Repairs - Tales from the bench

[Deluk]

This post is triggered by one of the kit owners deciding to send in his Crack for checking/repair. I wondered if it would be useful to have a thread, a sticky even, that chronicled some of the faults found while the units are on the workbench. Wouldn't want to embarrass anyone of course but there will I'm sure, be faults that would interest builders/owners of the various kits. It could widen peoples thought processes while head scratching. We all have those Duh moments but those can be pretty loud when you've spent a couple of hundred bucks getting it sorted and you read the repair report. I assume one is provided. Just a thought.

[Paul Birkeland]

We do certainly let people know what we find when we repair their kits.  When we redid the Crack, I went through several months of repair history and forum posts for tech support and looked at the most frequent issues people were having, then came up with a way to address each of those issues with the instructions provided for building the new kit.

-PB

[Doc B.]

A potential problem I have experienced is that builders might assume they have the same issue they read about, when they really don't. And because of that they never spot the real problem. I think PBs troubleshooting flow chart for Crack does a great job of covering the most common mistakes and is probably the most helpful procedure for sorting out an issue. I also think that a fair number of repairs might be avoided if builders would look over all their connections with a magnifier and just go ahead and reflow every connection if something doesn't seem to be working.

It does help to understand the electronics when sorting out a more obscure fault or the occasional blown solid state component. But probably 75% of the time one can visually locate the problem without needing to know how the circuit works just by scrutinizing the quality of the solder job and checking the wiring against the photos in the manual.