repair (2)

Repairing a NAD 502 CD Player

My trusty NAD 502 CD Player, which I bought in 1996 from Richer Sounds, developed a fault a few months ago. The display went completely dark, so although it would play CDs perfectly, it was tricky to operate. Luckily it was not a failure of anything more complex than the backlight, which turns out to be a couple of wire-ended small capsule lamps. This CD player has a fantastic specification and had great reviews at the time, so I was not in a hurry to dump it for a newer model just for the sake of some tiny and cheap lamps in the display. This really is built-in obsolescence because any incandescent lamp will eventually burn out, and these are not even replaceable without soldering. I suppose it was a cheap option at the time, and maybe the design life of the CD player wasn't more than 10 years. To last 23 years is doing well in consumer electronics. NAD can be forgiven for not using white LEDs since they didn't exist until 1996 or so and were very expensive at that time. Instead of just replacing them with the same capsule lamp, for example part number 606-CM7220 from Mouser,…

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Repairing an IKEA drawer unit

This had broken due to the weight of the items in the drawers causing the brown plastic runners to break. It's not that easy to find replacement runners, and in any case, they are likely to break again if they are used with this much weight - the unit is clearly designed for clothes, not paper files. It was clear that I needed to find a metal runner that could fit in the same slots to replace the plastic runners. Luckily, the slots in the drawers are a standard width and length: 17mm width and 350mm length, so these metal runners fit. They need securely fixing into the chipboard side panels, but an ordinary wood screw is not going to be able to take the weight. The pressure on the bits of chipboard just under the screws would be too much and the runners would fall off. On a similar IKEA drawer unit, the runners are fixed with M6.3 euro screws which have a distinctively wide thread and short fat design. But these runners have 5mm clearance holes which cannot take an M6.3 screw, so I found these M5 euro screws which work very well into a 4mm hole, drilled…

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