Entropy

Relax in southern comfort on the east bank of the Mississippi. You're just around the corner from Beale Street and Sun Records. Watch the ducks, throw back a few and tell us what's on your mind.
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JR.
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Re: Entropy

Post by JR. »

It seems like just a few months ago I repaired my coffee roaster when the control board tact switches became intermittent.... they responded well to some rubbing alcohol but now the LCD display has gone dark... These roasters get used a lot under taxing conditions and also require repairs...The company is good about selling repair parts but that is another strong revenue stream for them. I had already noticed that the fan under the cooling tray was not blowing, but that didn't affect the roasting...

I ordered a new display board and new fan so hopefully I can get this puppy whole again... I roasted one batch of coffee today without the display and it mostly worked, could be roasted a little lighter than normal...

I suspect the thermal cycling from sitting in my freezing laundry room then heating up to 400' when roasting has some effect on reliability. Humidity last week was 88% in there, while roasting probably drives off moisture in the machine.

JR
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JR.
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Re: Entropy

Post by JR. »

Got something new to fix... My slick plastic compost bin's legs collapsed (bent over) from the weight.. I guess a couple years of food waste added up to more weight than it could handle... It's hard being green... :lol:

JR

PS: I am looking at a 3 sided wood compost bin... should out live me.
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JR.
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Re: Entropy

Post by JR. »

Today's failure was a nylon cable tie I used to hold my new smaller flag to my old flagpole where the plastic top attachment point had broken off... I should know better, those nylon cable ties haves the shear strength of a wet noodle.

This time I used a screw clamp that should survive the wind loads. The flag pole is one of those slick ones that can spin with the wind..We'll see how long it holds this time.

JR
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mediatechnology
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Re: Entropy

Post by mediatechnology »

JR. wrote: Tue Feb 20, 2018 10:24 am I guess a couple years of food waste added up to more weight than it could handle... It's hard being green... :lol:
You never emptied the composter?

Cable ties seem to break down outdoors. At least the natural nylon colored ones do.
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JR.
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Re: Entropy

Post by JR. »

mediatechnology wrote: Wed Feb 21, 2018 5:03 pm
JR. wrote: Tue Feb 20, 2018 10:24 am I guess a couple years of food waste added up to more weight than it could handle... It's hard being green... :lol:
You never emptied the composter?
I wasn't enough of a sucker to buy two of them... every week new vegetable matter going in then you mix them up. Now they sell them with dual chambers. Nah.

This will work... Image

I'll angle it so it traps rain water. It should take me a lifetime to fill this one up. :lol:
Cable ties seem to break down outdoors. At least the natural nylon colored ones do.
They break indoors too... when I did drop testing on my drum tuner the nylon cable ties was incapable of holding even AA batteries in place.

I expect the stainless steel screw clamp to be adequate for my flag.

JR
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Gold
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Re: Entropy

Post by Gold »

I got a 1 mil non back coated 1/4" tape on a 7" reel that I'm supposed to cut directly to lacquer. My Telelfunken M15 preview deck is 7.5 ips and 15 ips. It has a button for low torque and high torque. It didn't like the tape. Severe wow and flutter. Then I put on a back coated test tape on a 7" reel. It didn't like that either. That's new. I've played 7" reels on it before with no problems. I then tried a 15 ips tape on 10" reels and it worked fine.

I think when I had the machine restored not a lot of attention was payed to 7.5 ips. My first thought was a transport control card. I poured over the manual to figure out the likely culprit. I hadn't had my head this deep in the machine yet. I narrowed it down to the most likely card. When I pulled it there were no obvious faults. One of the Al caps hadn't been changed so I did that. No difference.

Next I thought tape tension might be the culprit. This is an old deck and many of the adjustments that are electronic on later decks are mechanical on this deck. There is only one replay tension adjust. It is a thumb wheel under the left brake. I measured tension with a Tentelometer at the take up reel and it was high. So I experimented with adjusting the tape tension without any luck. After re reading the manual it said tape tension should be checked at the heads. Tension turned out to be fine.

Then I read in the manual that I'm supposed to read 750hz at test points on the card I looked at earlier. Got 750 Hz at 7.5 ips and 1500 Hz at 15 ips. It's not that.

Then I put my thumb on the pinch roller. Viola, not enough pressure. I figured this out at the end of day one. All freaking day. I thought I would come in the next day, adjust the pitch roller pressure and be a genius. No!

The adjustment for pinch roller pressure is turning an armature in a solenoid that connects to a pivot plate via a removable pin. The pivot plate has a pressure spring and a bunch of other stuff. Just getting to the armature on the solenoid turned out to be difficult. It took at least a couple of hours to figure out how to get to it. I ended up removing the solenoid from its mount and turning it around so I could adjust it. Figuring out how to adjust it without having the piston turn and without making any surfaces took a few tries. I put it back in and you guessed it. I made it worse. Okay maybe I turned it the wrong way. Took it apart again. Turned it the other way. Same thing. WTF! No matter how I adjust it it doesn't apply enough pressure. I readjusted bunch of times.

I spent another full day screwing around with it. No love. Unfortunately I don't have a spring scale so I can't see whether it meets spec. I guess that would indicate it's the pinch roller its self. But the pinch roller looks the same as it did when it worked at 15 ips and feels like it always has.

I ordered a spring scale. I was working on it in the studio. I decided to clean that mess up, take a break and move the machine into the shop. I need to get work done today but this is really freakin frustrating. I'm trying to avoid waving the white flag and calling my guy in.
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Re: Entropy

Post by emrr »

Must be the season. Had the highs diminish in a JBL powered monitor over a couple hours the other day, switched to secondary speakers to get through the session, not my usual constant listening experience. Thought it was probably a tweeter, spent the time to pull and swap tweeters between boxes, and it's something in the amp. Which appears to require total disassembly, and removal of all drivers to get out of the box. And I've got no free time......

