Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[factory]

They are brass or aluminium rivets in hp TE of this vintage, with an open end & a solid end on the other side, no mandrel.

Example from the 3400A with a damaged inlet, that I bought from bd some time ago.

David

[bd139]

Bah bloody humbug, I flipped a pair of speaker stands on the bay of evil back in April, sold though the Global Shipping Program to a buyer in Taiwan of all places. Now I've sold loads of things on the GSP system with no trouble, and they keep you updated with the parcels progress through their system. Yesterday I suddenly thought to myself that I hadn't heard from eBay about this parcel, so I did a trace on the parcel only discover that it was collected from the drop-off shop by the courier in the middle of the month and their system showed that they have it and its on-route.

I paid for the delivery to the GSP dept in Lichfield on the eBay PackLink system and as usual I paid the little extra to insure it for the full value, just in case. Today the courier has confirmed that as far as they are concerned, it is now lost in transit and apologised for any inconvenience, all the usual old crap.

So now I'm having to deal with PackLink to see what happens now about getting a refund.  The courier by the way was Evri, the new name for everyones favourite Hermes 

Here is my dilemma, I sold the stands for £50 plus delivery to any UK destination, the buyer paid almost £140 to eBay for the item and the shipping to him in Taiwan, assuming I get a refund for the value only of £50, is that going to mine to keep  or will that have to be passed onto eBay, who should be refunding the buyer's money in full, Will they claim any refund I get, or will they take it on the chin and pay the buyer back in full 

Thoughts?

I’d pay the buyer back in full. You will then have to separately deal with packlink which takes around 6 months for them to issue a refund after asking way too many questions and pissing around intentionally. I have got two refunds from them from UPS and Hermes respectively.

[mansaxel]

The rivets often end up spinning if you try drilling them out, the plastic inlet remains will probably help this happen, I usually resort to the Dremel & grind the tops off the rivets, then push them out.

David

Helpful, thanks.

Now with pics:

[tautech]

The rivets often end up spinning if you try drilling them out, the plastic inlet remains will probably help this happen, I usually resort to the Dremel & grind the tops off the rivets, then push them out.

David

I can confirm that the rivets are very likely to just spin as part of the steel mandrel is retained in the process of riveting. I had this issue when I replaced my car speaker recently and the only solution was to grind the head off and push them through.

It's not the only solution if you've been to sea enough with pop rivets over the years.
Use ~3x size drill at a 30-45^o angle and let the spinner spin as when the drill is offered up at an angle it will eventually take the rivet head off.

[bd139]

The rivets often end up spinning if you try drilling them out, the plastic inlet remains will probably help this happen, I usually resort to the Dremel & grind the tops off the rivets, then push them out.

David

I can confirm that the rivets are very likely to just spin as part of the steel mandrel is retained in the process of riveting. I had this issue when I replaced my car speaker recently and the only solution was to grind the head off and push them through.

My father would drill the rivets until the friction melted a hole large enough for them to fall out 

[tautech]

The rivets often end up spinning if you try drilling them out, the plastic inlet remains will probably help this happen, I usually resort to the Dremel & grind the tops off the rivets, then push them out.

David

I can confirm that the rivets are very likely to just spin as part of the steel mandrel is retained in the process of riveting. I had this issue when I replaced my car speaker recently and the only solution was to grind the head off and push them through.

My father would drill the rivets until the friction melted a hole large enough for them to fall out 

And that works just fine too.....if you have a supply of rivets large enough to fit the hole. 

[Specmaster]

Bah bloody humbug, I flipped a pair of speaker stands on the bay of evil back in April, sold though the Global Shipping Program to a buyer in Taiwan of all places. Now I've sold loads of things on the GSP system with no trouble, and they keep you updated with the parcels progress through their system. Yesterday I suddenly thought to myself that I hadn't heard from eBay about this parcel, so I did a trace on the parcel only discover that it was collected from the drop-off shop by the courier in the middle of the month and their system showed that they have it and its on-route.

I paid for the delivery to the GSP dept in Lichfield on the eBay PackLink system and as usual I paid the little extra to insure it for the full value, just in case. Today the courier has confirmed that as far as they are concerned, it is now lost in transit and apologised for any inconvenience, all the usual old crap.

So now I'm having to deal with PackLink to see what happens now about getting a refund.  The courier by the way was Evri, the new name for everyones favourite Hermes 

Here is my dilemma, I sold the stands for £50 plus delivery to any UK destination, the buyer paid almost £140 to eBay for the item and the shipping to him in Taiwan, assuming I get a refund for the value only of £50, is that going to mine to keep  or will that have to be passed onto eBay, who should be refunding the buyer's money in full, Will they claim any refund I get, or will they take it on the chin and pay the buyer back in full 

Thoughts?

