A quick test showed that the player was still working so I assured her I’d fix it for her. The door was held on by two plastic clips and a couple of tiny plastic screw mounts, now broken. Duct tape came to mind as a possible solution but I thought I could do better. So this morning—because I promised I would fix it and because I desperately needed to get away from the computer—I came up with this:

The wood is from a piece of scrap oak I have out in the garage (I think it’s oak). I cut it to size with a table saw and then used a Dremel tool and a chisel to carve out room on the underside for the circuit board. Then I sanded it down by hand into the shape you see here.

Next steps are to drill new holes and see if I can reuse the screws from the old battery door. I’m planning on doing away with the hinged door, obviously, and just screwing the whole thing down through the center instead of near the edge like the old door.

If that works, I’ll strip the conductor for the positive battery terminal from the old door and attach it to the new door. Glue probably. And then I’ll do a final sanding to get the edges flush with the body of the iRiver.

Of course, I may need to get some new bits for the Dremel. And I’ll need to buy a soldering iron. And if this prototype works, I may re-do the project using a nicer wood. Dark cherry or something.

The first thing you need to do is diagnose the problem correctly. Here were the symptoms I experienced that pointed to a failure of the HVB:

• Intermittent zapping noise prior to failure (probably electrical arcing)
• 8 blinks of the standby light, repeated
• Scorching, soot on the HVB
• Volume levels decreasing gradually over time
• Anecdotal evidence that this was a common failure

Dead high voltage block

The HVB costs about $80. I ordered mine from PartStore.com. The repair is straightforward and takes about 30 minutes.

1. Unplug your television.
2. Unscrew the wooden back panel. There are about 10 screws holding it in. I had better luck using a hex socket wrench to get the screws out. Careful around the back connectors because that bit is flimsy.
3. Remove the back panel. Inside there’s another piece of wood painted black. It just slides out the back.The HVB is hanging from a metal bracket above the circuit board. There are large red wires going into it. It is connected to the metal bracket by one screw through the top. It is also held in place by two plastic prongs.

   There are two wires coming from the HVB. One going up to the metal bracket (a ground wire?) and one going to a four pin connector on the circuit board.

4. Wiggle the 4-pin connector gently to pry it free. Make a note of which way it plugs in (on mine, the black wire was on the right, looking at the back of the television.)
5. The ground wire has a spring clip connector with a tiny little button on one side. Squeeze the clip and button and pull and it comes free easily. If you can’t see it, you can unscrew the bracket it’s connected to for a better angle.
6. Once those wires are disconnected you can wiggle the HVB straight out towards you. Be careful not to damage the plastic mounting prongs.
7. There are four red wires going into the HVB. Label them before you disconnect them so you know where they go in the new unit.To disconnect the red wires: first slide the rubber boot well up the red wire. Then push the red wire into the HVB, twist, and pull. You should be able to feel it wiggle around when you push it in and twist and then you can pull it out. Do not force it. There are little wings on the head that prevent the wires from being pulled out by accident. If you just pull you’ll probably damage the wires. Slide the boot up, push, twist, pull and they come out very easily. Repeat for the other three.
8. The HVB is connected to a black plastic mounting bracket with one screw. Unscrew it and remove the HVB.

Installation is the reverse procedure:

1. Connect the new HVB to the old black plastic mounting bracket.
2. Reconnect the red wires into the correct holes. They lock in automatically. Push the wires in until they click and won’t come free then slide the rubber boot down to hold them in place.
3. Mount the HVB back onto the metal bracket and screw in place.
4. Reconnect the 4-pin connector to the circuit board.
5. Reconnect the ground wire.
6. Close her up.

Good luck. A special thanks to the fine folks here and here for sharing their expertise with the rest of us.

He’s been brown-bagging it since then and as I’m the designated lunch builder I’ve taken it upon myself to draw a fun design on each one along with his name while my coffee brews. It’s usually some combination of astronaut or pirate or enchanted animal enjoying his lunch in an exotic locale and then considerately throwing away the bag.

