I haven't seen too many strange mods so this one is probably tame compared to the hacks out there.

I'm working on a power amp where the speaker selector switch was bypassed and the "A" set of speakers was hardwired to the outputs.

Why? Simple...

The selector knob fell off.

:wtf: :twak:

So what's the nastiest hack you've seen? Doesn't have to be audio. Just anything with a "What the #%*& was that freak smoking?" feel to it.

Not audio-related, but in our old apartment they nailed the stove recepticle to the wall... not even through the screw holes, just in random places. When pulling out the stove one day for a cleaning, we unplugged it and wiggling the plug caused one of the nails to touch the hot lead and a spray of sparks shot out a few feet, and blew the circuit....

We always wondered what crackhead did our wiring... and had an electrician come redo it after that.

-Sean

Yes, I had a similar problem with the electric stove at my house when I moved into it about 2 yrs. ago...they used flexible BX conduit which must have been about 50 yrs old to hard-wire the electric stove to the junction box...wires in the conduit had frayed insulation and shorted out when I pulled the stove out to check why there was no power to it....I replaced the old BX with a new electric range power cord and outlet.

Also the 220 v. electric dryer, air conditioner, and electric heater in the living room were all connected on one circuit supplied by a 50 A. circuit breaker.

At the well house (near the carport) the neutral wire had a bad connection to the sub-breaker box. The 220v. pump worked normally, but since the neutral was broken, the car port lights and the pump house outlet ended up being in series across the 220 v. line, resulting in 190 v. at the pump house outlet. A portable radio ended up being fried by the over voltage.

Ran into a service call where an electric dryer was hooked up
with lamp cord.

Not a hack, but...
Years ago I worked at Fretter doing their Audio repairs. Someone brought in a Fisher amp that someone had peed in. It came from another store and the salesman just plopped it in a box, dripping, and sent it in! Yuck!

:puke: gack! hope i never run into anything like that! then again, i had a guy bring me a fender rhodes piano to overhaul one time that had a family of mice living in it! :yikes:

Originally posted by dr*audio
Not a hack, but...
Years ago I worked at Fretter doing their Audio repairs. Someone brought in a Fisher amp that someone had peed in. It came from another store and the salesman just plopped it in a box, dripping, and sent it in! Yuck!

I'm not sure who the bigger jackass was there, the customer or the salesperson.

What a bunch of maroons! :dunno:

I had 1 good 1 bad experience with Fretter.
The bad-when the plastic handle to a sony camcorder broke after 2 years and even though I had the extended warranty *&%^$# made me pay $111 for repair and parts. They claimed I must have dropped the camera! That was my first and last experience with an extended warranty.

The good-had a Mitsubishi tv where the Flyback went bad after about 35-40 days. So they came and repaired it however, any black and white show I watched had a blue tint and even shows in color did not have the same look as when it was new!
So I bitched up a storm to Dave who I think was the manager of Southland store. He said come here saturday before closing and you can get another one even though it was past 30 days for a return. The wife and I picked out a nice Sony EXR set and I paid an extra $75 but it lasted 8-9 years.

I did find some half-assed wiring in box after buying our house. Dumbass somehow put 2 circuits on 1 breaker because they were too lazy to replace breaker! Talking with neighbor, seems when development was built in late 60's they used 14 gauge instead of 12 for houses, but it was up to code.
When my dad built our house in 52 they used 12 for the wiring, we rarely blew a fuse.

How many houses out there, old AND new, are wired in mickey-mouse hookup,(such as 4 rooms on a 15a. breaker, Knob-and-tube wire spliced to nm cable, OUT IN THE OPEN, general splices just rigged up, all over the place, with NO thought of fusing,14ga wire, for full-size central air conditioners, etc).

It IS a wonder, there are not more house fires, from all of the pi$s-poor electric wiring, all over the place!

I wonder how much of that knob and tube wiring is still being used? I worked with an electrican once and that wiring is just hairy. You just touch it and the insulation would crumble off the wire. It was next to impossible to splice into new wiring.