I’d pay the buyer back in full. You will then have to separately deal with packlink which takes around 6 months for them to issue a refund after asking way too many questions and pissing around intentionally. I have got two refunds from them from UPS and Hermes respectively.

Well there is no way that I'm paying the back the full £140 that he paid when I only saw £50 of that, I'm not taking a £90 hit.

[bd139]

EBay will decide otherwise.

[Neomys Sapiens]

No don't stay tuned.... at least not tonight. I am tired, time to go to bed.... will resume work on it tomorrow.

Did you see how lovely the wiring is ? 99.99% of the wires are white ? That makes it so easy to trace wires eh ?!   

I guess someone at Matra ordered by mistake a palette of white wires instead of just one spool, and the supplier refused to take the excess back. So Matra said oh boy what are we gonna do to use up all that white wire ! Hmmm.... what about making some of these 400Hz 3Ph PSU for that missile contract we just got the other day !!! 

Nothing wrong with that, no stupid manager or scrambled eggs general involved. These wire looms are made according to a carefully planned layout, as you can see, the person who had to solder the wires to the pins can identify the wires by their position. Just like a PC Board, all the traces got the same colour on a PCB, too, don't they?

I can attest to this practice. Indeed, 2 out of 5 coding and marking methods in MIL-STD-681 state, that
White insulation shall be used for all interconnecting wires; unless a particular color is prescribed in the equipment or system specification to identify a definite arrangement of elements, a specific function, or a hazardous condition.
S.5.2 Differentiation markings. Identification, if required, shall be printed in black on the wire insulation, on the white sleeve, marker or on some other type of marker.
while two out of the remaining three state, that
White insulation shall be used for all clrcuits not designated in tables 11, 11 T, and IV or 5.2.3.
Under MIL-W-5088 alphanumerical marking is given precedence whether you select one of the available colour schemes or not.
Same holds true for other national standards, while STANAG3347 elevates the core of MIL-W-5088 to NATO-wide use.
Now it becomes clear that they merely used the material of which they have most, and the abovementioned marking requirements do not apply to support equipment which is not fielded or does not even leave the factory.

[mansaxel]

The rivets often end up spinning if you try drilling them out, the plastic inlet remains will probably help this happen, I usually resort to the Dremel & grind the tops off the rivets, then push them out.

David

I can confirm that the rivets are very likely to just spin as part of the steel mandrel is retained in the process of riveting. I had this issue when I replaced my car speaker recently and the only solution was to grind the head off and push them through.

My father would drill the rivets until the friction melted a hole large enough for them to fall out 

I can totally see this happen.  Have lowballed an offer on a 10-pack Schurter brand  inlets that weren't insanely expensive to ship. Inlet seller was nice enough to include a drawing so have calipered (from now on, that's a word!) some guesstimates on hole pattern and so on, and they oughta fit.

Also brought out my best School German and wrote a notice to the 5245L seller using words like Nachlässigkeit (Negligence) and Vergütung (compensation).

[Specmaster]

EBay will decide otherwise.

Oh I forgot to add, that I had a chat with eBay this afternoon, and they did say (admitted it was before I discovered it was lost in transit) that on Saturday / Sunday they will find in my favour as I have done everything right, and it was me that first raised the alarm to them that the parcel had not reached their GSP dept. The person who I spoke to in Utah made notes on my account to that effect.

Now I don't mind handing over the £50, when I get it refunded from PackLink, but thats it.

[Saskia]

Just had a closer look at the previous hauls from my favorite dealer in the universe.

The 8 TB hard drive is an ST8000NM000A which means Exos Enterprise, CMR, 7200 rpm, 128 MB Cache, 5 years warranty. A quick SMART Scan revealed a total of 42 kb read and 0 kb written, 0 operating hours, scans passed. Those 42 kb were most likely the bytes written during the extended test.
This is indead a bargain.

The Uni-T: awaiting payment.

The 3070TI: not tested yet

The ZBox MI643: working as expected.

In other news I picked up another hifi rack today. This allows to actually move and rearrange those glass shelves, so this actually is the first rack which could hold my not so tiny power amp (Threshold T200 ...)
Weight of Rack is around 30 - 40 kg.

