Nntp-Posting-Host: spyro.cray.com Reply-To: kelly@cray.com Organization: Cray Research, Inc. Date: 1 Mar 95 12:39:16 CST Approved: Are you SERIOUS??? Status: RO
ObAndTheySaidItWasIrrepairableYaRightHack: I once had a car with a factory-installed AM/FM Cassette player (Ford -- no flames, please, I've learned). One day I was driving along, listening to tunes, when suddenly I hit a major bump in the road. Immediately, the volume of the stereo went to FULL BLAST, and could NOT be turned down. Later that day, I pulled out the stereo, and lo and behold, there was a break in the "trace" leading from the volume control into the amplifier circuitry. This "trace" was not copper, but was instead some kind of carbon. It was integrated into the incredibly cheaply built volume control. I scraped away some of the carbon HOPING to find a substrate of copper or at least SOME kind of metal, but no luck. This break was NOT solderable. I called a bunch of repair-type places, including FORD service, and everyone said the same thing: not fixable. Humbug. So, I talked to a mechanical engineer buddy of mine, and he gave me a sample of some stuff a glue vendor gave him. It was silver-powder impregnated epoxy!! Incredible holding power AND electrically conductive!! I cleaned the area on and around the break, carefully applied (read glopped) some of this wonder-goo onto it, waited overnight, and tried it out. IT WORKED!!! I re-installed the car stereo, and it worked great! It was difficult to resist the urge to call every one of them back and give them a royal raspberry over the phone... B^) Hack On!! --- ============================================================================= | Matt Kelly | | | Software Engineer | My karma ran over my dogma. | | Cray Research, Inc. | I hate it when that happens! | | kelly@els.cray.com | | =============================================================================