Post your redneck repairs.

[MS-DOS4]

Two pins on my sega genesis had broken clean off, so I just made some homemade pins and soldered them in.



Awful soldering! Hot glue everywhere!







Works just fine now. Any of you folks do some crappy fixes like this?

[FamicomRetroGamer]

lol "redneck repair"

Is that a storage room?

I've done some repairings but not for consoles.

[nensondubois]

My old classroom looked very much like that room. Anyway, I repaired my old Sega Saturn (Laser moving piece snapped in half so it's useless now.) when it was usable to have the CD lid button taped down so I could play games and listen to music with it.

[MS-DOS4]

Is that a storage room?

Yeah, it's a unused classroom at school where some friends come in during lunch to play games. We currently have a Genesis, NES, and a N64 set up.

[133MHz]

Some kludges from my old house:

My TV had a power supply failure. The standby voltage supply and caused the main power transistor to fail. It kept blowing the transistor repeatedly so instead of troubleshooting it, I just bypassed the standby supply entirely and fed the circuit directly from a tiny 5V & 12V universal power supply.



Light bulbs are there for series current limiting in case of catastrophic failure. Kid Icarus approves!



Last summer was way too hot. The temps lower substantially during the night but the house seemed to keep hot on the inside. Solution? Strap electric fans to the 2nd floor windows in order to force colder night air in and a fan blowing out in the back room to vent the hot air to the outside, just like a computer case.



Later I strapped more fans to the windows using ropes and tape. It worked really well, except for making our house look like crap.

Installed a fluorescent light fixture in my bedroom, but I was too lazy to wire it up independently, so I piggybacked the power from a wall mounted lamp, complete with pieces of different colored lamp cord patched together and the ubiquitous inline cord switch!



Kludges I don't have pics of:

My PC's heatsink takes a 60mm fan. When the fan died, I didn't have a 60mm one in hand so I mounted an 80mm one by screwing it to the heatsink only on its top left corner. It's been running like that for 4+ years since then.

[Cam3ron@FW]

Xbox hadn't worked in ages, I had thought my dog had peed on it years ago but wasn't sure.  It was 80 bucks to have them fix it, 40 bucks to buy one used.  I had nothing to lose so I did some research and opened it up.  Dust literally coated the console, and some of it was yellow dust   Yeah, anyways kept having to dig down and get the screws out, they really didn't want you to open it up.  Opened the disc drive and the xbox laser was in a pool of dust, thankfully some of it wasn't yellow this time.  Cleaned the whole system out and used rubbing alcohol on the laser lens and it worked like a dream.  Still have to clean the laser once in a while but the times where I need to clean it are drifting further and further apart.

Only problem now is every controller seems to press the "L" button on it's own every once in a while... Yeah, any ideas on why that might be?

[son_ov_hades]

Hey 133MHz, you Chileans need to learn the wonders of air conditioning! When I was in Chile in the heat of summer I was dying, and shocked that no one uses AC.

[133MHz]

No one uses A/C around here because until recent years there was absolutely no need for them. The climate has changed drastically over a relatively short period of time.

Chimneys and all sorts of heaters are extremely common in houses because winters were a lot colder, but A/C units are nowhere to be found, mainly because you barely need an electric fan or two if the hottest temp. you get in the summer is 25ºC, if that. Sadly, this is not the case anymore. Damn you Communist Global Warming from Space™ and your over 30ºC summer temperatures!

[NintendoNerds]

I'm sorry, but this thread is AWESOME! It's unique!! Love it!!

[FamicomRetroGamer]

Unscrewed a Crystal and Black Xbox controller to swap the analogue sticks.

No photos soz.

[satoshi_matrix]

That's not really a redneck repair...

For me, I'd say my Mayflash NES/SNES to Wii mod I did.

[133MHz]

Earlier today I spent my evening listening to Internet radio while doing stuff on the living room by hooking up my lappy to the stereo system, everything was great as usual but I kept hearing a crackling noise every now and then. I reseated the audio cables but it didn't seem to go away, it wasn't really that irritating so I ignored it for the most part... but then the crackling got louder and more frequent until I noticed it wasn't coming from the speakers, I realized it was coming from the laptop charger when I saw it going up in smoke.

I quickly unplugged it from the wall and fortunately my lappy escaped unharmed, but the charger overloaded and shorted out resulting in partial melting of the power input jack and a big round hole burnt through the printed circuit board, disintegrating a whole trace in the process. Ah, the pleasing smell of burnt plastic. Good times.

I can't afford a replacement laptop charger, so I scraped off as much as the burnt material as I could and then I repaired the circuit by bridging the broken sections by soldering tiny bits of wire here and there. Now I just need to find a way to remove the stench and I'm all set.



It seems to work fine now, though I'm not going to leave it charging unattended anymore.

[cubelmariomadness]

I love the name Lappy. If it were me, I'd wait to get a new charger. Seems really dangerous that it burnt!

[133MHz]

Why not install a CIC from a crappy SNES game on your adapter?

[Peps1ru1es92]

I had an emachines computer which would reboot regardless of whether you told it to reboot or shutdown. I attached a power strip and used its switch to turn the PC on and off for a good 6 months.