Folks,
After about a year and many many gigs and rehersals, my LE powersupply "brick" died. I went to power it up last night just to practice for a bit, and when I pressed the switch, there were no lights on- no one home. I'm sure glad it didn't die at the gig that I played previously!
Of course, I only figured out that it was the brick after taking the LE itself apart - including unsoldering some components off of the main board while trying to figure out what was going wrong. In my defense, testing voltages on the 9VAC plug on the brick appeared to show voltage, but the problem was that the voltage would collapse when any load was applied (eventually tested this with resistive loads - when it would not even push 100K I knew that I had a problem.
So, when I sawed the "brick" in half (busy night last night!) I found that there is a freaking slow blow FUSE in there! Completely inaccessible. I shorted out the fuse, re-built the LE, powered it up, and there was music. :-) It seems that there was just enough inductance on the winding of the fuse to show some voltage, but of course it would not push any current.
So - now I'm gonna build a real supply for the LE - enough of unreliable bricks!
If you find yourself in a similar situation (no lights on the LE), please don't do what I did and take the LE apart. Suspect the hidden fuse in the brick first.
Later,
Trevor
D'oh! - I see this has
Wed, 2008/06/18 - 8:25am — mayflyD'oh! - I see this has already been discussed to death previously with an SE brick.
Sorry 'bout that,
Trevor
Trevor; Its still a good
Wed, 2008/06/18 - 9:33am — hotramanTrevor;
Its still a good post.
With my SE, I unplug the power supply from AC when not in use. I don't want to take the chance of not having it able to power up at a gig.
Thanks - and a good point as
Wed, 2008/06/18 - 6:34pm — mayflyThanks - and a good point as well. I had been leaving the AC plugged into the mains while the unit was off.
As an update, I've rebuild the brick with a real fuse holder, put it back together with Gaffer's tape, and mounted it back into the roadcase beside the LE. I just did 2 hours of rehersal with no issues.
A spare set of fuses is now nestled beside the supply :-)
It would be great if people
Wed, 2008/06/18 - 8:37pm — mself61It would be great if people can take pitcures of there repairs and post tthem, you never know when you'll save someone some serious bucks. glad you got it fixed
www.selfdistruction.com
http://groups.google.com/group/tonelab-patch-exchange
Just an update, I've done a
Mon, 2008/07/14 - 5:13pm — mayflyJust an update,
I've done a couple of gigs with the LE and rebuilt supply - everything is working fine.
BTW - I have some photos of the repair - how do you post photos on this forum?
Not sure if you can still
Tue, 2008/07/15 - 9:54pm — mself61Not sure if you can still post photos directly to the site, but if you put them somewhere on the WWW (like photobucket of similar) then you just post the link in the thread.
www.selfdistruction.com
http://groups.google.com/group/tonelab-patch-exchange