Towbars & trailers [Breyer 2614 Pick Up Truck]

My 11yo daughter, who is besotted by all things equine, has a Breyer 2614 Dually Pickup Truck - a plastic 1:9 scale generic model to match her (vast) range of Breyer Traditional Scale model horses. She also has a matching Breyer 2615 White Horse Trailer.

  

The truck has a fitted towbar with a tiny ball hitch, which fits the hitch on the front of the trailer. Unlike most of these toys, the towbar frame is made separately and screwed onto the truck, and amazingly the actual ball is also a separate item - although this wasn't obvious at first.One day after the truck and trailer had been left out as usual on the living room floor in everyone's path, an unidentified vandal stepped on the trailer A-frame, snapping it across and breaking off the top of the towing ball as well. This gave rise to the usual tearful plea for restoration.

 This is the combination type of hitch, where in the real world the ball is on the end of a pin which simply drops through a hole in a bracket. This allows the use of a normal 50mm (scale) hitch or the farm type, which is just a steel loop on the trailer - you can lift the pin out and drop it back with the trailer eye in place. Noisy on the road, but secure and simple. In this case I assumed, as you do, that the whole towbar and ball were one moulding so I unscrewed it for repair, without much optimism. When I examined it, I found that firstly the pin part was detachable, and secondly that it has a steel reinforcing pin up the middle - which seems eminently sensible except that it didn't extend up into the ball, rendering the ball liable to break off. Which it did. Normally I would repair something like this by drilling both plastic parts and inserting a metal pin - as they had - but as there already was one, and it was still in the pin moulding, I had to simply glue the ball back in place and hope for the best. I used cyanoacrylate (superglue) but this might not have been the best choice here on reflection. I sourced a round-headed woodscrew of the appropriate size to replace the pin & ball if it broke again. In fact it did break off again almost immediately and the screw is currently in use. Although it's only half a sphere, not a full ball, that doesn't matter as the "hitch" socket on the trailer is just a void under the A-frame, not a shaped socket, so anything that acts like a hook will work after a fashion.

I have retained the parts of the pin and will re-fix them using plastic cement, which should weld the plastic around the steel pin and may be stronger than gluing it all with superglue. I may also try to turn up a new pin and ball from a piece of hard nylon or epoxy putty, which could be more resilient. The thing which surprises me (not really...!) is that the pin is reinforced, is a separate breakable, losable part on a £55 model and yet doesn't seem to be available as a spare part. Maybe they assume that with a steel pin up the middle, they won't break. Well, I have news for them!

The trailer was easier as the A-frame had cracked across where it joined the trailer body, but had not broken off completely. The frame is made of U-channel section plastic so I turned it upside down and clamped it in alignment, then dropped a steel rod into each U-channel and filled the channel with hot-melt glue. That gave a solid frame and was not visible from above. The downside is that it makes the front of the trailer heavier, so it tips forward (next time I'll use alloy). There is an adjustable support leg at the front, like a jockey wheel without a wheel, but if this is allowed to rest on the carpet then any attempt to push the trailer forward will bend it. Some time back I fabricated a swivelling jockey wheel and attached it to this pin, which would have solved the problem if it too had not been shattered by rough usage. So that's on the list for re-making in metal or nylon.

It seems pretty bad form to design and market a model which costs as much as this yet is still made in the same cheap way as most plastic toys, when for the sake of a little more thought or quality control they could make them durable to use. The addition of a jockey wheel on the trailer and a one-piece unbreakable towball/pin would be a step towards the quality you expect at the price.

Disturbing the residents [Tricity Bendix BL501W]

In this case, the residents were the creatures that were living, or had been, under our fridge. We have a built-in fridge of indeterminate ancestry, probably early 1990s, which preserved its anonymity behind a pine door in a row of kitchen units. I eventually found the model plate and it is a Tricity Bendix BL501W larder fridge, which seems to be an obscure one when it comes to getting info.

The fridge came with the house so there is no documentation. As long as it was working, we left it alone, but this turned out to be a mistake. There is no free convection round these for the condenser to lose heat, so the tubes are ventilated by a tangential blower of the type once common in fan heaters - a small induction motor driving a squirrel-cage centrifugal fan about 180mm long and 60mm diameter. I was vaguely uneasy about the fact that the fridge had been in-situ for at least sixteen years without anyone cleaning the fluff out of the coils and latterly it seems to have spent more and more time running rather than resting. This was brought to my attention because of the increasing noise from underneath caused by the fan module rattling, and it was obvious that the fan was out of balance and probably had worn bearings. Eventually it got to the point where it was banging and only intermittently (although the compressor was still running normally) and I decided that Something Had To Be Done.

Getting access was easy - if I had known how easy, I would have done it years ago! It was screwed to the next cabinet by a bracket with another screw vertically into the worktop above, and a third screw by the top hinge (opposite, on the right in this case). Removing the plinth board from the run of units revealed the most disgusting assortment of dead creatures, live insects and spiders, dust, rotten food, lost implements and even a pile of sand placed by an invading ant colony some time ago. I had to plunge my hands into this lot to lower the adjustable feet, to allow the fridge to slide forward and out. Cleaning out the cavity took another hour.

It was handy to be able to prop the fridge on a support, leaning backwards. The fan module is visible at the front through a clear plastic window which is held in place by two small screws and slides out. Additionally there is a sliding tray at the side which comes out to reveal the bottom of the condenser  coils. Other than that, the whole bottom tray is a single plastic moulding with the compressor and other bits fixed in it (and connected by copper pipe to the compartment) so no further dismantling was possible. Inside the coil chamber was a mat of greasy fluff and debris which virtually blocked the whole air passage.