Jim

If I said all hack jobs I encountered, AK would need a second server. I'll divide it into work and not work

WORK:

1. Not too long ago, a house done by a father/son team got dinged on rough inspection. The inspector noted gaps in return air caps, insufficient return air and a few other issues which I don't remember. I had to recut some RA's and add others. In the basement, the ducts were assembled haphazzardly. There were gaps galore in the headers. The PVC for venting the furnace did not have the quarter inch per foot fall as Bryant requires (it's in the instruction book, and what's in the book is code in Ohio). It took me all day to fix their shit (I was in the process of doing the basement across the street). It passed the next day.

2. Another house done by the same father/son team failed final. My supervisor asked me to fix it. Here's what the inspector said on the ding card: 1) RA duct hanging low. 2) RA drawn from unused space. 3) Gaps in RA. 4) PVC not installed per mfg specs. I found other things the inspector couldn't see. Normally, if the joists are 16" on center, we have about 14 inches of available space. These hacks only cut out about 6 inches of metal in the returns. After rehanging the return duct (all in a crawl space) and reinstalling the headers, and recutting the RA ducts to actually draw air, AND fixing the other problems noted, it passed the next day. I would like to know why these hacks are still employed.

3. I have had to follow these hacks on the last couple of basements I did. They cut register openings way too big (4 3/4 x 10 or 12 3/4) for a 4x10 or 4x12 boot. The boots get deformed this way. We use oval stack all the time and the rule is to have the ends that go into the basement be no more than one inch below the plywood. Said father/son team always has them too low or too high.

4. A different father/son team (since fired) did a rough and basement at the same time I was doing one in the same subdivision. The houses were identical. Mine passed, theirs failed. I was asked to fix theirs. I practically had to redo the rough. Too add insult to it, they had a 24 hour head start on me. I finished mine by myself before the two of them finished theirs. This father was in another subdivision as I was when he was hired. He owned an HVAC company in another state. The bosses wanted me to show him Ohio codes and the way we do things. His work looked good at the time. I later found out that every house he did got dinged first time.

4. If some of the framers our clients use would learn what a tape measure IS and HOW TO USE ONE, they would be dangerous. It would also be nice if they followed the print. Some areas are better than others.

5. When I was with my old company (before relocating), I had a work order to install a furnace. When I got there, I saw an old Lennox G6 (1950's era). The previous tenant (without the landlady's knowledge) replaced the old gravity furnace himself. Since the G6 was taller than its predecessor, the old tenant (referred to herein as idiot) broke up the cement and dropped the furnace in. The electrical wiring was hanging and spliced outside the furnace. Said idiot used speaker wire for the thermostat. He couldn't route pipe very well, so he used duct tape to seal gaps in the flue pipe. To tie in the return, he only ran a 6 inch pipe to the furnace. I relocated the new furnace, repiped the supplies, did a proper return drop and did a real flue connection. I ran a new thermostat wire and fixed it so the tenant could run the blower if he wished. As far as the hole in the cement, I got to fill that too. The other companies just wanted to use an A/C pad. The cement was how we got that job.

NOT WORK:

1. My RCA CTC-16 (next in line) has several places where wiring was haphazzardly spliced and several questionable PC board repairs. The focus leaad broke out of the CRT socket and a "tech" just wrapped the lead around pin 9 (focus pin on a 21FJP22) instead of replacing the socket.

2. The wiring in my mother's house was a mess. It was UNGROUNDED 14 gauge. There was one circuit for the whole upstairs. Most of the downstairs was one circuit. The people we bought the house from added wiring and there were several open splices that were just taped. When I rewired the house, I put in a 200 amp panel, removed all original wiring, added circuits and later rewired the garage. The house went from 6 original circuits to 18 (excluding garage, which has 7). As RCA2000 said, it's a wonder we didn't have a fire. I'm surprized that no other houses in the old neighborhood didn't go up. I only use 14 for lights.

