Tips!

Before you take “anything” to pieces you can take photos (or even video) of the whole project, then at different important stages of the process, so that when you put it back together you have visual aids of the important steps to help you find out where everything goes.

You can never have too many photos of what you are doing.

This is especially useful with anything that is colour coded like wiring (plugs etc) or something that comes apart in a special order.

When soldering and the solder does not glue to the steel or wire, sand the mental or wire with sandpaper or maybe a Dremel/rotary tool with a grinder/sanding tip/disc, to remove any surface covering that may be stopping the soldering process from being completed.

Before soldering the end of wire it pays to twist the wire.

Many people solder the wire ends before putting them into connectors to keep the connection strong.

If you have a Potentiometer and when it is used it is not working correctly it can be where the “wiper” is hitting the track it is running on worn tracks. One quick fix is to pull the “pot” apart and use a pencil to draw the track back in.

If you have trouble recognizing the colours on resisters use a good magnifying glass to make the resistor bigger in the magnifying glass and the colour bands can then be seen more clearly.

A Soldering Station is worth the money and far superior to a cheap soldering iron, for serious soldering projects.

Always have decent lighting in any room that you are working in. It is easy to overlook such a simple thing, but to preserve your eyesight, and to see clearly it is wise to have good lighting and possibly a portable lamp you can use in dark areas.

Save jars for holding items and label the jars.

Desoldering is the process of heating the already soldered part and removing the solder with a Desoldering Station, a Solder Sucker or Desoldering Braid/Wick.

Get a good multimeter. A decent one is helpful and will last many years giving good performance and dedicated service.

It pays to read up and learn, for fun, about old “cures”, such as not putting stereo speakers near CRT VDU/Monitors because the magnets can affect the screen. Also if VHS and Cassette tapes are put on magnets of stereo speakers they can be wiped or the data somewhat corrupted by the magnets in the speakers.
What may not be popular now may still be used by some and if you wiped their precious musical or video memories accidentally that would be an unsatisfied customer for sure.

In ATM Machines, in the Safe, the Money Cassettes used to have to be put in order, for instance $10’s at top, $20’s in the middle and $50’s at the bottom, and this was all checked by reed switches. But these have been done away with now, and the cassettes can be installed in any order now.

The symbol C in italic or slanted type, is for Capacitance.

The same symbol C normal is the Coulomb unit of charge.

Vcc = Voltage Common Collector. + Voltage. Power input of a device.

Vcc can be positive or negative compared to Gnd (Ground).

When first getting into computer power supplies and electronics one can be forgiven for being confused when one finds out that we deal in positive and negatives when dealing with supplying power to circuits & electronics.

The Ampere-Meter requires the circuit to be broken, to allow insertion of the meter.

ROM – Read Only Memory.

Bias: Short for Bias Voltage, a voltage applied to an electronic device to ensure that it operates on a particular portion of its characteristic curve.

Carbon Contact Keys – Glue a small disk foil over worn carbon layer for better contact.

The anode is usually the positive side. A cathode is a negative side.

There are a lot of variations in electronics so please don’t take anything for granted. If you are hesitant about something find out about it, investigate, do your research.

An IC is an Integrated Circuit – Chip.

MSI = Medium Scale Integration. Those IC’s (Integrated Circuits) that contains between 30 and 1,000 electronic components on a single chip.