Donald,

Looks like large lumps of metal going round and round very quickly.

Dubbie

A few years ago when I had recently started working for my current company, one of our GPS units we use for field data collection stopped working. I called the manufacturer and was told that it'd be a couple hundred dollars to repair.. but it sounded like such an easy task. I opened it up, reattached some wires that had broken and had it fixed within an hour. Boss told me I was the new "IT department" (small company, in forestry) and I was getting a raise. good day!

It was a flap barrier motor keep revolving on every movement but we need to stop it after user crossing it, finally we got that motor dose not have any problem but actually response time of proximity sensor was long enough to detect user and we were out of spare so we just increase surface area of metal foil to adjust the response time and finally successfully repaired it

There are many instances of "saving the day" over the years. Because I am OLD. LOL The best and most memorable was when I was first starting out in the technology biz with training, but not much provable experience other than my own electronic tinkering over the years. I put ads in local newspapers (no internet to speak of back then) asking for broken equipment to fix. A retired engineer had a basement full of equipment that he didn't want to pay to have thrown out. He brought a van full over and I cannibalized parts from some to fix others. They were old point of sale type terminals with a keyboard and an external hard drive box for each of them. Running DOS level software. I found a local school that wanted the repaired items, and I had found some simple programs they would run with limited memory to include as well. They gave me a thank you letter that I was able to use as proof of experience during job interviews. I stayed in that field for many years. Hop skipping all over doing different network and break and fix jobs eventually. Now where is my solder sucker anyway? This contest makes me want to dig through some of these boards again that are taking up closet space.

I am not renowned for my electronics repairs, although my first ever blog on element14 was soldering a new encoder into my old oscilloscope;

Repairing my Rigol DS1052E Oscilloscope

But that is usually about as good as my electronic repairs get.

I don't think I can ever claim to have saved the day either, I tend to go more for a save the year as we did with a repair of a generator rotor that got out of hand. What should have been a 6 to 8 week refurbishment works of a 34 tonne rotor, turned out to be 6 months after it developed a fault whilst undergoing repair works. What should have been 100 mile there and back journey from the site to the workshop turned into an 850 mile journey as the rotor went from workshop to machine shop to be turned, down to a workshop to be rewound, then off to a balancing facility to be finally returned to the site to be installed.

This first picture is a happier moment as the coil rewind has just been completed.

It was one of those jobs though where things just don't go well and to add total insult to injury the rotor cooling fan was damaged during the lifting process that delayed the final rebuild further.

34 tonnes of generator rotor making its way up to the top of the scaffold for installation

Not such a happy moment with a bent and cracked fan blade

That was a Christmas when not much time was spent at home, we finally got the machine back up and running on the 30th December - at least the New Year was saved.

I'm still proud of this repair I did when I was like 10 years old (thiugh slightly embarrassed why it was necessary).  We were poor, but my parents scraped together enough money to buy the NES Advantage controller I'd been begging for. I don't remember the game, but I had a temper-tantrum and threw the controller, breaking the PCB completely in half. I managed to disassemble it, scrape the traces, then strip and solder jumpers across the break, using my step-dad's soldering iron... all before they got home. It was good-as-new and they were none the wiser! That did break me from throwing controllers though.

I kind of have both. I always wanted a sega saturn since i was a kid so i bought one that needed repair online. It supposedly had a power issue so i opened it up to find a giant Japanese cockroach dead laying on the power board. I proceeded to clean the system and reflowed the psu components hooked it all up and it fired up but it was in Japanese thats where the fun started. I had to swap out the bios for a region free one its like a 40pin dip i believe. While attempting to remove it with solder Wick and a desoldering pump i pulled some traces on the top of the board. Being fairly broke at the time and knowing the chances of getting another sega saturn for 30 dollars even broken was unlikely (especially being it wasn't XD before me) i was a bit freaked out. After i calmed myself down i proceeded to use legs from old components and some careful placement to bridge the broken trace which was under the IC itself. After alot of sweating and using every curse word i know and a few i think i invented at the time i put it back together and it works like a charm to this day.

naltieri  Back in day before Elf and Safety as eagar apprentice, I was in admiration for pal who had spent many hours on the bench constructing an Oscilloscope, while attempting to fault find said unit in despiration he held the oscilloscope on his lap, while probing for an elusive wiring fault with his index finger, when all of a sudden there was an almighty shriek from my pal and the oscilloscope was observed to be thrown into the air, only to be caught and flung into to air again, this repeated several times, and thought that's an unusual method of fault finding, later on I realised my pals finger had inadvertently touched the transformer high tension for the Cathode ray tube and every time he caught it he got shocked again but didn't want to drop it and damage the Oscilloscope that he had toiled over. So I guess his Index finger was his first diagnostic tool although a tool that is not recommended    Merry Christmas.

made a proximity triggered pneumatic cylinder for an effect cannon, works great but after a day of shouting at people to step back/ not stick their arms in it i added an estop. it works but nothing makes people think twice like a big red emergency button

Amazon, for about $20. Just search for "Megaphone".

After looking at the internal circuitry that allowed record/replay of sound, I'm definitely going to revisit my plans to make a custom "That was easy" button from staples. It seams easier than I initially though it would be.