19 May
2010
19 May
'10
12:28 p.m.
On 5/18/10, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
How many people where, who restore and run old hardware, have never been
caught out by a 'silly fault'? My guess (if you are honest) is exactly
zero :-). I will admit to spending quite a time figuring out why all the
outputs of a PSU were sitting at zero volts ony to discover the fuse in
the mains plug was misisng (not blown, actaully removed). Or the time I
spend a morning tracing waveforms through the video board ina VT101 to
sort out a low-contrast problem, only to find the real fault was that the
CRT screen needed a good clean.
This is going to sound silly, but do you have one
of those DEC mounting
skids fitted? I had problems with an RD53 that wouldn't work if the skid
was on. Turns out some component leads were shorting to the ground plate
on the skid. A piee of cardboard cured that :-)
That's not silly at all. That has happened to multiple people. It was a "well known" thing when RD53s were in
use all over the world.
There's even a special DEC-made purpose-cut mylar insulator sheet,
IIRC, but cardboard works fine.
A piece of cardboard was a lot cheaper than trying to get a part out of
DEC :-)
-tony