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Components and Circuits For discussions about component types, alternatives and availability, circuit configurations and modifications etc. Discussions here should be of a general nature and not about specific sets.

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Old 6th Sep 2017, 10:58 pm   #81
TonyDuell
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Default Re: A simple mistake?

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Originally Posted by SiriusHardware View Post

Ed- I've worked in / with electronics since the early seventies but had never set eyes on a temperature controlled iron until I started work in the early noughties for a company which did have them. So - depending on when this interview took place - I might have found myself in the same perplexed position as your interviewee.
No, but presumably you'd seen normal soldering irons and their stands. And if you saw a spring holding a tool with a cable coming out the top end on an electronics workbench, your first thought would have been 'soldering iron'
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Old 6th Sep 2017, 11:04 pm   #82
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Default Re: A simple mistake?

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The intersection of superstition and engineering is a pretty funny thing.
There is a (probably apocryphal) story told about many famous scientists :

Somebody noticies that said scientist has a horseshoe nailed up in his lab. They ask the scientist 'I am surprised you are superstitious. Do you believe that that horseshoe will bring you good luck in your research'

The scientist replies 'Of course I am not superstitious. I believe in proving things by experiment, in the scientific method. <pause> But as for the horseshoe bringing luck, I am told it works even if you don't believe in it'
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Old 6th Sep 2017, 11:06 pm   #83
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Default Re: A simple mistake?

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No, but presumably you'd seen normal soldering irons and their stands. And if you saw a spring holding a tool with a cable coming out the top end on an electronics workbench, your first thought would have been 'soldering iron'
You'd be surprised. At university in the 1990s for me, they actually hung cheap yellow Antex irons up on the top rail of the benches. That was all we got. A Weller TCP iron would have had students dancing around it like the monkeys at the start of Kubrik's 2001 around the monolith.

The thing that killed me with this is the cheap 20MHz Goldstar scopes they put up there had burn marks all over the front of them.
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Old 7th Sep 2017, 12:58 am   #84
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Default Re: A simple mistake?

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I keep a work diary and have a small notebook for use when out on jobs. It's not because I am particularly well organised, but because my memory is rubbish, and the kind of work I do means recording either a lot of connection data or meter readings. It's saved me on many an occasion when I have become distracted from the immediate job and then gone back asking myself; now, was that pair E46 or 49 that was jumpered to pair D36? The other reason is to cover my backside for want of a better phrase. In previous employment there tended to be a witch hunt if anything went wrong with a job. If you write down times and dates, job numbers and where you were and are accused of doing something, you can smugly say "wait a minute I will just get my book out" and watch the accusers' face as you prove it wasn't you etc etc.
Alan.
When I worked in a blame culture like that, it wasn't so much the written notes that kept me out of the mire, it was more the camera built into my phone.

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Old 7th Sep 2017, 1:58 am   #85
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Default Re: A simple mistake?

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I spent much longer than intended this morning wiring up an oven and hob.
Looped the cable through the oven terminals nice and neatly to save cutting, taking care to leave enough to leave a long enough tail to reach the hob connection (far left, looking from the front).
Only when I went to connect the hob did I twig that 'far left' was with the hob turned upside-down for wiring, and when in working position the connection was 'near left', and needed another half-metre or so of cable - slightly more than I'd left spare!
I was going to post an oven anecdote, then I saw yours.

Mine concerns a new free-standing double oven/hob cooker that my sister-in-law bought. Whichever oven she used would overheat, uncontrollably. The retailer dispatched an engineer, but the ovens behaved themselves while he was there.

They still overheated when she tried to cook anything, so a second engineer was dispatched, with the same result.

At this point, in desperation, I was called in.

It slowly dawned on me that with BOTH ovens on, they worked reasonably well, cycling on and off as expected, I imagine that was the engineers strategy.

Only when one oven at a time was tried did the overheating occur, also tracing the wiring out showed no anomalies.

Then I had a brainwave, I traced the capillary tube from the BOTTOM oven thermostat, it had been carefully positioned and clamped during manufacture en route to the TOP oven (and vice versa).

Graham.
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Old 7th Sep 2017, 11:12 am   #86
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Default Re: A simple mistake?

A friend got on to a government TV repair training course in 1975. Day one they were introduced to an Avo , and a TV chassis with known faults to find. They were instructed to "Put the Avo across the mains input to see if there is power arriving there" My friend's new colleague on his right carefully detached one Avo lead and managed to put that across the mains inlet. Predictable result. I think he failed the course.
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Old 7th Sep 2017, 12:13 pm   #87
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Default Re: A simple mistake?

I think that sort of thing is quite common for new engineers.

We had one guy throw a battery across the room in the first lab we did because it had no volts. He had the red lead on the current terminal of the meter. The lab tech had explained this to him and unplugged the leads and we had drawn him a little picture showing how to do it. He plugged the leads in exactly the same again and nothing.

This was incidentally how every DMM in the lab had a blown current fuse and glue gun glue in the unfused 10A range. Those of us who cared bought our own 1% resistors from Maplin and used them as current shunts because we were forbidden from replacing the fuses in case we broke anything.

Sigh...
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Old 8th Sep 2017, 3:02 pm   #88
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Default Re: A simple mistake?

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I had the same problem with a Rank Arena tuner amp, looking for low one channel, after several hours, the penny dropped. It was in fact high one channel, If I have one of these to repair I replace all the light grey electrolytic capacitors. Mick.
A very good lesson here about making assumptions. I assume most of us have done this.
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