Like the title says I fixed my remington shaver/clippers today. It started behaving especially badly a couple weeks ago after sitting unused for a bit.

It didn't seem to hold a charge and would fade until the motor stopped dead within 5 or 10 seconds, and seemed to be getting worse. I'm a pretty repair-minded person so I took it apart and took a look around at how it was put together, and grabbed the battery size while I was in there. 1 or two plastic clips broke but ultimately it came apart okay.

So, not seeing anything else obvious I ordered a pre-tabbed replacement battery online and set it aside.

Yesterday I received the battery and tried to install it (a whole other issue, the tabs from the factory were offset on one end so it was tricky to snake the new straight tabs through the pcb). I finally got it in, and voila.... oh wait, it still doesn't work. same issue.

That is why you should always troubleshoot before you buy parts! A quick voltage check on the old battery would have revealed that the battery was full, and not sagging too much under load.

I got back to it today, and after poking around for a few mins with a multimeter, I found that the battery voltage was great, and that the issue seemed to be with the surface mount PTC thermistor that was in series right before the wires that went off to the motor. I removed that thermistor and temporarily bridged the contacts (should be relatively safe in the short term, there is other protection circuitry in there incl a thermal fuse on the battery), and the shaver works great again (I also took the opportunity to remove the insane amount of hair built up in the head of the shaver, which is far too open on this model, allowing things to get inside)

I highly recommend people who are interested get into repair! with a little know-how, plus soldering and desoldering equipment (nothing fancy), you can do quite a bit of little repairs of devices that would otherwise be disposable for no reason

  • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I have a Philips that does the same, even up just tossing it because I had it for 7 years and it was like a $20 trimmer. I keep it in the bathroom so I think the humidity just shorted out a circuit. Freaked me out when it started going off in the middle of the night.

    • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      lol. Mine was like that almost out of the box. I have heard it in the middle of the night. One of these days I'll crack it open and mess with the switch. But for now, I just bang it really hard.