Repair Noisy Champion Juicer

We’ve owned a champion juicer for about 20 years.  My wife juices heavily, and now so does my oldest daughter.  About two months back, I noticed the juicer was screaming like a banshee. 

Concerned, I took it apart to look at it.  The rear bearing seemed to be the main culprit.  So I changed both the bearings.  It was purring like a kitten.  Two weeks ago, my daughter starts up the juicer, and I hear a familiar scream, and it sounds like the front bearing.

I was thinking maybe I damaged the front bearing while driving it down on to the shaft.  But when I took the juicer apart, I realized it was due to leakage from the front seal.  I noticed it was bad the first time, but I didn’t have a replacement for it and so I just put it back. 

Don’t change your bearings without changing the front oil seal.  It’s a waste of time and money.   The total cost to fix this problem is about $30.  I spent another $30 on wasted parts (2 bearings and a retainer ring) as well as another $20 on a three jaw gear puller which worked miserably. 

Get a two jaw puller.  With the three jaw puller, two of the three jaws will likely hit some of the plastic cooling fins when pulling the rear bearing.  I ended up breaking the tips of two of the plastic fins because of this.  If the hooks on the jaws are lower profile, then maybe that can avoided.  But mine has quite thick jaws.

Parts needed:

(Amazon) 6203-2NSE Nachi Bearing 17x40x12 Sealed C3 Japan Ball Bearings ($8.76 each)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0045E0E8U?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00

(Champion) Champion Juicer Oil Seal ($14.50 w/ free shipping)

http://www.championjuicer.com/product_info.php?products_id=7

Tools needed:

(Amazon) Performance Tool W141 2-Jaw Gear Puller, 6" (note that I did not order this tool.  I ordered a 3 jaw puller, but there were interference problems.  I think this one will work better.)

http://www.amazon.com/Performance-Tool-W141-2-Jaw-Puller/dp/B000N35MCK

Extra parts due broken retainer ring:

(McMaster-Carr)

Side-Mount External Retaining Ring (E-Style)

Black-Finish Steel, for 16-24mm Shaft Diameter

98543A120 ($10.34 for pack of 25)

http://www.mcmaster.com/#catalog/122/3302/=116jy96

1)   Remove the four screws at the back of the case.

2)   Remove the front hub.

(Here you can see the crud on the juicer inside (under hub) face plate due to the leaking oil seal.) 

3)   Remove the back plate (may have to use a screwdriver and tap it off).

4)   Remove the front plate (may have to support back of the shaft and tap the shaft out with a hammer. 

Both the front and back plates are press fit on to the outside of the bearings.   So they may be a bit snug and require some pressure (hammer tapping) to get them off.  The motor armature can be pulled out the back of the motor housing.   If you drive it forward, it will break some of the motor electronics.  But it’s safe to drive it backwards as long as you keep the shaft centered by holding the back bearing so it does not damage the motor windings.

5)   Once you have the motor armature out.  You need to use the gear puller to pull the bearings off the shaft on both ends.

WARNING!!!: The bearings press up against retainer rings.  I made the mistake of catching the front one with the gear puller and snapping it.  I could not find an exact replacement.  All the retainer rings with the right dimensions were too thick.  I ordered the part listed above off Master-Carr and then ground it down to fit.  The second time I took it apart, I made very sure not to break them—though I now have a lifetime supply as they come in quantities of 25.

6)   Clean up the shafts.  I used some relatively fine grit sandpaper to polish them a little.  I also applied some 3 in 1 oil (very thin coat) to help the bearings slide on.  I didn’t do this the first time, and it took quite a bit of force to press them on. 

7)   Put the bearings on.  Find the smallest ¾” drive socket you have that will fit over the shaft (keeps the force near the center of the shaft and reduces risk of damaging the ball bearings sealed inside) and then use some larger ones to stack them high enough that you can tap on the bearing.  Gently tap it down until it reaches the retainer ring. 

8)   Put the shaft back into the windings.  Put on the front and back plates and line up the holes.  Note the “Top” marking stamped into both the front and back plate.

WARNING!!!! Do not forget the tension/pressure ring that goes in the front cover (forgot this on second pass and had to open it again).

9) Put in the screws so they are sticking out from the front plate as they are hard to get aligned once the front hub is on.

