Nothing In Particular

[Paul Barker]

It's a road sign just along from Conundrum, turn off for Doon Hill.

There's a Spott nearby that's worth a visit...

[Paul Barker]

My diagnosis is a bad protein in the brain weblike almost like dementia scenario but this one weakens blood circulation in brain. In York hospital from Scarborough haspital over night. In good hands. I may not build amy more amps i certainly wont do tradesman work. Wont drive. Diana admitted to ward I was on at Scarborough. We embraced and kissed.

Cerebral amyloid angiopathy

[Paul Barker]

Consultant just had a quick stop . Cerebral amyloid angiopathy. Keep my blood pressure down low dose of drugs for that. Get own monitor, keep bp low . No more grunt work. Light weights ecentric, cardio. Knows the consultants in Leeds I had worked under at St James and Seacroft. Top guy passing on basic knowledge fast on way to emergencies. Great!?

[jack]

Bit of a bummer. Sorry to hear that Paul. I hope you can keep the symptoms under control - preventing vascular damage is obviously the key. Is this hereditary?

[Paul Barker]

Bit of a bummer. Sorry to hear that Paul. I hope you can keep the symptoms under control - preventing vascular damage is obviously the key. Is this hereditary?

Apparently . Its in youre dna and very rare.

No reason I. Ant teach new pathways to the neural network to control the limbs et al. Main thing is keep bp low so dont bleed in brain.

Then can look forward to slowly build valve projects.

No moredeadlifting.

[Paul Barker]

Bit of a bummer. Sorry to hear that Paul. I hope you can keep the symptoms under control - preventing vascular damage is obviously the key. Is this hereditary?

Apparently . Its in youre dna and very rare.

No reason I. Ant teach new pathways to the neural network to control the limbs et al. Main thing is keep bp low so dont bleed in brain.

Then can look forward to slowly build valve projects.

No moredeadlifting.

[steve s]

Old age and its associated health is a reality now for us Paul, best of luck..

[Cressy Snr]

New living room setup. We have been decorating for the last week or so and I'm completely knackered. Getting too old for this kind of malarkey, and it cost us a bleed'n fortune. Trouble is, once you decorate one room, the rest of the house starts to look like a shit tip, so we've only just started really. Still, "It'll keep him out of mischief," as the woman on the till at Dunelm said to the missus.

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The absolute sound is not a priority these days, hence the speaker placement at each end of the new 6ft wide TV bench, and the straight arm on the TT upstairs
Our Ant has the Mission floor-standers from Ray's mate at the moment.
New speakers are Q Acoustics 3010i bookshelf speakers. Bass/mid driver is 4in. They do an excellent job given the placement and work well in the small room.

[jack]

Just a quick heads-up...

We have an older gshp which has been great since installation.

Last week we got an LP (low pressure) alert on the ground source loop. Diagnostics showed that attempting a service mode cold start of the ground source loop pump failed.

Our provider said this proved that the pump needed replacing - about £600 plus £300 + VAT for the engineer... ie over a grand to fix.

I check that the pump was getting power when it should and it was, so I took the pump cover off and low and behold... inside was a start/run capacitor. The pump shaft was also moving freely , so the pump wasn't jammed and there were no signs of damage (smell, carbon deposits etc.). The windings were testing continuous too.

It was marked at 8uF +5% -0% however measured at 3.7uF. A quick trip to my local white-goods repair shop, a new 8uF cap for £9.90 and ...

...the motor now runs and the heat pump is back.

About £1,000 saved by doing a simple check. The capacitor is internal to the pump motor but is easily accessible. As most companies nowadays just do module rather than component level fixes, the customer can pay heavily for unnecessary work ...

[brig001]

Bass/mid driver is 4in. They do an excellent job given the placement and work well in the small room.

Looks good!
It’s surprising how good small speakers can sound in a smaller room when you don’t need huge SPL

Brian

[Morgan Jones]

Failed capacitors on pumps are rather common. It's because they make the capacitor too small, forcing a high voltage gradient across the dielectric, causing early demise. And the giveaway is invariably low capacitance. We had this problem with about 600 pumps, when I worked out what the problem was, there were hardly any pumps with the correct capacitance. I took a capacitor off a new pump, measured its capacitance, then stressed it for a few seconds with about 1500VDC. Capacitance after that was measurably lower. I had some new capacitors specially made (significantly larger) and stressed some to 2kVDC without change in capacitance.

[jack]

Failed capacitors on pumps are rather common. It's because they make the capacitor too small, forcing a high voltage gradient across the dielectric, causing early demise. And the giveaway is invariably low capacitance. We had this problem with about 600 pumps, when I worked out what the problem was, there were hardly any pumps with the correct capacitance. I took a capacitor off a new pump, measured its capacitance, then stressed it for a few seconds with about 1500VDC. Capacitance after that was measurably lower. I had some new capacitors specially made (significantly larger) and stressed some to 2kVDC without change in capacitance.

Being fair, up till now, this pump has performed flawlessly for 20 years. It's a Wilo TOP-S30/10, so a quality item and a very expensive one too. There's 600 MTRS of pipework underground that this pump has to push water/glycol through for many hours every day. It's a tough job.

I'll replace the cheapo cap I got today with a right-sized quality one from RS or Farnell later in the week - then I'll be able to put the lid on again!

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[Morgan Jones]

Definitely replace that with a proper capacitor; it looks too small for its capacitance, even before wondering what voltage is across it. 20 years is a very good life for a pump, so I think it can be excused for a capacitor failing.

[jack]

Definitely replace that with a proper capacitor; it looks too small for its capacitance, even before wondering what voltage is across it. 20 years is a very good life for a pump, so I think it can be excused for a capacitor failing.

A little more on this: The original capacitor was 25mm in diameter and 73mm long - an odd shape but designed to fit into a small space in the motor control box. I haven't yet found one that size from a 3rd party - they're all a minimum of 30mm in diameter.

I found the actual Wilo part number and got a quote for a replacement. £69+VAT !! For a motor start/run capacitor that should be a maximum of around £15 including VAT...

So, for the moment at least, the current replacement is staying there. Not pretty, but it works just fine.

[Ant]

Quite a few things have been listened to today, all on the cans.

I finally got the jvc ql-y3f completely fixed by milling out a(nother) replacement arm lifter and fitting it with a guide pin so it cant rotate, which the earlier one was doing. It resulted in it not lifting because it had moved, but trying to return the arm, dragging the stylus across the record surface...... so i took it out and put the technics in instead.

Its now in full working order. Apart from the repeat function which i dont care enough about to source a replacement extrememly hard to find switch for. So that can stay broken.

We now have the jvc into the benedict audio hothead, into the myryad hpa, into the sundaras.

It was quicker and easier (relatively speaking) to completely fix the jvc by making the required part than to fix the technics sl150 which was doing lp duty in the headphone system. Which has now developed recalcitrant speed stability. Because i dont have any of the required caps in stock to recap it, but i did have some scrap aluminium to make another lifter with.

Some nasty godawful alloy, not sure what grade it is but it was awful to machine. Got there with it in the end after i decided not to follow the pattern of the original part, but to just make something that worked and had all the bits in the right places instead.

This deck is one of my favourites, lovely sounding old thing.

I pulled the board out of the technics to make a bom, just need to get them ordered come pay day.
I might order some bits for the original xerxes power supply while in at it. Might put the tabriz back on the xerxes and gregs mayware on the technics. If i ever get around to it