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Trio Kenwood KD-1033 turntable main bearing service

  One of my first posts in this blog was regarding the servicing of the Pioneer PL12D turntable, and that has proven to be the most popular by a significant margin. The Pioneer PL12D had its competitors, and probably the most popular alternative was the Trio Kenwood KD-1033 turntable. I use both names (Trio and Kenwood) as the company operated under different names in different markets. In the UK they were Trio, possibly because the brand Kenwood was most famous here for food blenders. 95% of a KD-1033 is similar to  Pioneer PL12D, and servicing them is very much the same process. Both are belt drive , have an AC synchronous motor,  mechanical speed change , a main bearing, sprung top deck and rubber motor mounts. the KD-1033 uses a different type of anti skate mechanism, employing a thread and weight. The plinth is shallower with an internal cross brace. One aspect that is different is the design of the main bearing, and servicing it is a little harder than a PL12D. The ...
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Fixing an intermittent ViewSonic LCD Computer Monitor VX924 VS10162

I recently decided to dust off an old gaming PC from around 2006 that was in the attic. I'm interested in folding@home , a way of assisting medical science donating computer time from home , and  wanted to see if I could build a dedicated FAH (Fold at Home) rig using spare hardware we had.  I'm also interested in computational heating i.e better exploiting the waste heat from computer systems . This  will be the subject of another blog shortly, but when I got this PC down and booted it up, I immediately hit an issue with the LCD screen. It kept turning on and off approximately every second , but sometimes staying on for longer. I could see the boot screen, the BIOS and eventually the windows logo, but the screen wouldn't stay on. Very frustrating I later realised that if I left the monitor on for at least an hour it would stabilize and become usable. I looked around  on the internet and realised this was probably a problem with the capacitors in the power supply. If...
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How to build a gaming PC from a Dell Dimension 2350

"What a piece of junk!" "She'll make point five past lightspeed. She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid. I've made a lot of special modifications myself." Luke Skywalker and Han Solo In 2002 I bought a Dell Dimension 2350 P4 2.6Ghz PC for my young son. His older brother had a PC, and it seemed right that he should have one too. I didn't know much about PC's at the time and assumed "Integrated Intel Graphics" meant that it might be a bit slower than a dedicated graphics card, but the price was good. Alas I learned the hard way that if you (or your kids) want to do serious gaming on a PC you need a dedicated graphics card slot , typically AGP or now PCI-Express aka PCI-E. The dimension 2350 did not have one, only 3 humble PCI slots . Thus began a long and enjoyable exploration of how far I could push this entry-level PC toward serious gaming , and along the way I learned a lot about PC's a...
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What to do with an old Sony Playstation 1

If you have an old Sony Playstation 1, especially the first variant (there were several iterations ) they do make pretty good stand alone CD players. Sony incorporated the ability for the Playstation to play normal audio CD's into the device and it turns out it does it rather well. Talking to people, it seems lots of them have aged Playstations either gathering dust or that they "gave to their young cousin" but they really do have a new lease of life. Now that we are on the PS3, the aged PS1 is considered by many to be virtually worthless, despite costing around £300 when they first came out. The early model (SCPH-1002) already has red & white RCA sockets on the back, and you can use a regular controller for play/skip/stop functions or you can buy a separate remote (around £5 on ebay) There are some tweaks you can do to them, and especially in Germany , people mod them even adding valve output sections. The best site for modifications is dogbreath.de However they s...
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Homemade diy xbox 360 cooler

My Son was kindly given an Xbox 360 a year ago by friends who returned to the USA. It's been great but in May it died, suffering the red circle of death problem. This is the Xbox equivalent of the PC "Blue Screen of Death", though is actually worse, as it indicates a hardware problem. The Xbox 360 has a very powerful dual core processor and onboard graphics, and throws out of lot of heat through two case fans at the back. When running a game, it resembles a fan heater. Some of the problems appear to be heat related. This is well covered elsewhere on the web and I don't intend to discuss it here. Microsoft have extended previous warranty to 3 years. We got ours repaired by Microsoft and it's up and running again fine. However I decided I'd try to avoid this happening in future by improving the cooling of the unit. I did not want to open the 360 as this will void the warranty, which still has 2 years to go. I looked at commercial 360 coolers, and these seem to ...
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