LV
Sun
LV
Sun
After making sure that the good VP415 was still working following its little explosive tantrum, I put it away again for a time whilst I concentrated on looking at the faulty one. Having repaired the faulty one, the intention was to keep it as a spare and to continue using the good one as my main Domesday Player. I then began to assemble my Domesday 2010 setup, initially with the good VP415.
Imagine my consternation, if you will, when I discovered that the wonky picture effect also put in an appearance on the good one! I really couldn't understand this at all! It seemed a little bit too much to take to think that both VP415 players could have started exhibiting the same fault at the same time!
The two players had been stored together since I got them, one next to the other, for the last seven years, so I could only think that the storage conditions (indoors and dry, but perhaps a little bit cold in the winter and perhaps a little bit on the humid side) had led to this fault developing on both Domesday players.
It was June by now, so we were due for our annual rainless hour in the North-West, and I took the opportunity to put the good VP415 outside in the sunshine for a bit. It didn't help.
I was still trying to fathom out why the picture kept going wonky a couple of days later when further disaster struck. I wasn't even in the room at the time, I was next door writing an e-mail to somebody saying that I'd been testing my Domesday System for the first time in over three years and it was working fine, when I heard a very faint pop and the Fawlty Towers disc coming to a gradual stop.
The PSU in the good VP415 had popped for the second time, and this time is was dead, and that's how it remained until repaired in July 2011.
What a very, very, very good job, then, that I'd managed to repair the faulty VP415 - otherwise there wouldn't have been a BeebMaster Domesday Machine at all during that time!
Oh, before you ask: the black box (plastic & glass) recycling scheme has been abolished, and is replaced by the Brown (plastic & glass) Bin recycling scheme, which goes out on alternate Fridays along with the Black (general rubbish) bin. On black & brown's week off, it's the turn of the Green (grass cuttings & garden waste) bin and the Blue (paper & card) bin, but since Green (grass cuttings & garden waste) now also includes Green (food waste), Green can be put out every Friday, along with Small Green (food waste) which you can see in the background here. I hope that's clear, several consultants have been paid several hundreds of thousands of my rates to fathom it all out!