And then it hit me: can I run a brown paper sack through my inkjet printer? Here’s the result on the first try:

Not too shabby, eh? I found the clipart here and popped it into a 5×11 document and printed it. The bag jammed at first but hitting the form feed button got it through. My printer seems okay but no promises that yours won’t jam, catch on fire, and burn down your house if you try this. Fun, though. The final version has his name on it in a calligraphic font. I haven’t shown it to him yet but I doubt if it’ll matter one bit to him what I put inside of it tomorrow morning.

A better way to mass produce these without destroying your printer would probably be to buy large stickable sheet labels and print on those instead.

We decided to do it ourselves. It’s something I’ve wanted to learn how to do for a long time but I didn’t want to make a lot of first-timer mistakes on a huge job. This bathroom is just the right size for learning to tile. It’s about 60 square feet combined with an inner room separated by a door with the bathtub and toilet and an outer room with two sinks and cabinets. It’s roughly L-shaped. The tub area had been tiled with an ugly 6″ brown tile and the outer area was carpeted. We decided on an offset (“running bond”) pattern rather than just straight rows (“jack-on-jack”) but that was as ambitious as we got.

Here’s what I learned:

• The instructions online at the Lowe’s website are very helpful and accurate.
• It’s much more difficult to start this job than to finish it. Psychologically, it’s hard to get yourself to demolish your own house. Just get a hammer and destroy some tile, cut out some old carpet. Once you’ve reached the point of no return, it’s much easier to continue. Your house can take it.
• Remove all of your bathroom doors before starting. I know you think you can get away with just closing and opening the doors as needed, but trust me: removing the doors is easier.
• Ripping out carpet, pad, and tack strips is extremely easy. Don’t fall for it. This is a trick to get you to relax your guard so you’ll be totally demoralized when you try to remove tiles.
• Removing old tile is much more difficult. There are tools that can help but we found that an old flat-head screwdriver and a hammer worked very quickly. Use the hammer to wedge the tip of the screwdriver under a tile until it cracks. Remove and repeat. It goes pretty fast.
• If you’ve got cement fiber board under the tile, do not try to remove it by demolishing it with a hammer. Find all of the nails or screws holding it down and remove those first. Then the board comes up very easily.
• Ignore the know-it-all at the home improvement warehouse who says you need a pro-high-power-diamond-tip-bladed-mega-buck saw to cut backer board. You don’t. Get the kind that you can score and snap. Get a scoring tool though and don’t try to do it with a utility knife. The backer board scores and snaps easily.
• You will spend a lot of time on your knees. Get decent knee pads with an extra-wide strap or two straps. Avoid “value” pads that only use a single strap. They get behind your knees, hurt, and you won’t use them.
• Cement comes in 50 pound bags. Only mix half of it at a time. If you mix the whole bag, you’ll end up having to buy a new bucket and another 50 pound bag of cement because it hardened in the bucket because you were tiling too slowly because it was your first time. Plus, it’s easier to mix.
• Get someone to help you. It makes the job go much faster if one person lays cement and another person comes behind to place and clean tiles. Plus, you’ll feel better knowing you’re not making mistakes alone.
• If it’s a small job, just measure the tiles you need to cut and get the home improvement store to cut them for you.
• Grouting is much easier than tiling. But buy a regular grout float and an offset grout float. The regular float won’t work under counters.
• Cement and grout clean up pretty easily. Don’t stress about making a little bit of a mess.
• It’s hard work and it’s going to take you longer than you think. We completed the job in 5 afternoons and probably put in around 15-20 hours total. If you worked faster you could theoretically do it in a weekend—but I’d count on doubling the estimated time for your first job.

It turned out really well and we saved a bundle. The total cost for the entire job including tools and materials was around $200. Hiring someone would have easily cost us $800 in our area. And I’m confident we can do a bigger job now. And if anything goes wrong with the floor, we now have the experience and know-how to fix it ourselves.