RE: (ET) Re: Parts NOT needed -- cautionary tale(s)

["Pieter Litchfield" <plitch attglobal net>]

Thanks for reporting back Jeremy!  We all learn from each other's
exzperiences and I, for one, am grateful you shared the results of you
problem solving.

 Group:  For the benefit of future ET owners, do we have a way (especially
in the post-Gunn era) of cataloging the collective wisdom of ETowners?  I
think it is very important for us all to share our problems AND our fixes.
Then we need to save them in some format that lends itself to searching.
That way the next time similar symptoms occur to another E-20 owner, he/she
has a place to go to look for historic solutions, and perhaps
troubleshooting logic as well.

I don't have a solution, just the unoriginal concept that a better 
organized
knowledgebase would be helpful to us all.

-----Original Message-----
From: elec-trak-bounces cosmos phy tufts edu
[mailto:elec-trak-bounces cosmos phy tufts edu]On Behalf Of
Jeremy Gagliardi com
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2004 6:01 PM
To: elec-trak cosmos phy tufts edu
Subject: (ET) Re: Parts NOT needed -- cautionary tale(s)


My E20 is fully operational again.  I hope you can forgive my foibles, me
being
a young'un (33.9 years old) and all.

The problem did actually trace back to a faulty connection on my relay, as
one
astute list member pointed out.  One of the wire connections physically
broke
and the wire pair was just dangling free.

However, it was when I was poking around in there, that I caused the major
problem (and melted 2 contacts & blew a fuse, but that's another story).
When I
was fiddling around with the wires, trying to crimp on a new connector for
the
broken wire, I accidentally (read that as "my 4-year-old must've distracted
me")
wrote down the connection diagram backwards.  Instead of writing down that
the
front and middle connectors were used, I wrote down the back and middle
connectors.  I had the wire numbers in the correct locations, I just got 
the
back and front rows mixed up.

Anyway, when I reconnected the wires, no motor action.  By then, I had just
about given up (thought I'd fried something) and decided to buy the Alltrax
controller and be done with it.  But, happenstance caused me to sit on the
problem for a while (that and I had to take care of my 4-year-old alone all
weekend long), and here, today, I had a thought, maybe I connected 
something
wrong, let's go see.  Well, sure enough, with all wires correctly 
connected,
full operations of every system was restored.  Sorry Alltrax, not this 
year.

Problem #1 turned out to be the #28 wire broke off the bottom of the relay
(sometime last year), and I hadn't noticed.  With no #28 wire, the only way
it
would work is if I kept the relay pushed in, and I zip-tied it to jury-rig
it
through to this Spring...but that prevented cutoff in a braking event, so
pretty
bad.

Problem #2 was I put the wires back on wrong after I fixed problem #1.

Problem #2a was, again my 4-year-old distracting me, with the power on, I
touched one of the wires to the finger of another relay and *TZAP*, blown
fuse
and another new connector.

Moral of the story, don't have distractions around when you work on your
tractor
and observe proper electrical safety, ala Al Borland, NOT Tim Taylor.


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 mailto:Jeremy Gagliardi com
 http://Jeremy.Gagliardi.com
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