In article o.uk,
"Dave Liquorice" writes:
On Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:47:47 GMT, Harry Bloomfield wrote:

I would never make an assuption that the person I was speaking to knew
any less than me.

But that could well just provoke a lot of WOOOSHHH...

I always try to find out first, so I can talk to them at their level.

That's better. I get the sneaky feeling that the shop wouldn't have
been able to do more than a board swap. Trying to fix it at component
level would beyound them and possibly even beyound their
comprehension. Youngsters have grown up in a "throw away" society,
summat breaks you chuck it and buy another.

I have replaced the two triacs on the driver board in my Hotpoint
washing machine (IIRC, they were under a quid each) - I couldn't
even be bothered to work out which one was dead. A repair shop
would have replaced the board (something like £40) plus labour.

The triac was blown by either a dying motor brush or a broken
wire in the motor wiring loom (I can't now recall which of those
incidents it was, although I think it was probably the brush).

The broken wire was fun - it was the field winding connection
for normal running.
The result was that as it made occasional contact, the drum
managed to achieve 1 or 2 revs/sec only. As it ramped up though
the profiled spin speeds, 400, 600, 800, 1000, it was actually
only doing about 2 revs/sec. However, the 1400RPM uses a separate
field winding connection which still worked fine. So in the final
step from 1000 to 1400RPM, the damn thing nearly took off. It
basically managed an almost standing start to 1400RPM in under
2 seconds when full with soaking wet load - you could see the
whole machine tip up as it did it. I didn't think it would
survive too many of those, so fixed it PDQ.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]