Greetings,

Crimp it, get a very small brass or copper tube, about an 1/8 inch in
length and just big enough for two wires to fit in. take a piece of 22
ga wire and carefully wrap the very thin nichrome wire artound the 22
ga wire and slide the small tube over both wires and squeeze the
tubing. take off a couple of turns to do this and leave some slack in
it for flexing, see, the nichrome wire acts like a heater and is
wrapped around a high temp insulator around a bi-metallic strip where
the contacts are for the light. This does move and that is why they
fail, heat and movement over time. Man that is an old unit, wish
they were all made like those. Keep the motor bearings lubed and
those units will last forever. Mine died last week, needed filter
caps on the sequencer board, got replacements out of a junked monitor.

take care,

Markus

the bearings and On Sat, 10 Sep 2005 20:04:40 GMT,
(Howard Goldstein) wrote:

On Tue, 06 Sep 2005 23:15:47 -0400, Jeff Wisnia wrote:
: Almost thought I had one for you Howard, but not quite.
:
: I found this one in my "hell box" tonight.
:
: http://home.comcast.net/~jwisnia18/temp/timer.html
:
:
: It's a garage door light timer from the right era, but the winding
: resistance is 500 ohms, and that'd certainly never do for going in
: series with the motor.
:

That *was* close...it's looks better engineered to last longer than
the one that goes into my garage door opener operator to boot. I
shouldn't be so insulting about the one in my operator because it did
manage to hold up ~20 yrs and has a clever feature (whatever....it is
still very fragile)

On mine, on startup the motor powered in series through a nichrome
ribbon much thicker than the one from your device and with fewer
turns. Where it may be different: It reaches red-hot in about 3
seconds, then after another 4 or 5 seconds the bimetal thingie inside
of the ceramic the nichrome is wrapped around starts bends enough
to cause two circuits to close - one for the lights, and cleverly, one
that bypasses the motor current around the nichrome.

For the last 4 days or so my clumsy repair to is somehow letting ot
work again; I don't think the solder job I did to connect the break in
the nichrome did anything (can one even solder to nichrome? When it
heated up did it melt off whatever solder I did manage to get in
there?) but a good solid crimping of the cleaned ends of the broken
ribbon together seems to have done the trick for now and hopefully
it'll stay intact for another day or two until the replacement
arrives.

I really appreciate everyone's comments, advice, and looking in their
junkboxes to help a fella out. Have a great weekend all!

h

de n2wx/4