In my effort to procrastinate doing the things that will improve my life, I’ve been working on improving Shoshanah’s.  Specifically, her car.  She despises doing anything to maintain her car with a kind of weird passion, so it falls to me.  For example, she’d been bugging me to replace the wiper blades on it so her old ones joined a few dozen others in the trashcan outside the auto parts store.  Plus, I had found replacement gas lifts for her PT Cruiser ($55 for the pair, shipped); the hatch started drifting down and whanging us on the head from time to time.  So I added my sweat to the blood and tears this had cost us (however did I live without this Makita cordless impact driver?!  I’ve needed it so many times now) and now the hatch drifts gracefully up with a little nudge, and stays there, like it did when we got it.  Sweet.

Now here’s the tough one.  Her amplifier.  The power amp under the driver’s seat has caught a bit of abuse in seven years and the right channels for both pairs of speakers were having problems.  Seems the posts from the RCA connectors sheared off inside the receptacles.  I managed to fish one out with a pair of pliers but the other one is way in there.

So being me, I took the thing apart.  I was hoping to poke the post out from behind but the connector is buried.  To slide the mainboard out turned out to be incredibly involved as this Arc Audio Class D amp consists of maybe 30 amplifier IC’s pasted to long heatsink rails with thermal grease and as many black metal retaining clips.  So I let my son remove the clips and I loosened the IC’s from their greasy seal and eventually, after finding a few more screws that were required (and removing a few screws that really didn’t need removing), I slid the mainboard out.  A bittersweet victory because I know that now I’m going to have to run to Fry’s to get more thermal grease — the little tube I have ain’t gonna cut it — and grease and clip and screw it all back together.  Not to mention rebuilding the RCA connectors without losing much wire — there’s a minimum of play to work with and it might end up being a splice job — and I’ll have to replace a fuse I think because (ahem) the hot brushed the case when I was deinstalling it.

And it turns out that’s not going to be enough. I figured I needed to take a break before desoldering the six points holding the connector block in place.  So I sat and had a think, and I think that my best bet is to solder something to the errant post and yank it out when the solder dries.  It might melt the connector interior plastic a bit, which is why I had initially dismissed the idea, but I keep getting into riskier territory with this $350 amp and this is starting to sound safer.

The irritating thing is that I could have taken that approach without even cracking the case.