Winging it

Our house dates from the turn of the century and has been redeveloped several times, at some point it had metal "Crittall" windows installed. These were single glazed, and in poor state of repair so when we had rebuilding work done we had to find similar/matching designs and settled on some new metal windows called "heritage" windows from a company called "Duration Windows". They looked great, almost perfectly matching the original design. They also had matching "window catches" internally, rather than your typical upvc style handles. Window with one of the opening arms: Picture showing the window latch, siamese cats assist. Unfortunately, just a few years later these started to fail one at a time, close inspection revealed that they had been manufactured with some cheap poor quality cast alloy.  (one of) the broken hinge parts  Naturally I contacted the supplier for assistance but was simply advised that: "oh we don't do those any mor...

I picked up a water damaged Psion 5x to have some spare parts available to repair the first Psion 5x I bought. Psion in pieces with screens being repaired The first Psion had a broken screen and was sold as "fixable, complete with spare screen" the "spare screen" however had clearly been poorly removed from somewhere and had missing PCB pads and traces. The currently installed screen had a cracked cable. A cracked screen cable Sigh. My "donor" machine took ages to arrive, so instead I thought I'd see how I got on with some repairs instead. First I tried repairing the cracked flex cable, with no success, so ordered some new ones from JLCPCB... Second course of action, I decided to repair the spare screen, first cleaning up the contacts then carefully adding a new PCB pad, and connecting it up. and yes, I wished I'd taken some pictures of the PCB repair before I soldered the ribbon cable back on, but after connecting the cable and firing it up... it ...