In the spirit of "I'm too cheap to by anything", I decided to fix what I have.
-craft hack saw
-wire cutters, electrical tape, soldering iron, solder, tinner, knife,
-enclosure, old electric cord,
-volt meter
1. Used a small craft hack saw to open up adapter shell. Carefully saw only
to get past the glued shut shell. I do mean carefully.
Also needed to saw into the shell to remove the cheapo plugs.
2. Snipped the black wires from the plugs that went into the electrical outlet.
3. If you look at the white wires that connect to the scanner, one of the wires
has letters printed on it. That is the negative wire. Snipped both of those wires
and peeled back the glue that was very generously covering the negative wire
on the circuit board.
4. Used a soldering iron to remove the white wires from the circuit board.
5. At this point you have to figure out what kind of enclosure you are going
to use. I had an old power supply from from an ancient dead laptop. I just
removed the innards from that and used the plastic enclosure.
6 The idea here is to create an adapter that will be located in the middle
of the two cords. One cord is going to get plugged into the wall
so any old electrical cord from any appliance will work. I did not worry about
polarity here. Then you can reuse the white cord from the original adapter and
here is where you have to worry about polarity. Once again the wire that has print
on it, is the negative wire.
6. Solder new wires onto the circuit board. I used a black wire for the negative
and a red wire for the positive. of course.
7. Tied the black electrical cord in a knot to fit inside the enclosure
to add strength to the connection. Did the same for the white wires. The enclosure
I used was large enough to allow me to do this.
8. Be sure to do a dry run with a volt meter to make sure your connections are good and
that you have the correct polarity and no shorts and all that stuff.
9. Finish up connecting all the wires with whatever suitable method you can think of, and
close up the case.
10. Kick yourself for being too cheap to buy anything, because you just spent almost
2 hours trying to figure out how to replace an adapter that costs 20 dollars on a hobby
that annoys everyone around you.
11. Open beer and listen on your scanner waiting for the end of civilization.
