Kenmore Microwave Oven - 2 failures in 2 years

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:48:19 -0700, Jeff Liebermann
<jeffl@cruzio.com>wrote:

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:04:11 -0400, Meat Plow <meat@petitmorte.net
wrote:

Some times the best way to blow off some steam is with words.

Yep. I've learned more about effuent terminology and profanity while
working on the septic system than all the CB lingo in my chequered
past.
Click to expand...
Heh...septic systems suck. I've lived in two homes with them in my
youth and 5 kids in the house. #1 back in the mid 60's used to fill up
and leak through the ground. Made the grass around it nice and green
though :) #2 was in a home newly built for us in 1968. A brick ranch
out in then rural surroundings, no water/sewer. Never had a lick of
problems with that thing. It was a huge tank and cleverly made leech
bed from house block in sand and rock. I guess in that location the
tank could be made from house block and act partly as a leech bed of
its own. 20 years later they ran water and sewer and caved in the tank
and leech bed so I know what it looked like.

I've helped
design one of the best amateur radio repeaters in the Cleveland/Akron
area now being used for the backbone of NOAA - W8CLE and SKYWARN.

Well, working backwards, I either built or helped build:
W6JWS-2m Bonny Doon. (no photos)
K6BJ Santa Cruz. <http://www.LearnByDestroying.com/k6bj/
KI6EH Watsonville. (no photos)
A bunch of junk in Smog Angeles I would like to forget.
WB6EEP West L.A.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/Old%20Repeaters/slides/wb6eep-01.html
and a bunch of commercial stuff.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/Old%20Repeaters/index.html
My favorite was a repeater built into a hollowed out 4x4 fence post
and installed in a prominent location. Sorry, but no photos.

The problem with ham repeaters is that they seem to run forever,
usually with zero maintenance. When something finally breaks, I get
to fix it. When someone builds it wrong, I get to fix it. When
something blows, I get to repair it.

Design is usually done on the back of an envelope. Documentation? We
don't do no stinkin documentation:
http://members.cruzio.com/~jeffl/k6bj/K6BJ%20Repeater/slides/Documentation.html

One of the few smart things I've done is to NOT build my own repeater.
Click to expand...
Well now adays using a prebuilt from a company like Icom, a cavity
duplexer and adding a Mirage repeater amp and a couple Diamond Super
Stationmasters, some 9913 or hard line is the way to go. Back in the
early 90s it was piece together a controller, mobile or bass rig, an
AT computer to handle the phone patch etc.... I know of one such beast
still in existence that I had a part in its equipping and that I had
modified a couple Motorola 160mhz "Pageboy" pagers for use on the
repeater. It's used every day all day long and part of the SKYWARN 2
meter network. I can hit it with a 5 watt HT 50+ miles away albeit
strategically located.
 
Meat Plow wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:48:19 -0700, Jeff Liebermann
jeffl@cruzio.com>wrote:

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:04:11 -0400, Meat Plow <meat@petitmorte.net
wrote:

Some times the best way to blow off some steam is with words.

Yep. I've learned more about effuent terminology and profanity while
working on the septic system than all the CB lingo in my chequered
past.

Heh...septic systems suck. I've lived in two homes with them in my
youth and 5 kids in the house. #1 back in the mid 60's used to fill up
and leak through the ground. Made the grass around it nice and green
though :) #2 was in a home newly built for us in 1968. A brick ranch
out in then rural surroundings, no water/sewer. Never had a lick of
problems with that thing. It was a huge tank and cleverly made leech
bed from house block in sand and rock. I guess in that location the
tank could be made from house block and act partly as a leech bed of
its own. 20 years later they ran water and sewer and caved in the tank
and leech bed so I know what it looked like.

I've helped
design one of the best amateur radio repeaters in the Cleveland/Akron
area now being used for the backbone of NOAA - W8CLE and SKYWARN.

Well, working backwards, I either built or helped build:
W6JWS-2m Bonny Doon. (no photos)
K6BJ Santa Cruz. <http://www.LearnByDestroying.com/k6bj/
KI6EH Watsonville. (no photos)
A bunch of junk in Smog Angeles I would like to forget.
WB6EEP West L.A.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/Old%20Repeaters/slides/wb6eep-01.html
and a bunch of commercial stuff.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/Old%20Repeaters/index.html
My favorite was a repeater built into a hollowed out 4x4 fence post
and installed in a prominent location. Sorry, but no photos.

The problem with ham repeaters is that they seem to run forever,
usually with zero maintenance. When something finally breaks, I get
to fix it. When someone builds it wrong, I get to fix it. When
something blows, I get to repair it.

