Flea Market Find – Fixit LocalAd

February 21, 2024

Cheep Cameras

I get a kick fixing broken stuff, sometimes I expect an item that’s a dollar to be broken, so at least I get a lesson on dis-assembly. If it’s already broken who gives a shit right, but if I can fix it I have the knowledge and experience working on the item

Digital Cameras–portable

These things are all over the place anymore and I use them for doing inventory building. As long as they have a high density ccd, like 8meg pixel they work great.

This is an experience on 2 I have found lately, one appeared good, clean and worked, had a 8gig memory card but no charger. It was 1 dollar and had a nice case, problem was it didn’t have a charger and I didn’t have a cable for nikon. I had to put an additional 8 bucks into it to charge the battery, which worked
Here is where the deal went south. The camera worked fine but it wouldn’t focus properly.
after a couple minutes in the settings it got worked out, there is a close up setting. I took these of camera 2 with camera 1. Very acceptable, 9 bucks

Next was a lumix FS 3. This was 3 bucks but was in a bag of goodies. A interface cable, charger, and an additional AA Battery charger for NiCD & NiMH.
This camera had an error on power up. It said please turn the camera off then on again. This appeared about 3 seconds after start up. It displayed the images on the installed sd card, we won’t go into some of the pix I find on these cameras, I just delete them but oh boy.
Doing some research shows the error is from the lense not coming out on picture mode power up. Errors can becaused from dropping the camera or getting it wet. This one just had the lense stuck. You can see tool marks on the lense, I dont know if thats the result from probing with a xacto knife trying to extend it but doesnt matter, the lense came loose and the error was gone. This is a nice unit and limux is my favorite brand, I use the GH5 for my video work. Here are some images from this unit Cam2 of Cam1

All in all both of these units have 8 meg pix sensors, my intention as noted is to use them for inventory purposes. I setup small business inventories using older macs running a photo based inventory system. With these cameras a pretty good photo based inventory system can be setup for under 50 bucks depending on the mac. I am looking into a simular setup using the raspberry pi but the application I use now is for mac only. It runs for about 15 bucks, I didn’t mention that. Of course we only work with registered apps on all our programs, be it desktop or internet.

admin0 comment5 min fix, Flea Market Find

June 1, 2022

Looking for 1 dollar electrical out strips

Flea market finds some electrical strips. My limit was 1 dollar. All offers were accepted, only purchased 3 because I avoid the real cheap plastic ones

The findings were surprising, one was plastic, branded Zenith, might have been the best of all. As you can see there are many ways to skin a cat.

admin0 commentFlea Market Find

May 14, 2022

Car AMP to shop stereo 30 Bucks

#1 Speakers Flea Market 20 bucks for pair (visual inspected before bought)
#2 Car AMP 10 bucks
#3 power supply (garbage)

Notes: The car amp is a beast 550watts (not real) these things are Plentiful, yard sales, junk yards
this unit uses 12v dc, it’s a car install. One issue I came across is the power supply I have is 3amp and when I crank it up the amp turns off, my guess not enough amps, still the loudness is not a problem so I am not looking for another one. This is a brick, says LG so it’s quality

Make sure you look at the power supply output for the DC indication, it’s represented by a straight line.
The Power Amp needs a power feed to the REM, same as the input, this tells the amp to turn on

UPDATE:

I found a XBOX power supply. This thing has 16.5amp output . Fixed the amp quitting but way loud

Remember the powe brick has to be jumpered to turn on

admin0 commentFlea Market Find

February 4, 2022

Pool Cleaner Again

Well as fait would have it, it’s a flea market find. While i was waiting for parts delivery I found a pool cleaner and picked it up for 15 bucks. This is a Hayward unit and so has it I have been an owner of this model in another time. It was aworker but we left it behind with the new home owner. The unit doesn’t have any brushes, it just motors around sucking up debris. The overall condition was actually new so to my disbelief I just threw it into the pool and of course it didn’t work properly. It went in circles. I didn’t do any research on the issue i just disassembled it. Turns out it had a frozen bearing, The bearings in the unit (2) had rust on the bearing. The design is a plastic cage with metall balls. The unit must have sat around , put up wet and started to corrode. I was able to free it up and cleaned the bearings and reassembled it. Yes it worked great. I let it run a couple cycles and my pool was nice and clean but I still had to brush the pool, My other unit, the great white has brushes and worked well

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December 31, 2021

Kobolt 8gal Compressor POS

Ok so we thought we had a real bargain until we researched the tool. Turns out this is a real junker. Yes it’s still available for purchase new, fleabay has them for 219 so our bargain of 40 bucks might pan out. Except, ok it’s obviously made in china and is of the lowest quality, but some reviews say it can handle light duty stuff and for years. Of course reviews are like, you know, everyone has one. One of the toughest things to get from someone reviewing a item is an objective non-bias opinion. Of course if a guy laid down some of his hard earned cash on an item he’s gonna talk it up, it’s a natural phenomena, sometimes even convincing themselves a piece of sh!t is a good deal to save face and feel better about their decision. So as this deal goes we want it to be a great find but in reality these compressors are junk.
no oil bath for the connecting rod, simple piston and ring design and of course a defective poorly designed manifold
At least I will provide some real images for anyone that needs some info, the online community only has black and white scans and leave a lot of info out like the pressure switch and the flyweights on the motor. Our find had the notorious broken manifold and of course the part is no longer made or available. Here goes (the images are high rez if you need a closer look download them)

Well 2hrs mental process and a little mig and it’s running. It makes great pressure fast, cuts off and on when it’s supposed to, i guess it’s a win but paying anymore than 40 would have been a bad deal. It’s hard to tell sometimes with all the plastic shroud and the excitement of making a deal.
NOTICE This!! The main lead, the black wire came from the inlet cord and routed under the compressor mount point. This is straight up BS, the main wire was pinched when pulled out . Because I dont know the history of this unit I will let it be but the reality is this manufacture shipped this unit with a major defect!!!