Things you have fixed/modded recently

[SylverReZ]

Fixed the disc tray on my fat PS2, god I hate Swap Magic so much. A misaligned tray that keeps getting stuck is almost always caused by the Magic Card that came with Swap Magic kits.

Swap Magic absolutely destroyed the tray if you kept using the slide card so much. It causes the latch that opens the tray to become jammed and thus forces you to replace it entirely. I'm glad that I have a chipped & softmodded system that doesn't need that, and for how expensive the Swap Magic is, it's more of a collectors item now.

 

[VmprHntrD]

Sorry have no pictures to bring to the table on this.

Three weeks ago I found an early 90s Sony Walkman at a flea market and got the guy to go with $10 on it. It has no battery crust, and the tape wheels and posts all seemed free so why not because at that rate parts works. When I could get batteries into it the radio worked great, tape deck looked fine at first, but when I found an old tape and stuffed it in, it ran in slow mo...ugh.

I couldn't find a matching tear down of the thing, but a similar enough one to get an idea how to get inside of it and figure it out. Nothing looked bad other than a stretched belt at minimum and more research gave me the right thickness and needed size for proper tension so I fished for a bit and found one match on ebay and ordered it. When it arrived it was still a little off, so I did a pretty decent cleaning and scrubbing with tools and a toothbrush of all the gears and posts. Then re-assembled it and tried one of the two tapes I found locally to further test and it worked 100%. It's NFS, have it on my desk and got 5 tapes for it now, but not collecting tapes, it's just nice to have as an option and if I find an old tape worth having.

 

[tech3475]

Update on my OG Xbox.

I gave up on the 'Tuscany' PSU and just bought a replacement Delta PSU (since that's what the other working PSU is).

At this point, I suspect something is shorting to ground on the Tuscany, but I can't seem to identify which and I can't find any schematics. The 'obvious' candidates seem to be ok and the closest I found to anything is a dodgy diode....which I can't identify and even then I don't have spares to hand.

Not going to completely ditch the faulty PSU, I'll put it in the spare parts bin.

I popped in the replacement and it's powering on, but I haven't tested video output yet.

In terms of the DVD drive, I had more problems with it than I thought I would, turned out the tray was physically jammed and had to perform a 'manual override' to get the tray out. I've replaced the belt and the drive seems fine, although I've yet to test it with a disc.

Next things to do is test video output.

Bonus: if I can get video output, I've bought an LPC rebuild QSB.

I'll also do other maintenance e.g. repaste the CPU/GPU.

Update:

Video seems to be working, at least composite.

 

[emmanu888]

Got a broken Gamecube controller off eBay for 25 bucks with what seemed to be a bad c-stick. Turns out its just the pot that needed a small clean up. Before I cleaned the pot, up and down on the c-stick were very slow to react.

 

[emmanu888]

The Gamecube I got for 30$ actually works despite the amount of rust in it. Put a drive that has a botched XenoGC install on it, one of the pads is clearly not properly soldered so it can't patch the drive, I'm putting a Picoloader in it anyway so I couldn't care less for the Xeno chip.

 

[emmanu888]

Reshelled the 30$ GameCube, put a Picoloader and SD2SP2 Pro adapter, I also did a half reshell on the controller I repaired. Just gotta find a GameBoy Player now.

 

[Skelletonike]

Received this helmet today.
Looks pretty good.

It is not the original but rather a replica I got from AliExpress (it's for a cheap cosplay I'll be doing). The box got all damaged but the product itself was good.

I'll still need to panel line it and add some retouches as well as add all the stickers.

 

[g00s3y]

It's been a while, but I had to get back into it.

 

[skawo]

Corrosion makes things sad
Break in the speaker flex cable (thing on the left is the tip of my finger, for scale)

Tiny wire to the rescue:

And now there are two of these abominations in the world (as soon as I also replace the bottom screen :c)

 

[VmprHntrD]

I posted this in a finds thread, forgot this existed here and I think this qualifies as I'd consider work put into it fixing it up, even if it wasn't persay wrecked either. I got this on the weekend and considered it lucky, but it was utterly gross coated in perhaps unspeakable things. it also was seemingly not always taking pushes, which is why that internal image is there, as I had unscrewed that and cleaned the contacts and pcb contacts with alcohol to get it happy again.

This was covered in black oily mess, brown stuff, dirt, who knows what else and it was into the rubber, plastics, and worse the fabric. The glove fabric black seam by the V shape area of the thumb was split in 2-3 places and one was starting to go into the mesh. Post-cleaning, I re-hand stitched the seams with a fine black thread and needle in each spot, but also while doing so, fixed the V shaped split in the fabric as well before doing that last seam and it came out clean, really non-noticable thankfully.

The black rubber on the inside of the arm guard had rotted and continues to fleck off this oily black powdery smeary mess so I had to remove them and it ate most of an hour getting it out, and cleaning it off of and out of the plastic, and it got into the fabric too, the blackened stuff there around all the yellowy-brown grossness. Alcohol was used along with magic erasers around the entire body of everything, all materials, but before hand, seeing the crap in the fabric I tested a risk which worked of using Clorox foaming with bleach bathroom/tile cleaner and a plastic bristle hand brush and scrubbed the crap out of it until it was white. I used it on the rubberized gray glove bits too, and then all after cloroxing chased the body with 91% alcohol with the brush, then a full magic eraser pad, and finally paper towel to get its grit off too. Every part, finger hole, all were gone over and scrubbed and cleaned out. The bracket had the crap on it too, but nothing as much but it got the magic eraser-alcohol-paper towl combo too.

Currently it's clean, looks fresh, smells and feels clean, and best of all -- it works. Cost $75 and a couple hours (about) of work on it, well worth it, it's a keeper.