Design is usually done on the back of an envelope. Documentation? We
don't do no stinkin documentation:
http://members.cruzio.com/~jeffl/k6bj/K6BJ%20Repeater/slides/Documentation.html

One of the few smart things I've done is to NOT build my own repeater.

Well now adays using a prebuilt from a company like Icom, a cavity
duplexer and adding a Mirage repeater amp and a couple Diamond Super
Stationmasters, some 9913 or hard line is the way to go. Back in the
early 90s it was piece together a controller, mobile or bass rig, an
AT computer to handle the phone patch etc.... I know of one such beast
still in existence that I had a part in its equipping and that I had
modified a couple Motorola 160mhz "Pageboy" pagers for use on the
repeater. It's used every day all day long and part of the SKYWARN 2
meter network. I can hit it with a 5 watt HT 50+ miles away albeit
strategically located.
Click to expand...

'90s? you should have tried building one in the late '60s. Motorola
Twin-V transmitter strip, a GE Pre-prog reciever strip, home brew power
supplies, Unijunction transistor timers and a surplus W.E. Touch tone
decoder and a homebrew phone patch. The diplexer was home brew out of
scrap copper pipe. All of this mounted in a surplus 3' shallow relay
rack.

There were no computers. It was on 146.01/146/61 and installed in the
pressbox at Lemon Monroe high School in Monroe Ohio. You could hit it
from the Dayton hamfest with a 1 W handheld.


--
The movie 'Deliverance' isn't a documentary!
 
On Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:09:09 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
<mike.terrell@earthlink.net>wrote:

Meat Plow wrote:

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:48:19 -0700, Jeff Liebermann
jeffl@cruzio.com>wrote:

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:04:11 -0400, Meat Plow <meat@petitmorte.net
wrote:

Some times the best way to blow off some steam is with words.

Yep. I've learned more about effuent terminology and profanity while
working on the septic system than all the CB lingo in my chequered
past.

Heh...septic systems suck. I've lived in two homes with them in my
youth and 5 kids in the house. #1 back in the mid 60's used to fill up
and leak through the ground. Made the grass around it nice and green
though :) #2 was in a home newly built for us in 1968. A brick ranch
out in then rural surroundings, no water/sewer. Never had a lick of
problems with that thing. It was a huge tank and cleverly made leech
bed from house block in sand and rock. I guess in that location the
tank could be made from house block and act partly as a leech bed of
its own. 20 years later they ran water and sewer and caved in the tank
and leech bed so I know what it looked like.

I've helped
design one of the best amateur radio repeaters in the Cleveland/Akron
area now being used for the backbone of NOAA - W8CLE and SKYWARN.

Well, working backwards, I either built or helped build:
W6JWS-2m Bonny Doon. (no photos)
K6BJ Santa Cruz. <http://www.LearnByDestroying.com/k6bj/
KI6EH Watsonville. (no photos)
A bunch of junk in Smog Angeles I would like to forget.
WB6EEP West L.A.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/Old%20Repeaters/slides/wb6eep-01.html
and a bunch of commercial stuff.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/Old%20Repeaters/index.html
My favorite was a repeater built into a hollowed out 4x4 fence post
and installed in a prominent location. Sorry, but no photos.

The problem with ham repeaters is that they seem to run forever,
usually with zero maintenance. When something finally breaks, I get
to fix it. When someone builds it wrong, I get to fix it. When
something blows, I get to repair it.

Design is usually done on the back of an envelope. Documentation? We
don't do no stinkin documentation:
http://members.cruzio.com/~jeffl/k6bj/K6BJ%20Repeater/slides/Documentation.html

One of the few smart things I've done is to NOT build my own repeater.

Well now adays using a prebuilt from a company like Icom, a cavity
duplexer and adding a Mirage repeater amp and a couple Diamond Super
Stationmasters, some 9913 or hard line is the way to go. Back in the
early 90s it was piece together a controller, mobile or bass rig, an
AT computer to handle the phone patch etc.... I know of one such beast
still in existence that I had a part in its equipping and that I had
modified a couple Motorola 160mhz "Pageboy" pagers for use on the
repeater. It's used every day all day long and part of the SKYWARN 2
meter network. I can hit it with a 5 watt HT 50+ miles away albeit
strategically located.


'90s? you should have tried building one in the late '60s. Motorola
Twin-V transmitter strip, a GE Pre-prog reciever strip, home brew power
supplies, Unijunction transistor timers and a surplus W.E. Touch tone
decoder and a homebrew phone patch. The diplexer was home brew out of
scrap copper pipe. All of this mounted in a surplus 3' shallow relay
rack.