3. I have found other suspect repairs in some of my TV sets. My Hallicrafters had some suspect things done, but I feel it was not well manufacturered. My tabletop Zenith had some totally incorrect parts installed in the past. I corrected that, but I will eventually recap the set.

Originally posted by dr*audio
Not a hack, but...
Years ago I worked at Fretter doing their Audio repairs. Someone brought in a Fisher amp that someone had peed in. It came from another store and the salesman just plopped it in a box, dripping, and sent it in! Yuck! PISS on that!!!
:puke:

BigDave,
Oh man do you have your work cut out for you! What a list. My house (which the ex has now) is unusual maybe you can shed light on this. It is knob n tube and from what I could tell It appeared to be one common ground wire for all the outlets I only saw one at the service panel when fixing the previous f-up.

I discovered when I had to get in walls to fish the cable and phone up stairs, (there was only 1 phone jack up there for 4 bedrooms, I made wife and kids go to mall cause I knew I would be cussing on that job!)

Would that have been common for that late 60's era? I would have thought by then they would have used romex on all new housing.

"It IS a wonder, there are not more house fires, from all of the pi$s-poor electric wiring, all over the place!"

Ive seen plenty of fires caused by plastic dryer venting

The first romex apprared aroung the 50's. It was either ungrounded, or the ground wire was about 16 guage. Knob and tube (a total nightmare) had a common neutral. When I was at my old location, some firends of mine who had rental properties had me do some wiring. One of the houses they had was their grandfather's. When I saw the wiring, the only thing I told them was to make sure they had good fire insurance.

To answer another post about plastic dryer venting, if you see plastic, replace it. I run hard pipe from the dryer location to the vent cap. NEVER use screws to attach dryer vent pipe. Use foil tape. To connect the dryer to the vent, use either aluminum flex or hard pipe.

The vinyl flex gets brittle and will hold any lint that passes the filter. On my mother's dryer (a gas GE), I was replacing glow plugs every year. When I replaced the glow plugs, I cleaned the blower and all other areas where lint can accumulate. This went on for a while (before I got into HVAC). I checked the vinyl flex and vent pipe. The idiots who originally installed the dryer used screws in the metal. I found that the lint buildup reduced a 4 inch pipe to THREE. Aftrer I cleaned out the pipe and removed the screws, and hardpiped the entire vent (sans screws), I haven't replaced a glowplug since. This was about 1999. The dryer is still working well.

One New Years Day, a house around the corner from my mother's place caught fire and the occupant died. The cause was the dryer. I don't know any other details.

If you find yourself constantly replacing glowplugs or heating elements more than usual, OR finding the dryer isn't drying worth shit, check the venting. In Ohio, if there are screws in a dryer vent, the inspector will ding it.

Originally posted by Big Dave
To answer another post about plastic dryer venting, if you see plastic, replace it. I run hard pipe from the dryer location to the vent cap. NEVER use screws to attach dryer vent pipe. Use foil tape. To connect the dryer to the vent, use either aluminum flex or hard pipe.

The vinyl flex gets brittle and will hold any lint that passes the filter. On my mother's dryer (a gas GE), I was replacing glow plugs every year. When I replaced the glow plugs, I cleaned the blower and all other areas where lint can accumulate. This went on for a while (before I got into HVAC). I checked the vinyl flex and vent pipe. The idiots who originally installed the dryer used screws in the metal. I found that the lint buildup reduced a 4 inch pipe to THREE. Aftrer I cleaned out the pipe and removed the screws, and hardpiped the entire vent (sans screws), I haven't replaced a glowplug since. This was about 1999. The dryer is still working well.

One New Years Day, a house around the corner from my mother's place caught fire and the occupant died. The cause was the dryer. I don't know any other details.

If you find yourself constantly replacing glowplugs or heating elements more than usual, OR finding the dryer isn't drying worth shit, check the venting. In Ohio, if there are screws in a dryer vent, the inspector will ding it.


Yep you got it, If I had all of the plastic venting Iv'e removed
and placed it end for end it would stretch half way across the
United States.