Got a bicycle for Hubby. A Cannondale M400 with a CAAD2 frame. Needs a bit TLC, but appears to be mostly fine. 130 Pesos ...

In even more strange news we finally had some rain today after prolonged sunshine (like, 2 weeks straight). Finally.

Tomorrow it will be back to work day.

Question:

does anybody know if the TL866 eprom burner can erase / read / program M48T59Y battery buffered NVRAMs ? I need to test sumthang ...

Thnx

[factory]

EDIT : trying to search ebay for this type of PSU to see how much they sell for... big fail  !

I first searched for " 3 Phase 400Hz power supply " ... and got flooded with regular power bricks because most are switch mode and most SMPS are rated to accept from 50Hz up to 400Hz !

so I dropped the " 400Hz" in my search terms.... still fail : now I get flooded 3Phase power supplies but PSU's that take 3 phase as their INPUT, then output a regular DC low voltage ! 

OK so I can't even find similar supplies... which means that even if I pu tit up for sale, nobdy would be able to find anyway.

So I am screwed.... nobody wants it ? 50 Euros + shipping... .have a good heart, save its life before I take it apart !

If you haven't sold anything on ePay for years, I would recommend selling a few low value items first, as they tend to hold payments for new sellers & sellers that haven't listed for years, once you have enough selling feedback/reputation on there they should stop doing this.
Once you've done that, consider listing the PSU, after you know what keywords to use, make sure to start it at the minimum price you want, last thing you want is it selling for £0.99.

Also I usually list vintage stuff as "spares or repair" condition, as I can't guarantee it under ePay's "used" condition description, which pretty much state it must work/function like a new one. 

David

[tautech]

Yes wiring standards, well aviation is pretty specialized. Well remember a tour around our Air Force Aviation training school when delivering some gear to them.....they won't let you through the front gate these days without a weeks worth of paperwork ! 

Anyways, their cabling lab was a place of wonders with wiring jigs and some pretty complex looms everywhere that had to be copied by the cadets to be millimeter perfect. 
All manner of conductors and terminations were used .....power, signal and RF all beautifully hand laced and none of that plastic tie rubbish !

[Saskia]

Bah bloody humbug, I flipped a pair of speaker stands on the bay of evil back in April, sold though the Global Shipping Program to a buyer in Taiwan of all places. Now I've sold loads of things on the GSP system with no trouble, and they keep you updated with the parcels progress through their system. Yesterday I suddenly thought to myself that I hadn't heard from eBay about this parcel, so I did a trace on the parcel only discover that it was collected from the drop-off shop by the courier in the middle of the month and their system showed that they have it and its on-route.

I paid for the delivery to the GSP dept in Lichfield on the eBay PackLink system and as usual I paid the little extra to insure it for the full value, just in case. Today the courier has confirmed that as far as they are concerned, it is now lost in transit and apologised for any inconvenience, all the usual old crap.

So now I'm having to deal with PackLink to see what happens now about getting a refund.  The courier by the way was Evri, the new name for everyones favourite Hermes 

Here is my dilemma, I sold the stands for £50 plus delivery to any UK destination, the buyer paid almost £140 to eBay for the item and the shipping to him in Taiwan, assuming I get a refund for the value only of £50, is that going to mine to keep  or will that have to be passed onto eBay, who should be refunding the buyer's money in full, Will they claim any refund I get, or will they take it on the chin and pay the buyer back in full 

Thoughts?

I’d pay the buyer back in full. You will then have to separately deal with packlink which takes around 6 months for them to issue a refund after asking way too many questions and pissing around intentionally. I have got two refunds from them from UPS and Hermes respectively.

Well there is no way that I'm paying the back the full £140 that he paid when I only saw £50 of that, I'm not taking a £90 hit.

My experience with ebay GSP in that regard is that ebay will swallow the difference.

I ordered a Midway Arcade1up cabinet from the US via Ebay GSP and the box was marked "damaged in transit and repackaged by DHL". I made some photos, contacted seller and ebay and told ebay that the seller did indeed do everything  in his power to send out the parcel, and that it got damaged while entrusted to ebay.
Provided those photos to ebay and seller.
Ebay fully refunded me for shipping cost and import duties. The seller got to keep the purchase price.

[factory]

Only if it actually got delivered to the GSP warehouse, will GSP take full responsibility, it's the sellers problem if not received by the GSP in the country of origin.

