vintage computers and lead poisoning?

The stuff I have does not seem to break very often. Off-hand there's been this MP3 player that was dropped, a solar powered garden light, a washing machine, a cassette player and two TVs. The MP3 needed no manual (just glue!), the light was trivial to trace (probably not worth the effort since the fault was always going to be the LDR, but fun nevertheless), no manual needed for the washing machine (although I did buy that Haynes guide a while ago) and the TVs I could find schematics for in the RTSE Guide (is that still going these days?). I'd be upset if something broke three times :-) I'm not sure how you can tell, before buying, that the manual is of any use (short of having previously seen one). I expect sedning it back with "insufficient data, please refund" won't work. I've seen Mauritron do a bunch of CDs with manuals - not too expensive for a CD I guess but I have no idea what the manuals themselves would be like. I may take a punt on a CD if I ever need one ... Why am I not surprised :-) Most of the stuff I buy, I buy to have it perform a specific function. I don't want the washing machine to do anything other than wash perfectlt, time after time, without ever failing (or, if that's too hard, without ever failing during my lifetime). I also want to minimise the amount I spend on it. I don't see why I should pay more purely to justify any future repairs on an economic basis. Same goes for TVs and the rest. As it happens I'll fix both of those if it seems worthwhile, but there are other things I'd rather spend my time and money on. Oh yes :-) In fact, I still have the original broken pump. And much of the wiring and the circuit boards. When I get half a mo, I'll sit down and figure out roughly how it works - I assume that most of the machines will be similar at least in principle. I only have a Rainbow and a CUB monitor at myn parent's house - luckily they settle for a bit of reprogramming of the TV and Sat Receiver. When TVs were more expensive (like in the 1970s) people did indeed pay for repairs. I just don't think that's a good reason for them to be more expensive. There are expensive TVs around today: if you want to you can pay maybe ?1500+ for a large widescreen one with all the trimmings. I'm not convinced that Horizon would look or sound much better but that's stingy old me :-) No. But it makes no economic sense to pay say ?50 to fix a ?6 calculator. I happen to have a faulty Casio fx-83 and one with a shattered display (quite how my kids manage to achieve this I do not know). The innards are basically an LCD, a keypad and an IC covered in you-can't-see-me gunk. I'll use one as an LCD-donor for the other but that seems to be the limit of what I can do here. It's not even worth my time to try, but there's a decent magnifying lens right by the soldering station at work ... The fact that it is not worth fixing it is not a good justification for taking the price back up to the ?40-?50 I remember having to pay for a less well specified calculator when I were a lad ... (although if someone comes out with an indestructible one, my TCO calculations may well need tweaking ...) I assume that you are not offering this service as a business ... otherwise you would be rapidly out of business. During my days as a freelancer I did odd bits on the side as the opportunity presented itself. I think I was charging about ?300/day ten years ago. Plumbers round here seem to advertise rates as low as ?40/hour. Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org