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Mole Richardson Type 407, Baby Solar Spot, Lighting Bulb Refuses To Come Out

11/21/2012 Score Card Comments 0 Comment

Customer complaint: Can not remove the light bulb out of a Mole Richardson Baby Solar Spot. It appears to be stuck.

Solution: I tried to remove the bulb by wedging a straight blade screwdriver between the socket and porcelain bulb base. The bulb was locked into the socket. I called Mole Richardson and explained this problem to them. I was told that some times the bulb contacts become pitted and make bulb removal difficult. I would have to disassemble the socket. The technical illustrations provided by Mole Richardson are very impressive and thus most helpful. I had to remove the bottom of the unit by removing four screws that hold a box at the bottom of the fixture which holds the reflector, socket and pan/spot rails. The socket is very complicated and is NOT recommended by anyone except a repair person who is totally competent to complete this repair successfully. I found one (out of four) of the ceramic donuts cracked as seen below. Once the two main metal contacts were removed the bulb pin was still stuck inside the socket. The image below shows my attempt to use pliers and spin the connector around the bulb pin. The pin was so firmly stuck that this attempt failed. I had to break the bulb ceramic base so I could remove this contact and attack the problem while the socket was held by a bench vise.

Instrument socket shows contact holding bulb pin.

I had to remove the metal contact (seen in above image held by pliers) and put it into a vise. I then took a vice grip pliers and I must have spent over ten minutes spinning the bulb pin before it would come out of the contact. I inspected both the bulb pin and the socket connector. The image below shows an extreme close up of the problem bulb pin. Notice the extreme pitting. The bulb pin should be smooth, not pitted.

Microsope view of bulb pin showing pitting. — Microscope view of bulb pin showing pitting.

I determined that I must replace BOTH instrument contacts. Only one ceramic insulator circle was cracked but I ordered four in case one might break during installation and have some as spares. The ceramic insulators only cost $2 each. The repair parts cost about $68 with tax, not shipping.

Conclusion: If you have a Mole Richardson Type 407 lighting instrument and the light bulb can not be pulled out of the socket, the bulb pin and even the socket might be pitted. Send or take the instrument to a qualified repair facility. Do NOT attempt this repair as the socket components are rather complicated to disassemble and even more difficult to assemble. The purpose of this post is to show that the bulb pin may be pitted so the bulb can not be pulled out of the socket.

Collective Intelligence May Have Saved 2012 Election

11/14/2012 Score Card Comments 0 Comment

Prior to the 2012 presidential election I had written some blog articles that were pretty critical of some individual’s intellectual process for supporting a candidate. party and party platform. I had been following the political happenings prior to the election and my perception was this election was going to be close. Me and my friends were even scared that Romney would win and set our county back into more oligarch control. I was vastly surprised, almost shocked, at the election results. I still can not believe that the electorate figured it out pretty well. I still stand by my prior blog posts that many individuals have a single issue or two that really is important to them. My problem with this approach, in my mind, is politics comprises a lot of issues and I think it to be a better choice to measure as many as you can and then draw a broader conclusion. Well that is simply not going to happen. People are really drawn into just one or two political issues. But then, what did happen in this past election? My only conclusion is there must be a collective intelligence. If we take all the one and two issue people and put them all together, the issues that each finds important would naturally differ. If each person was pretty good at figuring out what was the best outcome to pursue for “their” issue then might we then have a pretty good collective intelligence? I am still toying with this as an explanation because I am out of any other ideas.

Repair Of Wii Game Console Sensor Bar

11/13/2012 Score Card Comments 0 Comment

My daughter came to me complaining that our cat had chewed into the Wii sensor bar and it now fails to work. I looked at the cable and indeed the cat had chewed right through the outer insulation and right into the wires. Just over three feet nearest the antenna was damaged in about three places. The remedy was to cut the wire at the last break and solder it into the bar.

I was later to find out that the connector that mates with the game controller is not available at my local electronics store. I had to go into the antenna and shorten the cable. I was successful and here is the procedure I used.

There are a number of very small screws that need to be removed from the rear of the bar. I did not have the correct tool and had to go to an electronics store and purchase a Prokit’s Industries, Tri-Wing Driver with shaft #0 tip size. The tool was less than $4. I found that when putting the sensor bar back together that this screwdriver would hold the screws perfectly and I did not need to use a second hand to hold the screw in the hole.

