Repairing Old Electrical Equipment
When is Electrical Equipment too old to repair?
Fletcher Moorland MD Matt Fletcher was recently asked, "How old can you go when it comes to repairing electrical equipment?"
Below are his thoughts, they might surprise you!
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An interesting question that I was asked recently. I've heard some OEMs saying that 10-year-old equipment is as old as you should repair.
As far as I'm concerned, as long as you can access the circuitry, there should be no real reason why any age equipment can't be repaired successfully.
Take this controller we've had in recently. It was made by Hawker Siddeley Dynamics Ltd. What a great British engineering company name. It was a company deeply rooted in aircraft and missile manufacturing.
I've no idea how old this is, maybe 1960s.
That's not how we do it now!
Plenty of old can-type transistors, capacitors, resistors and diodes. Good old proper simple electronics. Maybe you can see the fault too, there's a blown diode on the printed circuit board. Even my phrase there, printed circuit board, is not quite correct. This circuit board would have been hand drawn or traced. Then a mask to cover the required copper tracks, some UV exposure and acid used to etch the remaining copper away. Anyone remember making circuit boards that way? I do when I was a teenager. Certainly not the modern way circuit boards are made today.
There are some things to be aware of when repairing old stuff. There were things called mercury wetted relays and tilt switches. That's the sort of stuff you don't really want to bugger about with. Then there are the other types of PCB, Polychlorinated Biphenyls, stuff that you might find in electronics made pre-1979.
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Most of the components, or equivalents, are still available today. No going obsolete, like a lot of electronic components are today.
This unit will soon be going through our workshop and then back to the heritage rail business it came from.
So, if anyone says that something is too old to repair, remember this thing that we are keeping running.