Repairing a Nozatec GPS

[Capitol]

My Chinese GPS died, seems normal for GPSs IME, except Garmin 1200. Anyway, I suspected that it's battery had died, so fished out the special screwdriver set that I bought for mobile phone surgery and after removing 4 screws at the back, was able to carefully release the plastic clips in the back moulding and access the insides. Yes the Li battery had clapped and was of course glued in with a bit of twinstick tape. The construction was simple and clean. Fortunately I had a spare Li battery in my stock, also with a sticky pad, so a bit of soldering/sleeving and it was time to reassemble the unit. Contrary to my expectations, the whole thing went together 1st time! Most unusual! Time to switch on! Well, at least it lit up. Twenty minutes of monkey keyboarding later and after a factory reset, I seem to have a working GPS once again. Why I have to set date and time on a GPS, I'll never understand. I'll need to buy another Li battery, as the one I used is a bit small, but we'll see how it goes. I guess the whole job took about an hour, normally it takes that long to get to the stage of removing the first screw!

[Brian Gaff]

There is a growing movement internationally against companies who make it very hard to do basically simple repairs on their kit. I would imagine that this movement will only get stronger, since we do throw away some very useful items with silly faults. Brian

[Dave Liquorice]

Aye, a pretty good (A or AA rated but 10+ years old) fridge/freezer, with twin, fully functional, heat pumps, display of actual fridge and freezer temps, is about to junked 'cause the fridge control system if unreliable. It'll intermittently decide it's a freezer...

Can I find the fault, nope, the fridge control thermistor measures OK and varies with temp, the tweaky pot to set temperature measures OK and varies smoothly (even replaced it with a couple of fixed resistors to no avail), all connections are good, even reflowed any that looked even remotely iffy. The control thermistor disappears down a hole on it's flexible cable at the back of the fridge into the void where the enclosed evaporated is. The only thing I can think of is that it some times moves to be too close or touching the outer casing and thus "thinks" it's too warm and runs the fridge heat pump...

Most frustrating that the damn thing works, apart from what I'm sure is a simple fault with the fridge temperature control system.

[alan_m]

The downside is that goods will become more expensive. Gluing and clicking things together is a cheap manufacturing process. Making difficult to get items apart[1] may also be part of the Elfin safety culture where anything "deemed" to be a hazard is not to be trusted in the hands of the public.

Says he who not only half an hour ago had to get the water pliers out to get the top off from a bottle of bleach.