Turn the bar so the back is facing upward. Right away you will notice two screws that need to be removed. You will have to remove four more for a total of 6. Two screws will be at the end of the bar under a very thin rubber cover. Gently peel back this rubber starting from the end of the bar and you should quickly see the hidden screws. Remove both.

The next image shows the hidden screw location at the end of the bar, the black sensor lid pulled away from sensors at the end. Take note of the how the black lid comes off. One end of the lid has a hook and the other end has a “L” shaped tab seen below. It is a bit tricky putting all the pieces together after you have soldered the new wires in place.

Sensors shown, sensor lid and two screw locations.

Next. gently separate the clear plastic stand that holds the bar correctly upon a horizontal surface. This stand is only held in place by a sticky surface but it is quite strong so take care not to break it.

Sensor bar middle screws — Note the clear plastic bar stand at the top of the image. I have put red arrows where the two screws are located.

Once all the large black plastic back can be removed, the circuit board will be seen at one end. I cut just over 3 feet of wire from the end of the cable going into the sensor bar which was damaged. I still had plenty of cable to reach the Wii controller. I cut out the bad section of wire. I removed insulation from the wire end and soldered it in place. I did have difficulty with the wire quality. It was a pain to remove the thin cotton string that wrapped the wire. Then I found that the wire would not tin properly until I used a high wattage soldering iron. To finally solder the wires on to the circuit board, I used a low wattage pencil iron with thin solder.

The next problem was to properly calculate and execute a knot in the wire. This took some time to match the same distance between where the knot is to rest in the middle of the bar and the circuit board. Below I have outlined where the knot must rest with the color green. I am most sorry that the image below does not show the knot in the box. The plastic tape wire with a red stripe can easily be lifted so you can stuff the knot into that little box.

Proper knot placement is inside the green box.

Putting the bar back together requires patience and some puzzle experience. The wire must be placed properly within channels. The black sensor lids must hook properly and close properly into both ends of the bar. The black back must be placed carefully down upon the bar and care and good visual confirmation must be made that the back is down in place before you put those 6 screws into the bar. I wish you good luck. Just take your time, have good light and maybe a magnifying glass as the parts are small.

The solution I used to keep our cats from eating the wire again was to run the whole cable into a white garden hose that I had that was darn near perfect length. It was left over from my pool sweep. A large diameter hose was needed because of the connector size. I was able to hide this awful garden hose pretty well by running it along the back of our wide flat screen TV.

Time Warner Cable Modem: Motorola SurfBoard SB6141

11/13/2012 Score Card Comments 0 Comment

I read an article in the LA Times some time in November 2012 where it revealed that Time Warner Cable was now charging a rental fee for its Internet modems. The article went on to say that the customer can buy their own modem but it must be an approved model. I went to the Time Warner web site but could not find anything about which modems were approved. I had to contact them by Internet typing chat. The fellow at the other end rather quickly sent me the link. I wanted a high speed modem and there were only two to choose from. One included wireless router and I already have the Apple Airport so I was stuck with the Motorola SurfBoard SB6141 SOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem. Time Warner did a good job picking this unit. It has wonderful reviews. I next tried to buy the unit locally but it was not to be found. On the Internet it was also a bit hard to find. I purchased mine form Tirgo for $124.94 including all charges. The delivery was amazingly fast.

Before you remove the old modem, make sure you know of a good phone number to call Time Warner Cable. I used 888-892-2253. I disconnected the old modem and hooked up the new one. A couple of lights lit up but I knew that I had to tell Time Warner the Mac address for this modem before it would work correctly. I called Time Warner to give them the Mac address. The lady at the other end needed to verify who I am. I forgot my pin number but luckily it was recorded within mSecure. As soon as my customer service lady was satisfied that I was at the correct address and paying Time Warner for service, she quickly got the system to recognize my modem. The modem, so far, has worked perfectly.

The current Time Warner modem rental fees for me were $3.95 per month. Dividing that amount into the cost of the new modem comes down to 31.6 months when I would break even. Dividing 12 months into 31.6 gives us 2.63 years before I would start to actually make money. So why buy your own modem? Why buy this expensive one? Is there a hidden benefit? My research for this new modem implied that I might gain some added performance.

Before shutting down the old Time Warner Scientific Atlanta unit I did some Internet speed tests. Our current Time Warner Internet plan is Turbo. After connecting the new modem up I performed the same tests. Following is my findings using http://www.speedtest.net/ .

