[Ti] Fixing a power adapter cord

[mburke6225 at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/8/2003 6:20:57 PM Eastern Standard Time, gerry at netspeed.com.au writes:

> 
> My Teenager from Hell (bless her) tripped over the cord of her iBook's white power adapter the other day and it has broken... Does anyone know if these can be fixed?<

Gerry

Consider yourself lucky.  I've got two teenage daughters who seem to be perfecting careers as an Underwriter Laboratories testers for MAC POWER CORDS.  They must take perverse pleasure making Apple Engineers look like total idiots as they "trip" over the cords which magically string all over our house like some renagade strands of spaghetti on the floor of an Italian restaurant.  I have screamed, cajoled, and begged for them to stop criss crossing the floor with the cords.  And no they are not spoiled jerks.  They are good kids who just don't get it.

What makes it exasperating is that they both have iBooks and constantly short out their cords (at 60 to 79 bucks a piece...do the math).  After replacing them three times (no joke) I finally spliced the joint by cutting the cord and stripping the sheath from the wire and cutting away the "nubbin" of the adapter (tricky to do).

I then twisted and soldered then separated each pole of the attached wires with electrical tape, then wrapped the whole thing in electrical tape.  Looked like hell but it worked like a champ.  Both girls flashed me their "You're our hero smiles" as they went back to surfing the web (read as "doing homework").

There I was basking in the reflected iBook LCD light flashing off their braces when my wife takes one look at the bulbous mound of electrical tape on the power cord and hits the roof, "The girls could get shocked?  ARE YOU CRAZY!"  So much for basked glory.  We went to the Apple store that night and dropped about 130 bucks for two new adapters.

Moral:  If you go ahead and fix the cord it will work just fine but your wife will likely kill you long before the cord will short out. LOL

MBurke