Working on amps is easy...

[LeftyStrat]

Once you've disassembled an iMac.

My wife's iMac started acting up, and I took the damn thing apart. Suction device to pull the main glass off (held by strong magnets).

Eight T10 torx screws, which immediately get sucked in by those strong magnets.

Gently tilt the LCD up by about an inch and remove connections for LCD backlight, display port, temperature monitor, and one other way back in the corner just to be a pain in the ass.

If you want to remove a fan, you'll need to remove the optical drive first.

You'll need to remove the hard drive before removing the power supply board. Once you've removed those, you'll be able to remove the logic board to get to the second fan. Oh wait, we're switching to T6 torx now.

Reminds me of an early Japanese car of my friends (forget which model), where you almost had to drop the engine to replace the oil filter.

We've become a throw-away culture where us peons aren't supposed to fix things and engineers no longer design for maintenance.

Okay, sorry, rant over.

Still wasn't able to fix the damn thing. I'm pretty sure it's the GPU, which unfortunately isn't a separate card, so I'd have to buy an entire logic board, which costs more than the resell value of the computer.

Okay, sorry, rant really over.

[dobbhill]

I bet if you were charging your normal labor rate, it would have been cheaper to replace!!!

Good luck!

D

[Bob S]

Engineers now design the parts that you can't get apart.
They make the big bucks.
I honestly thought I'd have to take out the engine to replace a headlight bulb on my daughters car. Turns out I needed a special tool.
Sign of the times.
Sad really.

[VacuumVoodoo]

Sort of OT but maybe not.
Thursday 11/22 Germany has submitted a motion to EU to ban electronic products with non-replaceable batteries. At last!

[LeftyStrat]

That's great news. I don't know how many dead ipods we had laying around, until my oldest daughter started taking them apart and making jewelry with the parts. She even sold some items.

[kwijabo]

i blame the marketers. we go through an exercise with the marketing team when we're doing new products and decide if we want to have products be servicable. typically if it costs <$100, we don't service it. so engineers can design it as such - meaning ultrasonically welded, non-replaceable batteries, etc.

but it starts further back than marketing. like lefty pointed out we've become more than OK with just throwing something away and re-buying it. so once you have consumers that are OK (willingly or not) with that, companies don't want to pay for service so the product is designed to not be serviced.

i wasn't really around for carburetors in cars, but my dad says that when he was growing up everyone on his street knew how to clean and adjust a carburetor. now a customer is just as likely to know how to take their car to the shop so a PCA can be swapped out.

the idealist in me says 1. teach the kids in school some technical competence in root cause analysis and 2. have companies provide easily accesible block diagrams and replacement parts. though i am sure for good reasons companies wouldn't just open up and provide that information.

[kwijabo]

and good on ya', lefty, for attempting to open up an imac. i've always looked at them and wondered how they put it together. sounds like it is really designed to be put together once.

[Reeltarded]

The carb thing is a hoot. I had a few cars way beyond their imagined service life where everyone had swapped to carbs while I learned how to service the injection myself, adjust valves, troubleshoot fuel delivery.. damn, I have been building amps for way longer than the one year I guess!

I have swapped out stacks in drives with bad contollers at least 10 or 11 times with success. I don't have access to a clean room, so I hold my breath in the garage for 10 minutes. lol

Apple pisses me off. heh.. Everytime we upgrade machines at work I open them up to find components with build dates from 3-4 years ago.. NICE CASE..

[Firestorm]

i wasn't really around for carburetors in cars, but my dad says that when he was growing up everyone on his street knew how to clean and adjust a carburetor. now a customer is just as likely to know how to take their car to the shop so a PCA can be swapped out.

the idealist in me says 1. teach the kids in school some technical competence in root cause analysis and 2. have companies provide easily accesible block diagrams and replacement parts. though i am sure for good reasons companies wouldn't just open up and provide that information.

My brother-in-law used to rebuild carburetors as a home business. You could buy all the replacement springs, valves and seals and use the carb again and again.

Notebook computers are the worst today for serviceability: the small, light form factor dictates that almost nothing can be replaced. Drives, yes, but if a drive controller goes, you're done.

[M Fowler]

I was trying to fix a new Blackstar 5w head the one with a 12ax7 and 12bh7 tube.

Taking it apart was easy but there was so much damage to the PC board, tracings, transistors and components so small I never did identify what they were.

Making an eyelet board for it now.

Mark

[jestaudio]

I was trying to fix a new Blackstar 5w head the one with a 12ax7 and 12bh7 tube.

Taking it apart was easy but there was so much damage to the PC board, tracings, transistors and components so small I never did identify what they were.

Making an eyelet board for it now.

Mark

Blackstar make some great products but the service in the UK is crap, i had one for a while and eventually dropped it in favour off a old DC 5 for one reson only, i can get a Mesa repaired pretty quick, it takes forever to get a Blackstar repared, as a opinion only i don't rate Blackstar any more highly than modern Marshalls.
On the OP's original subject Apple Macs are stupidly expensive in the uk but having repaired a few laptops for the family i can see where he's coming from, give me a amp build any day, its wy easier to work with

[Cantplay]

On some of the blackstar they use a ninja fuse on the board.

Ninja, because it doesn't look like any fuse you've ever seen, it blows and you can't tell without dvm.



John

[VacuumVoodoo]

That's a fusible resistor,when used correctly it will be placed ahead of electrolytic cap in PSU ripple filter. It is meant to blow when the cap has gone "half bad" i.e.not bad enough to blow main fuse but bad enough to blow its head any minute and spew electrolytic fluid all over the board. A fusible resistor, if correctly dimensioned and strategically placed, will prevent this. But you need to know where and why it's there. Now you do.

[DonMoose]

ifixit.com
sparkfun.com

[cbass]

http://youtu.be/kl1ujzRidmU?t=7m17s