Hello! I recently bought some power supplies at auction. I like those Proteks,
and that's what I have on my bench.
And I really like it, although of course like the HPs,
but these one have the advantage that you have a - except I removed
it - you have a display of both the voltage and the amperage at the same time, for both.
And they are nice analogy, with buttons. But you can see, this one is really yellowed.
And it should be more like this. And I'm not sure, I expected it to be white on the back face,
but it's not. So was a bit surprised, has it been exposed to heat or something like that?
I'm going to attempt retr0brighting that one, in the footsteps of the 8-Bit Guy. Except,
of course, I should do better, because I work on 16-bit computers.
I need to start with a nod to the 8-bit guy, arguably the YouTube king of retr0brighting. He
has an excellent video, linked in the doodlydoo, where he compares different retr0brighting methods
in a systematic way. This was the inspiration for the simplified method presented here.
To sum it up, retr0brighting seeks to revert the yellowing effects of
the bromine additive which is used as a fire retardant in vintage beige plastics.
The active ingredient in the retr0brighting solution is peroxide, or H2O2.
And, although the exact chemical process has not been elucidated, it comes to reason that it is
probably some form of free radical oxygen at work. It is essentially a bleaching process, and it
should come as no surprise that peroxide is also the main ingredient in hair bleach solutions. And
pre-mixed hair bleach is what we are going to use in our very simple, yet quite effective method.
I'm following the footsteps of the 8-Bit guy, but doing it with eight more bits. He uses paste,
but then he shows that it works just as well with something watery. This is Salon
Care 40 Volume Clear, and I can hear it's watery. So I don't trust paste,
because I think it would be pretty uneven.
So I am going to try just the watery stuff, which I got on Amazon, I think.
And then he uses UV but he shows that heat works just as well.So, I'm just going to
use lukewarm water - not sure how much I need - and I'm going to heat that thing up.
Because, same thing, if it's UV, but I have two sides to it, I don't understand how that's
going to work. So, following my instincts here, we will see. But we have no fear.
Okay, and I'm going to put in a toaster oven. But now that it's in the toaster oven nice
and safe, I can top it a little bit without risking spilling anything.
And by the way, I should probably wash my hands after I touched the peroxide.
I'm kind of a super low setting, it's lower than 200. So I suppose it's in the 100 - 150-ish area.
And leave it there for a while, and go to sleep, and see next morning how it works.
All right, it is the next day.
We'll see if our cooking experiment succeeded. And, oh, I can already tell it has. Oh, fantastic!
Yeah, that was simple enough: just put the stuff
in the liquid, and it gets whitened. All, right, success!
So, I let it out to dry, but I had a piece which was a tab that was broken. And you can
tell the difference in color between the two. So, it has improved a lot!
It's just: dunk it in the stuff, put it in an oven, and that's all you need.
So, if you now compare it to the original that I have on my bench, it's
the same color. And also note that the plastic has become extremely brittle,
and that's not the retr0brite process. It was brittle from before. So, it's part of
the degradation that makes it yellow that makes it brittle, not part of the restoration process.
And also, notice that there's a button that's a different color. That's the only one I
retr0brited. It was very yellow. And then, there's three others that were just white.
And I don't understand, why would one button be yellow and the other
white? I don't know. Something weird about it.
I had not noticed, but it had broken before. So, here's the part that fell off. And this one,
I didn't retr0brite it. So you can see the difference in tint, quite obvious.
By the way, when I was remounting it I noticed this very disturbing fact.
This is loose here, that's the negative. And it's loose over here too! It looks like it's
bad soldering, or it was never soldered in properly.
All right, it's all back together. So, all we have to do,
is make sure it's calibrated properly. I can tell it's not. Let's see. It should go
to 30 volts, it goes to 27. I have the manual, so it should be not too hard.
Now the left one is calibrated. It was fairly far off, both of them. So if I set them at 1A
and turn it on, 1A comes out, and 1A it is. So we got it.
So, sorry HP power supply. It's not often that I replace a piece of HP equipment
with another thing, but in this case, it's nice to have the digital reading.
All
right! Well, it doesn't look too bad. It has the same
color.
Here we go. Was worth the effort.