Great Electronic Repair Guide
An Electronic Repair Guide
If you want to save yourself some money by doing your own electronic repairs, the first thing you need to do is prepare a work area in your home. The three most important things your work area will need are several 3 hole electrical outlets, good lighting, and good ventilation. You need the outlets with three holes because that is the type of grounded outlet most of your tools will use. The best setup for your tools is to have them plugged into a power strip, which is in turn plugged into a surge protector. The ventilation is important to keep the work area cool, and the bright lights are needed because you will be looking at some very small writing to identify components. A magnifying glass, a fire extinguisher, additional power cords, and a first aid kit are other items you should have.
Most people don’t attempt to do their own repairs because they think they will need a lot of technical knowledge. But the truth is, a great many electronics problems have very simple causes and any layman can check for these. Dirty connectors, old cables, and loose screws are some good examples of these. And you only need a very basic understanding of electronics to repair many other problems.
The first thing you do is diagnose a problem, and for that you need to obtain some testing equipment, which is not expensive, and a book on how to do testing. A guide written by Delton T.Horn, which you can purchase on Amazon.com, is a good one. Other good authors of this kind of guide are Robert J. Traister and R. A. Penfold, and they also can be found on Amazon.com. After reading more than one book, purchase the testing gear that is recommended.
If your testing shows that the cause of the problem is a simple one like those mentioned above, you will have saved yourself a good deal of money. Also, if you read an Internet electronic repair guide for the broken product, it often turns out that you can avoid a repair altogether. A guide like this will tell you, for example, that if you drop a cell phone in water it is often not necessary to take it in for repair as most people do. If you simply quickly remove the battery and thoroughly dry it and the phone, normally the phone will be undamaged. For the basic knowledge of electronics you will need to deal with other problems, read a good electronic repair guide for beginners.