Then there's my AD/DA interfaces, which are being graciously swapped out by the manufacturer after 4 years, because they just behave strangely, and I've apparently said as much plenty on some other sites. They want to know if I have early adopter blues, I guess. That'll take awhile to pull, and has to be done when I don't need them, since it'll probably be a week turnaround. Then it'll take awhile to reinstall and wire, and I really have no prediction as to whether anything will work any better. I guess I'm jaded, and don't have positive expectations in these situations.
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JR.
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Re: Entropy

Post by JR. »

emrr wrote: Fri Feb 23, 2018 7:34 am Must be the season. Had the highs diminish in a JBL powered monitor over a couple hours the other day, switched to secondary speakers to get through the session, not my usual constant listening experience. Thought it was probably a tweeter, spent the time to pull and swap tweeters between boxes, and it's something in the amp. Which appears to require total disassembly, and removal of all drivers to get out of the box. And I've got no free time......
Stuff happens... did you try feeding a low level sine wave into the box? This may give some insight about what to look for.

Good luck

JR
Then there's my AD/DA interfaces, which are being graciously swapped out by the manufacturer after 4 years, because they just behave strangely, and I've apparently said as much plenty on some other sites. They want to know if I have early adopter blues, I guess. That'll take awhile to pull, and has to be done when I don't need them, since it'll probably be a week turnaround. Then it'll take awhile to reinstall and wire, and I really have no prediction as to whether anything will work any better. I guess I'm jaded, and don't have positive expectations in these situations.
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JR.
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Re: Entropy

Post by JR. »

Gold wrote: Thu Feb 22, 2018 12:52 pm I got a 1 mil non back coated 1/4" tape on a 7" reel that I'm supposed to cut directly to lacquer. My Telelfunken M15 preview deck is 7.5 ips and 15 ips. It has a button for low torque and high torque. It didn't like the tape. Severe wow and flutter. Then I put on a back coated test tape on a 7" reel. It didn't like that either. That's new. I've played 7" reels on it before with no problems. I then tried a 15 ips tape on 10" reels and it worked fine.

I think when I had the machine restored not a lot of attention was payed to 7.5 ips. My first thought was a transport control card. I poured over the manual to figure out the likely culprit. I hadn't had my head this deep in the machine yet. I narrowed it down to the most likely card. When I pulled it there were no obvious faults. One of the Al caps hadn't been changed so I did that. No difference.

Next I thought tape tension might be the culprit. This is an old deck and many of the adjustments that are electronic on later decks are mechanical on this deck. There is only one replay tension adjust. It is a thumb wheel under the left brake. I measured tension with a Tentelometer at the take up reel and it was high. So I experimented with adjusting the tape tension without any luck. After re reading the manual it said tape tension should be checked at the heads. Tension turned out to be fine.

Then I read in the manual that I'm supposed to read 750hz at test points on the card I looked at earlier. Got 750 Hz at 7.5 ips and 1500 Hz at 15 ips. It's not that.

Then I put my thumb on the pinch roller. Viola, not enough pressure. I figured this out at the end of day one. All freaking day. I thought I would come in the next day, adjust the pitch roller pressure and be a genius. No!

The adjustment for pinch roller pressure is turning an armature in a solenoid that connects to a pivot plate via a removable pin. The pivot plate has a pressure spring and a bunch of other stuff. Just getting to the armature on the solenoid turned out to be difficult. It took at least a couple of hours to figure out how to get to it. I ended up removing the solenoid from its mount and turning it around so I could adjust it. Figuring out how to adjust it without having the piston turn and without making any surfaces took a few tries. I put it back in and you guessed it. I made it worse. Okay maybe I turned it the wrong way. Took it apart again. Turned it the other way. Same thing. WTF! No matter how I adjust it it doesn't apply enough pressure. I readjusted bunch of times.

I spent another full day screwing around with it. No love. Unfortunately I don't have a spring scale so I can't see whether it meets spec. I guess that would indicate it's the pinch roller its self. But the pinch roller looks the same as it did when it worked at 15 ips and feels like it always has.

I ordered a spring scale. I was working on it in the studio. I decided to clean that mess up, take a break and move the machine into the shop. I need to get work done today but this is really freakin frustrating. I'm trying to avoid waving the white flag and calling my guy in.
Did I ever mention I hate tape recorders?

While I never designed open reel machines, I inherited a 4T cassette deck at Peavey and ended up redesigning pretty much every circuit board inside it.

Later when I had to design a Karaoke unit with a cassette playback deck, I used the same deck I was already using inside the 4T but with a different (stereo) playback head. But the Japanese vendor screwed up by changing the durometer of the plastic geats that operated the head mechanism... a too soft gear, would jam with the other harder plastic gear and lock up...

I pulled out my hair for months trying to figure out what I (we?) were doing wrong, before the vendor finally admitted their mistake.


But by then the product had establishes a bad reputation with dealers. :oops:

JR
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Gold
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Re: Entropy

Post by Gold »

With the Studers I just call my guy. A80s are common and reliable so I don’t feel like I need to get to deep into them. The M15 is a rare beast. I don’t think the pinch roller needed adjustment when the work was done. I’ve been speaking to my guy to make sure I’m not going off the rails. He would need to refamilliarize himself with the machine and then he would need to play around with it too.

I have no doubt he would figure it out much faster than me. I feel like I have to be the tech for this deck. Anyone else will have to spend time getting up to speed before doing anything. I’d rather not pay for that. I love this deck. It’s very smooth but seems a little touchier than the A80s
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