I chose LA for the server test location. You can choose many more locations but just make sure you use the same location when doing your comparison. The further the server is from your computer, the performance typically goes down due to the distance that the test signals must travel.

Old Time Warner Modem: Scientific Atlanta model 2100

Time 1: Upload error error.
Time 2:   2:50 pm Ping, 16ms; Download Speed 20.87 Mbps; Upload 1.77 Mbps
Time 3:   2:55 pm Ping, 16ms; Download Speed 11.95 Mbps; Upload 1.73 Mbps
Time 4:   2:56 pm Ping, 16ms; Download Speed 20.50 Mbps; Upload 1.77 Mbps

New Purchased Modem: Motorola Surfboard SB6141

Time 1: 3:47 pm Ping 14ms; Download Speed 20.93 Mbps; Upload 2.05 Mbps
Time 2: Upload Test Error
Time 3: 3:25 pm Ping, 14ms; Download Speed 20.62 Mbps; Upload 2.06 Mbps.
Time 4: 3:26 pm Ping, 14ms; Download Speed 20.91 Mbps; Upload 2.05 Mbps.
Time 5: 3:40 pm Ping, 13ms; Download Speed 20.71 Mbps; Upload 2.07 Mbps.

Qualification: The above test was not done perfectly. Ideally I should have had both modems doing the testing at the same time. I did try to make my tests as close in same day clock time as I could between the old and new modem. My concern here is that Time Warner Cable has been accused of metering their service. I have heard that during the day they improve speeds for business and flip that around during the night for the residential customers. I do not know if this is true or not. My point her is the testing may have been done near of at the time the cable company does its alleged flip. My feeling is that the flip would occur much later in the day.

Technical:

This modem offers a nifty modem software called Modem Configuration Manager built right in the modem itself. All you need to do is type this web site address into your web browser: http://192.168.100.1.
To understand further about this modem, download the pdf file: SB6141.pdf which I found darn near impossible to find. For this post, I tried to find the document again at the Motorola web site but could not. The Motorola web site looks nice but lacks true customer support.

Summary: I know it is a rationalization on my part for putting down so much money for an expensive modem but the numbers do show a slight Ping improvement and a near double upload speed from this new modem. My son and I do web sites so upload speed improvement is nice. My son is a gamer so ping is important. For the person who loves to visit web sites, implying the need for good download speed, this expense might not be seen as an improved for you as the download speeds will not improve unless you pay for better speeds from Time Warner. My son’s verdict is that he did NOT experience any change in game performance.

Private Equity CEO’s Fail With Social Issues.

11/12/2012 Score Card Comments 0 Comment

I have a membership with a health club where quite a few GOP business people attend. Many of these people are quite rich. The men’s locker room is often times loud with anti Obama opinions. In particular, I watched one individual who was against Obama right after he won the presidency. I did not think his view as because of prejudice. The man is very good at investing money but I am soon to realize that he may be stupid about people and social issues. I am always trying to figure out things to a logical conclusion and I just could not figure out why so many GOP men held such strong opinions against the president. Just prior to President Obama running for president a second time and about a week or two before the election was held, the Wall Street Journal ran some articles describing how just about all the financial institutions donated vast sums of money to the Romney campaign and virtually nothing to Obama.

August 27, 2012: Wall Street’s Singer Makes His Influence Felt

October 9, 2012: Political Wisdom: Goldman Drops Obama for Romney.

The articles stated (in my words) that Obama failed to genuflect to the financial institution wishes. The financial institutions wanted even more profits and someone who they could more easily control. When Obama won the presidency with an impressive margin a second time, I began to realize that the business leaders of all those financial institutions totally failed to understand how this nation was changing, failed to predict the election, failed to understand the social forces that were changing since the past four years. They wasted vast sums of money and failed to buy access. One might go so far as claiming that they were below the intelligence level of the very people who voted for Obama. If this is actually true, then why do we give business leaders so much credit for course corrections on issues outside of their personal knowledge? Might we require that business people who have political influence in government policy not go beyond what they directly understand?

The Problem With Religion

11/01/2012 Score Card Comments 0 Comment

There is quite a full range for believing and promoting the importance of organized religion from non participation with total lack of concern along with atheism at one extreme and fervent adherence to a religion at the other extreme. What should be realized by all is that religion is a comfort mechanism. It is not an absolute. It is in the mind and not based in any reality except when the mind thinks it is so.