David

[Robert763]

Vince
Use this:
https://modelshop.co.uk/Shop/Adhesives/Item/Plastic-Weld-Solvent-57ml/ITM5060
or French version. It's just Dichloromethane (DCM or methylene chloride) a solvent but it sticks this type of plastiv almost invisibly. You hold the two pieces together (tape modeling clay etc) and apply a drop of solvent to the crack (on the black part in your case) and capilary action does the rest.

Well done on the repair. Try searching for aircraft inverter or 400Hz inverter.

[Robert763]

Only if it actually got delivered to the GSP warehouse, will GSP take full responsibility, it's the sellers problem if not received by the GSP in the country of origin.

David

Yes exactly this. Ebay will refund the extra they charged to the customer but you have to repay what ebay paid you. You keep anything packlink gives you.

[Neomys Sapiens]

EDIT : trying to search ebay for this type of PSU to see how much they sell for... big fail  !

I first searched for " 3 Phase 400Hz power supply " ... and got flooded with regular power bricks because most are switch mode and most SMPS are rated to accept from 50Hz up to 400Hz !

so I dropped the " 400Hz" in my search terms.... still fail : now I get flooded 3Phase power supplies but PSU's that take 3 phase as their INPUT, then output a regular DC low voltage ! 

OK so I can't even find similar supplies... which means that even if I pu tit up for sale, nobdy would be able to find anyway.

So I am screwed.... nobody wants it ? 50 Euros + shipping... .have a good heart, save its life before I take it apart !

I'm almost sorry, as I already have a 400Hz power source, which consists of a sealed abbot Martek converter in a Zero Halliburton case, so it is portable with an instrument/selector refitted by me. If you offer it for sale, be sure that you include 'avionics test' and 'aircraft electronics' in the description.
I know your Martel, as I have worked on a direct competitor of it once.

[Specmaster]

In other news, still working my way through my son's monitor and discovered that a MosFet is buggered among a handful of other parts, which are on order apart from the MosFet and the only place that has some available at a reasonable price is TME, but of course because of the dreaded "B" word, they have ceased with private buyers in the UK, will only deal with corporate account holders 

I can locate the one I want (2SK3530)  from Spares2Repair.co.uk for £10 delivered, only £1.80  from TME. Anyone know where else I could try?

[Specmaster]

Only if it actually got delivered to the GSP warehouse, will GSP take full responsibility, it's the sellers problem if not received by the GSP in the country of origin.

David

Yes exactly this. Ebay will refund the extra they charged to the customer but you have to repay what ebay paid you. You keep anything packlink gives you.

Yeah that sounds better, well in the meantime, I'll sit tight and weight and see what the result is at the weekend.

[Neomys Sapiens]

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/255529155186   

If you're going to make a suicide cord you might as well go top tier. 

That should NOT be allowed to sold on eBay.

Come on, it is a standard accessory for those PAT testers which do not have dual UUT connections (binding posts or 4mm safety jacks AND the applicable national connector). In case it only has the latter, you need this cable to test anything else.

[Cerebus]

The rivets often end up spinning if you try drilling them out, the plastic inlet remains will probably help this happen, I usually resort to the Dremel & grind the tops off the rivets, then push them out.

David

I can confirm that the rivets are very likely to just spin as part of the steel mandrel is retained in the process of riveting. I had this issue when I replaced my car speaker recently and the only solution was to grind the head off and push them through.

If, if, you can get to the back of them you can sometimes stop them spinning by clamping the back of the rivet with Mole grips or something similar.

The ubiquitous Mole grip, in case it goes by another name in foreign parts:

[mnementh]

I can't quite put my paw on it, but for some reason this just speaks to me... 

mnem

[mnementh]

5245L update:

It appears that the mains inlet (a normal IEC C14) is broken. It "works" as in it gives power but is definitely dangerous and unsuitable.

The frame where the rivets sit is separated from the receptacle part so that the latter floats; held on only by the wiring. Scary. And to think that I ran it a couple hours in that condition..

Am considering taking it up with the seller, because it could be shipping damage; they sent the counter with an angled mains cable plugged in, which definitely could cause exactly this.

Now, I'm considering repair, and that is pretty straightforward, except for the rivets. What do people use to get them out? A center punch from the outside and then drilling? Need to rummage around in my boxes and see if I've got a spare too.

If it's a all-plastic C14, cut the plastic ears off with dikes, then cut the now-exposed rivets. Cut the rivet halfway through, then rotate rivet 90°, and cut all the way through at the same height. This will make the cut portion of the rivet remain mostly circular rather than crushing to an egg-shaped profile that fights you getting it out.

mnem
You may now barrage me with your favorite "butch female" quips...