There were no computers. It was on 146.01/146/61 and installed in the
pressbox at Lemon Monroe high School in Monroe Ohio. You could hit it
from the Dayton hamfest with a 1 W handheld.
Click to expand...
Yeah but I don't know where Monroe is.I have a close friend who still
runs a modified Motorola Land transceiver on 2 and a GE (I think it's
a GE) on .70cm. Plus we used to mess with a couple all tube 1200mhz
transmitters yanked from an old Bell microwave relay station tear
down. Had a ham friend who would get on the local repeater and
announce where and when he was closing down a relay station and we
could rip out most anything we could haul away. I still have boxes and
boxes of all sorts of weird Western Electric parts, vacuum relays,
tubes, waveguid for 1.2ghz and 1.6ghz, detector diodes, copper
grounding strips and just about anything else you could think of made
back in the 50s and 60s.
 
On Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:09:09 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
<mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:

'90s? you should have tried building one in the late '60s. Motorola
Twin-V transmitter strip, a GE Pre-prog reciever strip, home brew power
supplies, Unijunction transistor timers and a surplus W.E. Touch tone
decoder and a homebrew phone patch. The diplexer was home brew out of
scrap copper pipe. All of this mounted in a surplus 3' shallow relay
rack.

There were no computers. It was on 146.01/146/61 and installed in the
pressbox at Lemon Monroe high School in Monroe Ohio. You could hit it
from the Dayton hamfest with a 1 W handheld.
Click to expand...
Feh. My first repeater:
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/Old%20Repeaters/slides/wb6eep-01.html>
was like that. 6m Pre-Prog receiver near the bottom. Unichannel
receiver hanging in back. Two 80D xmitters, with mobile power
supplied modified for AC operation, near the top. DC wire line remote
in the middle along with home made control and audio panels. Note how
cleverly I put all the heavy stuff on top so that it would topple when
moved. Driving around town with a 2500 and later a Princess (Schmoo)
phone on the floorboards was the ultimate in cool in the late 1960's.

Also, initially no touch tone. It was controlled by a rotary stepper
switch and a single tone decoder. Also, no PL. A later machine used
a Strowger switch when 10 functions were deemed insufficient. However,
it was way too big and and made far too much noise, so a WE 247B
materialized and I switched to Touch Tone. The first PC I used in a
repeater was for IRLP, not the controller. I keep wanting to build
and write code for my own PC based controller, but can't find the
time, excuse, or market to justify the effort.

One of the repeaters I listed (W6JWS-2m) is an Icom RP-1510 commercial
repeater owned by the local ARES group. I inherited the unpaid
lifetime maintenance contract on it when the previous tech died. I
had to remove a tangle of modifications, fix a few things, retune, and
deal with a nasty case of intermod at a new location. The quality of
the radio and controller are marginal, but it will probably remain in
service forever.

How we got from microwave ovens to this will remain a mystery.

Back to shoveling mud and muck. Yech.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
 
Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:09:09 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:

'90s? you should have tried building one in the late '60s. Motorola
Twin-V transmitter strip, a GE Pre-prog reciever strip, home brew power
supplies, Unijunction transistor timers and a surplus W.E. Touch tone
decoder and a homebrew phone patch. The diplexer was home brew out of
scrap copper pipe. All of this mounted in a surplus 3' shallow relay
rack.

There were no computers. It was on 146.01/146/61 and installed in the
pressbox at Lemon Monroe high School in Monroe Ohio. You could hit it
from the Dayton hamfest with a 1 W handheld.

Feh. My first repeater:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/Old%20Repeaters/slides/wb6eep-01.html
was like that. 6m Pre-Prog receiver near the bottom. Unichannel
receiver hanging in back. Two 80D xmitters, with mobile power
supplied modified for AC operation, near the top. DC wire line remote
in the middle along with home made control and audio panels. Note how
cleverly I put all the heavy stuff on top so that it would topple when
moved. Driving around town with a 2500 and later a Princess (Schmoo)
phone on the floorboards was the ultimate in cool in the late 1960's.

Also, initially no touch tone. It was controlled by a rotary stepper
switch and a single tone decoder. Also, no PL. A later machine used
a Strowger switch when 10 functions were deemed insufficient. However,
it was way too big and and made far too much noise, so a WE 247B
materialized and I switched to Touch Tone. The first PC I used in a
repeater was for IRLP, not the controller. I keep wanting to build
and write code for my own PC based controller, but can't find the
time, excuse, or market to justify the effort.

One of the repeaters I listed (W6JWS-2m) is an Icom RP-1510 commercial
repeater owned by the local ARES group. I inherited the unpaid
lifetime maintenance contract on it when the previous tech died. I
had to remove a tangle of modifications, fix a few things, retune, and
deal with a nasty case of intermod at a new location. The quality of
the radio and controller are marginal, but it will probably remain in
service forever.

