Here I go resurrecting another zombie thread…
After having thought about this during March last year, I found an interesting one on a second hand market, tried to purchase it but the seller did something weird I can’t remember now and I finally lost my chance to buy it.
Then I got diagnosed with a cancer and while dealing with that important battle for my life, I completely forgot about the magnifying glass.
But now that my cancer got successfully removed and I’m nearly finishing my final chemo treatment (just 3 sessions to go) before the final operation to reverse my ileostomy (expected sometime in June/July, coronacrisis permitting), things were looking better, so I recently had the chance to think again about the magnifying glass and I made a decision: I ordered this one:
but, when I received and connected it, it was a faulty unit, with 1/3 of the LEDs never being illuminated. Seemed to be blown out.
I contacted the customer service and went through the purchase-of-a-new-one-and-return-of-the-faulty-one process.
When I received the new replacing one, instead of an identical one, it was a different model, but I immediately noticed it was a superior one, so I felt happy with it and proceeded to install and connect it to the 12V CC.
This is the new one I received now:
Unfortunately this one resulted in another faulty unit, as none of the LEDs ever got illuminated when clicking on the switch button. I contacted back again the customer service and explained the whole thing. They seemed to take a bit too long to give me a response and after a couple of days waiting, together with the fact that I really liked this new lamp much better and the boredom during these lockdown times, I finally got into investigating why the LEDs of the lamp were not illuminating.
I found that the 12V cc were correctly getting to the switching circuit, but there were 0V at the output and that’s an obvious good reason for the LEDs not getting illuminated.
The switching circuit was in theory, upon consecutive clics of the only pushing button available, for switching the LEDs ON and selecting one up to 4 different levels of brightness. Given that there were 12V at the input of that circuit but 0V at the output, I decided to bypass the circuit and connect the 12V directly to the LEDs.
Then, after this action, I got the lamp perfectly illuminated, but obviously with just one single level of brightness, which is not a problem for me at all and this was obviously better than nothing at all.
Then the customer service finally responded and I told them that I had managed to finally get the LEDs illuminated and I had decided to keep the lamp as it was instead of going again through the process of buying a new one and returning the faulty one.
A few minutes after having got the LEDs illuminated, I started to smell overheated melting plastic, so I switched it off and decided to power it on with just 9V instead of 12V.
After a few minutes being illuminated with the 9V cc supply and not smelling any melting plastic, I found with deception that 1/3 of the LEDs were OFF; just the middle sector out of the 3 sectors making the whole LEDs ring.
I opened the lamp and inspected the LEDs ring to find out that the middle sector was indeed blown out:
It seems like Murphy is indeed working hard in these lockdown days…
I’m now exchanging emails with the aftersales trying to get a spare sector of LEDs and a spare switching circuit for me to try to repair the lamp, as I don’t obviously pretend it to be covered by the warranty after having been manipulating it.
Furthermore, I have already used the magnifying glass and the lamp for some few repairs I’ve had to do on tiny things lately and I found it very helpful. I’m happy with it, despite having 1/3 of the LEDs non illuminated.
73,
Guru
dioptres 3 and 8.