Examining the fan, it was clear that the rotor was completely free at one end and it was obvious that the bearing had disappeared. These things are very simple and have only the motor spindle supporting them at one end and at the other end the shaft is running in a graphite sleeve bearing - a graphite bush with a metal thrust plate moulded in, the whole bush being supported in a very flexible rubber grommet in the pressed steel chassis. In fact the graphite bush was still there, but had worn oversize to the point where it didn't show in its housing. I gloss over the half an hour it took to work out how to get the fan module out of its rubber mountings and extricated through the front opening - I had to use a big screwdriver and a big pry bar to lever it out of the moulded tray, bending the mounting lugs on the way. If there's an easier way, please tell me.

Unfortunately it seems that these fans are not as common as they used to be. The only place I could find them  (without troubling the Electrolux service people, as I don't want to be laughed at) was at Catering Parts UK, whose model TAS18R seems to be suitable. Unfortunately it's also £32, which isn't viable as we will probably only need this fridge for a few more months. So the next step was to find a bearing - also with no success. In the end, I selected a small piece of old oak, which is very hard, and turned a new bush on the lathe. I have successfully used old oak bearings before, in a kids' scooter, and it has been running for over five years with no obvious wear. You do need to grease it first though. The oak sleeve fitted the grommet OK but I had to fill the grommet with silicone sealant, as the rubber was perished and began to fall apart. After a suitable curing period, the oak bush was greased and put in place and the fan reassembled, and works perfectly with a very smooth action.

I had to repair some of the door frame which had been kicked to bits, and clean off a horrible mess of cheesy layers and fungal growth where spilt milk had been trapped in the fascia, then it was time to force the fan module back in. I eventually succeeded, and the fridge is now back in use and running quietly. Very quietly in fact, because I haven't seen the fan rotor move since installation. The fridge is maintaining temperature correctly, the condenser barely gets warm and I don't know whether the fan is off because it simply isn't needed or whether I have knocked off a wire during the violent re-installation. At the moment I'm not going to investigate further, as everyone is happy and the dog can sleep undisturbed at night. But it keeps nagging away at me, and maybe next year I'll pull it out again just to see if I did screw it up.

Archaeology revisited [Aiwa AD-R450]

As I now have some of the drive belts I need, I went back to my favourite cheapo cassette deck, the Aiwa AD-R450 which I was looking at last Sunday. It only took a couple of minutes to take off the backplate of the tape transport - a couple of screws and the plate was free to move out enough to thread in the flat drive belt. I had obtained service info and I was right about the belt path - from the top of the motor pulley, horizontally over to the RH capstan flywheel and down and around, up between the two flywheels and back to the bottom of the motor pulley. This drives the RH flywheel anticlockwise and the LH flywheel clockwise for the forward and reverse capstan drive.

 At this point I refitted the backplate and tested the drive - all was working now except the mechanical tape counter. To replace the counter belt, I had only to remove the four screws securing the whole transport mechanism  - two into plastic pillars right at the top of the front panel, and one each side into the base of the bottom tray (from inside) and pull back the machinery. Another two minutes to loop the new belt around the back of the take-up hub onto its integral pulley, then put back the mechanism and secure it and stretch the counter belt over the tape counter pulley. While the assembly was out, I took advantage of the easy access to clean up the heads, capstans and pinch wheels with some methylated spirit (wood alcohol to our colonial cousins).

This restored everything to full working order, and I had my old hi-fi deck back again.

The belts I used were from CPC Farnell, AVBELT9 (flat, 81mm dia., 3.5mm wide by 0.6mm) and AVBELT98 (61mm dia., 1.2mm square section). I had intended to try AVBELT10 (88mm dia., 4mm wide by 0.3mm) but this was out of stock. The original capstan belt was about 86mm dia, 5mm wide and 0.5mm thick - it's difficult to accurately measure a length of soft liquorice.....

The only comment I'd make was that the AVBELT98 was slightly too long and although it drives OK, will probably loosen fairly quickly. A better choice would have been the AVBELT96 (55.6mm dia.) or AVBELT95 (54mm dia.).

CPC's website is one of the worst for finding items. They have an astonishing range of stuff, and usually good prices, but the organisation and search is rubbish. For example, to get a drive belt you can eventually find your way through the menus in the sidebar (> Components, Kits & Spares > Spares (Brown & White Goods) > Audio Spares > Belts > Square Section) but then you're presented with a filter matrix. If you select just one wrong box, you will get wrong answers. By selecting the minimum of filters, you can get a matching list of bits (belts, in this case), but they are in apparent random order. They show part numbers, prices and the Length - by which in this case they mean DIAMETER - and the depth - by which they mean WIDTH. If you click 'More details' the actual item page shows the price and hopefully an accurate picture (but sometimes generic) but no dimensions, If you select the obscure "Further Information" link from there, you get a list of EVERY belt with dimensions and a BUY NOW link, but no prices! When searching for a number of possible alternatives, as you do with belts, it's a matter of having a very good memory and the patience of a saint. Many times I have tried to find something in CPC stock and given up, only to find out later that the item was available but classified as something else. And the filter options rarely filter the things you want to filter.

Another point to note with CPC is that they very kindly send you sales flyers - floods of them! - listing the current special deals. The catch here is that the last two digits of the part number are specific to the offer catalogue only, and if you try to get something from that catalogue after the offer period has expired it will show a 'Not Found' error. Disregard the last two digits and search again, and you will probably find the item still in stock but at a different price. You may be happy to buy at that price as it may be better than thinking you aren't going to get it at all. Once I tried to be an arrogant smartarse and thought I would remove the last digits because I didn't like my buying habits being logged (from a given catalogue). Hoist by my own petard, I was charged the full off-sale price for everything. And serves me right.