How we got from microwave ovens to this will remain a mystery.

Back to shoveling mud and muck. Yech.
Click to expand...

Interesting discussions :)

If we may return to the original topic for a moment, I reassembled
everything
and now there is a loud hum. so I guess another component was busted
when the
diode went.

Any suggestions? I know there is some info above and I'll look for it
later today.

Thanks to all for your patience.
 
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
JD wrote:
Jim Yanik wrote:
Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> wrote in
news:jr9nd51qdiv9l11811p61rut5g8j8t832f@4ax.com:


While you're at it, you should also get the 5 point variety. I had to
do that to tear apart a Seagate USB disk drive enclosure:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=360198377299
Thanks for the link,Jeff!
I could have used these a few weeks ago,on my Nissan Sentra SpecV MAF
sensor.
I was able to get the screws out by bending the center pins just enough
to allow the hole-less Torx key to catch the 6 faces in the screw. Then
I brought them to a strong vice and I flattened said little pins with a
few whacks. Now I can do some real screwin' :)

OK guys, I have installed the diode but I was unable to find a wave
guide. I have seen pictures of guides - a small channel to direct the
waves. but I have no such channel, unless it is the short duct between
the magnetron and the oven wall.


That is the waveguide, AKA a duct to carry the RF into the oven
cavity.


On the inside of the wall there is a plastic plate about 5" x 3". The
oven has a curved back inside.


Take a look under the plastic plate for bugs or grease.


Presumably the waves get scattered all around inside. The inside is in
pristine shape - I could see nothing like small burn holes.

My situation now is whether to try to start it up or start taking
measurements. There is a small pamphlet with some measurement
guidelines.
Click to expand...

Interesting discussions :)

If we may return to the original topic for a moment, I reassembled
everything
and now there is a loud hum. so I guess another component was busted
when the
diode went.

Any suggestions? I know there is some info above and I'll look for it
later today.

Thanks to all for your patience.
 
On Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:59:58 -0700, JD <JD@NoDen.con> wrote:

Interesting discussions :)
Click to expand...
Yep. Topic drift is so much fun.

If we may return to the original topic for a moment, I reassembled
everything
and now there is a loud hum. so I guess another component was busted
when the
diode went.
Click to expand...
My guess(tm) is that either the magnetron or the HV cazapitor are
shot. I'm surprised the fuse or circuit breaking didn't blow. The
hummmmm you're hearing is the transformer trying to pass way too much
60 Hz current. Additional help:
<http://www.partselect.com/repair.aspx?appliance=microwave&part=no-heat>
Please be careful when poking around the HV cazapitor. There's no
warranty on your life.

The 0CZZW1H004C cap is $26 from Sears. The 6324W1A001L magnetron is
about $70. (Plus tax and shipping). You'll find these somewhat
cheaper from discounters and ebay:
<http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280408336046>
<http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370142426921>




--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
 
On Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:02:28 -0700, JD <JD@NoDen.con>wrote:

<snip>

Interesting discussions :)

If we may return to the original topic for a moment, I reassembled
everything
and now there is a loud hum. so I guess another component was busted
when the
diode went.

Any suggestions? I know there is some info above and I'll look for it
later today.

Thanks to all for your patience.
Click to expand...
Did you read my post advising you how to go about the repair?
 
Meat Plow wrote:
On Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:02:28 -0700, JD <JD@NoDen.con>wrote:

snip

Interesting discussions :)

If we may return to the original topic for a moment, I reassembled
everything
and now there is a loud hum. so I guess another component was busted
when the
diode went.

Any suggestions? I know there is some info above and I'll look for it
later today.

Thanks to all for your patience.

Did you read my post advising you how to go about the repair?
Click to expand...
Thanks for them.

"Replace the cap, diode and mag. Tear the cover off and inspect the
waveguide, stirrer and outlet covering for arcing. Check the interior
for arcing. Watch the cap it can bite you. Have a micro detector and
check for leaking door and overall leaks.

Or just buy a new oven.

Best for the buck in my opinion is the GE 1100 watt or Sharp."
Click to expand...
I believe it's not worth the bother. The oven cost about $118
and the magnetron alone costs $69 + shipping.

Do these ovens have any scrap value?

Consumer Reports (Feb 2009) rated 3 Kenmore midsized countertop
models as the best. I'm beginning to lose confidence in them (C.R.).

Thanks for your support.
 
There is an excellent article in the following link on repairing
microwave ovens:

http://www.gallawa.com/microtech/safety.html#dischg

Good luck guys!
 
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