deskthority

In my many years as an IT tech and now working in an art gallery helping where there is IT involved in installs, i have learned many things.

The most important one is how to bodge something to make it work, a bodge is not good looking its not clever and its not elegant but it will work. A bodge must be quick and use whatever you have to hand.

From quick and dirty batch files to boot a RasberryPi directly to a webpage , or hacking together a quick webcam feed that, rather than live feed just refreshes the page every 30 seconds using the browsers reset function, to gaffa tape WD40 and best of all cable ties.

My latest bodge stars a standalone PhysX card (pre nvidia days) that should by all intensive purposes cooked itself many years ago.

The Background

There is a PC that runs an art installation had a software issue so I take a look. Hey why not open it and clean it? its been running for 8 years straight without a break it will be dirty.

The software is the least of my worries, what i see inside is terrifying. I find the PhysX card, the heat sync is falling off , the fan has jammed and the thing looks like its spent a few too many years in a reflow oven. Not to mention the dust, oh hell the dust. but our friends at metrovac have that covered.

I have to fix this thing, the artist is long gone and this is no standard software , i am guessing it wont work on any up to date versions of windows or on a modern card that supports PhysX

The Bodge

First of all the old fan has to go , its dangerous and i don't know how it has not smoked the whole PC. I don't even need to unscrew the fan from the heatsync it falls right off showing whats left of the wiring and the fan mount, the 5v wire is as black as the ground and there is exposed copper, the clips holding it to the PCB are scorched as well and fall off into dust when i try to pop them out. This .... looks terminal.

Under the heat sync i find what looks to have at one time been thermal compound but now it just looks like dry grey paint

After dreading the ebay search to come I think to myself , its a 1 in a million chance that card is alive , but you need to give it a chance, if you don't try you will never know right?

So with a bottle of rubbing alcohol some cotton buds some new thermal compound, the remains of the heat sync a fan from the box of bits and some cable ties i set to work, and this is what i come up with.
And you know what. The thing works! I don’t know how hot a PCB has to get to go brown but I would say well over 100 celsius. And the thing works! It has been sitting like that running 24/7 for years ( its old enough to have pre SP1 XP)

I even used ( what was left of ) the old fan cable so the fan is powered by the card. ( solder and electrical tape , another good tool in the arsenal of the bodger)

How the hell the caps did not fry I don’t know.

I have never in my life been speechless but when that thing passed its internal tests I could not even think of something to say.

.

So how about you guys , any bodges your proud of ?

I do some work at an art gallery as well. That is a great bodge! Thank you for saving Art

I just wish i had the skill to update our LED screen on the front of the building , its dim and low resolution.



EDIT

I think i need to call the LED lighting master

Pretty good quick solution, I'm sure you're watching those GPU tempatures.

I didn't do many impressive electronics bodges (aside from occasional wiring with lamp wire, stripping wires with my teeth), but I used a broccoli tab as a floppy eject (working 10+ years) and furniture drawer knobs as a tuning/volume knobs. (20+ years)

My most impressive bodges involve quickly making tools out of random crap. I never have the tools I need - damn annoying when I need to do something fast.

Great bodge Andrew!

mr_a500 wrote: ↑...stripping wires with my teeth...

That's no bodge, that's standard practice. Especially for ~AWG22-24 teeth are THE tool!

Well yeah, I assumed teeth were the standard tool... but I was referring to whatever bodge I created with that wire.

Teeth are THE wire stripping tool. Not good for high volume but they are very accurate

I do that all the time

This is a mod I did on my old Radeon 6970 because the stock cooler was noisy.



I also did something similar for my new router / torrent box. The motherboard had a small heatsink and a 7000 rpm fan. It was unusable so I had to improvise.



More details of the build here : http://imgur.com/gallery/DxNE8

Your last two pics remind me of a bodge I did once...
I had to get a second PC going for a cousin/room-mate and I had no appropriate case to use, so the MB box became the case.
Was like this for ~3 months.
MB hot-glued to the bottom, HDD screwed through the side.

I think everyone has put a PC in a cardboard box at some point

This is a subject I'm very fond of. Being a Romanian means I've learned from the moment I could walk and hold a tool in my hand how to bodge.
I don't have photos of my bodges but here is a small list :
- drilled and threaded mounting holes in an enterprise rack with live servers in it (electronics and small metal shavings ), that was a scene to be filmed, big power drill vacuum cleaner and plastic bags in a rack full with expensive servers running mission critical shit. We had to install a new server, no place in another rack but this one, and mounting holes completely different Wanted a down-time but it wasn't granted, so we did it Chuck Norris style
- mounted a server in a rack only with cable ties, mounting gear was missing the shit had to be installed did our best to accommodate the request
- around the house I did it so often the list would never end
Ohh, forgot about another one, this one is really crazy, at my first job we had to install a server in a rack, the customer was too cheap to buy a decent rack so he bought some crappy cabinet/rack , it should have been standard 19" but in reality it was a few mm shorter. Needless to say the server just would't go in, in that moment the technician I was with had a brilliant idea, went to the car and brought a hydraulic jack and a piece of wood a really solid one. We pulled away the mounting rails of the rack and shoved in the server. When we released the jack it was so tight the server was sitting in position with no mounting screws

At work so I can't really contribute right now.
Replying so I remember to follow this topic

I love this stuff. In American English this is called a "Kludge". Hence why I had to laugh at the "RoyalKludge" keyboards.

Here's a nice resource for great and some really bad kludges:

http://failblog.cheezburger.com/thereifixedit

DanielT wrote: ↑ Ohh, forgot about another one, this one is really crazy, at my first job we had to install a server in a rack, the customer was too cheap to buy a decent rack so he bought some crappy cabinet/rack , it should have been standard 19" but in reality it was a few mm shorter. Needless to say the server just would't go in, in that moment the technician I was with had a brilliant idea, went to the car and brought a hydraulic jack and a piece of wood a really solid one. We pulled away the mounting rails of the rack and shoved in the server. When we released the jack it was so tight the server was sitting in position with no mounting screws

That is the best thing i have ever seen lol, amazing

Yeah, it was really fun to do it. Somehow I find it nice to mix old-school/low-tech with high end equipment

Added a raid controller to my server. It required direct airflow so I improvised.

A use for some old drives form a G5 Xserve. The most useful thing an apple server has ever done , made my monitors higher.
I mean how cool is that ! You can even use the handles to hold pens

andrewjoy wrote: ↑A use for some old drives form a G5 Xserve. The most useful thing an apple server has ever done , made my monitors higher.I mean how cool is that ! You can even use the handles to hold pens

BTW nice setup Andrew!

seebart wrote: ↑ BTW nice setup Andrew!

Its only my work setup .

I hate apple servers , i can show you the mark on the wall where i launched the 2013 mac mini server across the server room if you like, that will teach SMB to not break again!

The funny thing is the original intel xserve blade that i decommissioned years ago never had a problem it was on 10.6, every version of server since then has been terrible , and every version has been an add on to normal OSX not its own version hmm i wonder why its gone to shit.

Fingers crossed 10.12 appears to be just about working, as long as you don't have the audacity to change a setting without your tongue at the right angle.

Man i cannot wait to dump that shit and go FreeBSD, ZFS 10gigE 30TB with 4 6 drive RAIDZ2 vdevs in one pool mmmm the speed mmm the IOPS mmm reliability!