Ric Deputy Memorial Scholarship

The Renton Technical College Foundation has established a memorial scholarship in the memory of Ric Deputy, the long-time Major Appliance Technology instructor who passed away August of 2000.

If you’d like to know more about how you can help, please don’t hesitate to call the Foundation Office at (425) 235-2356. Thank you for considering supporting Renton Technical College and its Foundation.

Donations can be sent directly to the Foundation Office referencing the Major Appliance Program Endowment and Ric Deputy Scholarship. See address below for college.

Renton Technical College
Foundation
3000 NE 4ht St
Renton WA 98056
www.rtc.edu

One of our FixYourBoard workstations started wigging out yesterday. The symptom was that occassionaly you could see one of the screens start to waver slightly, usually up in the top left corner, or around the cursor, then maybe the 2nd screen would start to do it ever so slightly, then the system would crash and reboot itself.

At first I thought maybe a graphics card problem … until I dug into it.

Here’s what I found. This was not at all obvious until unplugging the power supply from the main board (which naturally was the very last thing I did before ripping out the main board). Well, the problem was obvious.

Fig 1. Main power connector on the motherboard. See the overheated, burned contacts.

Fig 2. Main power plug coming from the power supply. This holds the pin sockets which are actually the culprits. The charred posts on the mainboard connector in Fig 1. above are actually ok, just need cleaned.

Nice!

Easy fix, spliced in a new connector from a spare defunct power supply, cleaned up the posts on the main board … so far it’s passed the stress test … we’ll see after a few weeks.

Root Cause of Failure

… age, stress, heat, fatigue … much like this past summer in Texas!

Yall I gotta get one of them cheap video cameras. I want to document some of these repairs for posterity don’t ya know. Today my friend Robert came down to shop with an ailing GE dryer. I had planned on posting a few pictures that I stole from the web but I ain’t figgered out how yet. Hay I said I could mess with appliances not be a dang puter wiz. Never could get nothing out of the little front loader(mah2400aww) Robert found on a trashpile, but it looked good enough to get $10 from Able, so I advised him to take that thang over there. (Able has an appliance boneyard and used appliance showroom not far from here.)
I wonder how them fellers get them movies on youtube? Talk about some rednecks having fun. I saw one titled redneck camping and another one titled How we do it redneck style. LOL!