Continuing in my trivial repair series I bring you the drums. One day (about a month ago) I was out driving around at night through my friend’s neighborhood the day before trash day when we come upon something interesting. It turned out to be an xbox 360 set of rock band drums, complete except one of the far pads was completely broken off. After I got it home it was trivial to replace the broken wire with another one (a twisted pair from a bit of ethernet cable) however the hardware repair proved to be a bit harder. My normal approach is to use hot-melt glue or fiberglass resin to just put it back together, but with the forces that would be torquing the joint would shear off any adhesive quite quickly. What I decided was that I needed was a rigid piece of material to bridge the gap and I needed to permanently affix the new material to the existing body. For the material to act as a bandage I used some bits of a computer case (one drive bay cover and two strips cut from the case of a power supply) and for the adhesive I used pop rivets, they are cheap, fast, and easier than a nut and bolt. Since the cable didn’t come with a USB connector on the end I ended up using a female USB b port salvaged from an old printer, insulated with some medical tape since we were out of electrical tape (we now have five rolls since I got fed up with not having any and went out to get some today).
Bottom Brace
Back Brace
Front Brace
USB Connection
I promise my posts will get more substantial as time goes by, trying to archive my own minor fixes I do on a regular basis (I do have some actual mods and hacks coming up soon).
Evan's Techie-Blog 