10) Drive out the oil seal from the front hub.  It comes out from the forward facing (exposed) side.  Put a socket on the back, hold it in your hand, and then gently tap it out with a hammer.

11) Drive the new seal back in very carefully.  Use an oversized socket to seat it flush. 

(Champion seal shipped with that void in the oil seal.  I probably should have gotten some grease somewhere and filled it the rest of the way, but I didn't.)

(Note that the outside ring of the front hub was already dented slightly.  I did not do that while driving the seal in so be careful, it deforms easily.)

12) Lube the shaft with olive oil and slide the hub over it.  Push the hub up against the front plate and carefully tighten the screws.  Do not over-tighten.  The hub is plastic and the screws will strip.

You should now have a working juicer.

Cleanup Merged Github Branches

For big projects with multiple contributors where nobody is really cracking the whip on Github maintenance, there is a tendency for the branch count to just keep climbing.  I have seen cases where it tops 100 branches, and it becomes quite painful to clean up.  In cases like that, I have developed the following method for handling it:

First, you need local copies of all the remote branches.  This is not as easy as just doing a fetch origin, as that just pulls over an underlying awareness of the fact that the branches exist.  You do not actually create local copies of all those branches.

So we run the following command:

for remote in `git branch -r`; do git branch --track ${remote#origin/} $remote; done

This creates local copies of all the branches including one called HEAD, which is not a real branch and is dangerous.  So let’s get rid of that by renaming it  to something else and then deleting it.

git branch -m HEAD bogusBranch

git branch –D bogusBranch

We now want to delete all the branches that are already merged.  We can get a list of them by running:

git branch --merged master | grep -v master

If we like the list, we now delete them from the origin:

git branch --merged master | grep -v master |  xargs -n 1 git push --delete origin

And we now delete the same list locally:

git branch --merged master | grep -v master |  xargs -n 1 git branch -D 

And we have now cleaned up our repository by removing everything that has already been merged to master. 

If something is not on the merged list, and we want to know what changes are not merged, we get a list of un-merged commits from that branch:

git cherry -v master <unmergedBranchName>

Now we checkout that local branch:

git checkout unmergedBranchName

And we do a whatchanged to see what the difference is:

git whatchanged -m -n 1 -p <SHA of target commit>

Samsung LNT5271F Horizontal Line Issue

This is a blog about a failed attempt to fix a Samsung LNT5271F 52-inch LCD TV.  It developed problems with horizontal lines on the screen.  If the TV warms up sufficiently (about half an hour), it goes away.  The lines look like this:

I swapped the electrolytic caps on the power board because people in various forums were saying that was a potential solution.  I was not feeling good about that.  It seems tantamount to sacrificing a chicken over it, but it is cheap, so I gave it a shot first.  It did nothing.

I then swapped the T-Con board which set me back about $100.  I ordered it from:

https://www.encompassparts.com/item/7665055/Samsung/BN81-01285A/As-t_Con_Board

There are many places that have the board cheaper—some of them much cheaper, but they were all out of stock.

I have since heard that horizontal lines are almost never caused by the T-Con board.  But I did not become aware of that until I had already ordered the part.  It is a bit of a delicate operation to swap it because of the LCD panel connectors, and because it is not at all obvious how those connectors work.  But at the end of the day, I was able to do it without issue.  Unfortunately, it had no effect on the problem.  The horizontal lines remain, and they still go away after half an hour.

The TCON board LCD connectors look like:

They open by folding them downwards.  In the picture, the right one is open.  Notice also the black horizontal line on the connector, which just lines up with where the top of that connector is going to be once we close it.  You should not be able to see any of that black line if the connector is securely fastened against a properly positioned wire.

I think the issue is likely the LCD controller, and it’s just come to the point that it is a better bet to just buy a new television.  I’ll suffer with the thirty minutes of horizontal lines for now until OLED come up to the point where the OLED TVs are better priced.  In the meantime, I have another 32” LCD TV next to the bigger one I use for gaming.  I have a dual 4-port HDMI switch attached to both TV’s, so it is a small matter to route the cable box to the smaller TV if it is really critical.

So the point of this blog is if you have a problem similar to what I am showing in the above photo, you are probably better off just giving up on the TV rather than wasting $150 and a good bit of time tearing down and reassembling this TV a couple times over.