Today we have a new subject to tear down- my own Sonicare toothbrush. At the end of a brushing cycle it made a short “Beep” noise and went silent. No reaction to button press or to putting it on a charger. No lights, sounds or anything. Oh well, might as well take it apart.
Philips Sonicare
A silly looking box showed up in the mail a few days ago. It was attached to a spam mailer from a local car stealership proclaiming that I have already won a car, and just need to confirm the number this thing spits matches theirs. Naturally I took it apart:
Another ebay find- a vintage Keithley 172 multimeter. The datecodes on the parts range from 1978 to 1984, placing the final assembly somewhere in mid-1980s. It seems fully functional, but could use a bit of a calibration to regain its past precision.
As a result of visiting Hamfest, I ended up with a laptop to take apart – a fairly new Toshiba Satellite C675D with a broken screen. It’s not a Hamfest if you don’t bring home something to take apart of course! Today we’ll be testing the battery it came with to see if it’s salvageable.The date code says it was made in 11/2011
Patient all hooked up
This unit was used for a few years with a very limited success until I finally got fed up and decided to peek inside. The always warm case and constant 7W power draw did not help its cause either. As one of the 2 star reviews on Amazon concluded- don’t bother buying one of these.
An ebay find made its way into the lab- an industrial quality DMM from Hioki, made in 1984! The meter has some pretty good specs as shown in this datasheet:
Today we are unpacking a brand new LCR meter from a company called Tonghui in China. It was purchased on ebay and took less than a week to arrive.
Chinese market packaging
Today’s quick visual teardown is of an 1984 vintage Keithley 197 microvolt DMM, Despite considerable age, it’s still quite alive and kicking and very useful for measuring low currents and voltages.
Today’s quick teardown target is a 1985 vintage electronic load made by Kikusui of Japan. It came from eBay with a noisy fan, but was otherwise fairly functional despite the considerable age.
Only 2 inches wide
In the usual Kuzyatech fashion, when something breaks, we must take it apart. Today, one of the “early adopter” GU10 style LED lamps decided to fail mechanically:
We have a problem