parts

One of my audiophile pals, Dave King, e-mailed me the other day about his latest find, the Dayton B652 ($25 per pair). It didn't arrive in time for my Top 10 audio bargains blog the other day, or it would have surely been included.

I've known Dave for 20 years, and we've listened to a lot of hi-fis together, so I know he's got great ears. And he knows how to get my attention: "I'm certain I recently discovered the absolute diminishing returns point in hi-fi loudspeakers. They remind me a lot of Wharfedale Diamond speakers of yore, but the B652 has a 6.5-inch midwoofer instead of the Diamonds' 4.5-inch." The original Diamonds were a really big deal in the 1980s; they were easily the best budget speaker of the era, but even then they were more like $60 or $70 a pair. They were probably made in England, the Dayton B652 is built in China.

It's a mid-size, black vinyl-covered monitor speaker, 11.7 inches high, 7.1 inches wide, and 6.5 inches deep. The front baffle hosts a 6.5-inch polypropylene woofer and a 0.6-inch polycarbonate ferrofluid-cooled tweeter. Dave liked the fit and finish well enough, but he wasn't too happy with the Dayton B652's spring-clip wire connectors. I agree, clip connectors never have much grip on the wires, so they can fall out when you move the speakers. I've seen those things on $100 speakers, but on a $25 speaker you can't really complain about spring clips.

One of the Dayton B652's more interesting design features is its acoustic suspension (nonported woofer. I like that because acoustic suspension woofers tend to sound better than ported ones, and Dave was impressed by the Dayton B652's bass definition. The downside to acoustic suspension designs is the bass doesn't go as deep as ported woofers do. The Dayton B652's bass is reasonably flat to 70 hertz, and Dave likes to use subwoofers with most speakers anyway. When I pressed him on the matter he said he thought most folks would be well-satisfied with the Dayton B652's bass on its own. … Read more

You could be responsibly green and take your old TV to Best Buy to be recycled. Or, like Sam Todo, you could be responsibly geeky, taking the telly apart and turning it into a walking humanoid robot!

Todo, a student from Africa's Togolese Republic, constructed "Sam10" almost entirely from old television sets, as you'll note from the antenna popping up behind the little guy's head. Todo aims to make the robot fully automatic, so it can greet people, avoid objects, and calculate the distance in front of it.

The robophile also says he also wants … Read more

So you want to upgrade your current car stereo to a phat sound machine with specialty or aftermarket parts? Beyond your personal tastes and desires for items like a head unit, speakers, and woofers, you should probably be aware that you'll need to upgrade your battery and alternator; most production vehicles' electrical systems are not designed to run high-power aftermarket audio equipment. In fact, most vehicles' electrical power range lies between 600 and 1,200 watts--not much for a big, loud, fancy car stereo.

Once you've decided what exact pieces you want to install as your car stereo … Read more

Earlier this week, iPhone repair site iResQ posted photos of what the blog claims are fourth-generation iPhone parts, received "as a sample from a reputable source." The most obvious change in features of the alleged new iPhone is that the front panel--and therefore, the phone--measures nearly a quarter-inch taller than the iPhone 3GS.

iResQ claims the new iPhone parts contain an LCD that's glued at the factory to the digitizer, which would suggest higher repair costs as both parts will have to be replaced at once (versus the separate LCD and digitizer on the iPhone 3G and … Read more

Flaws in shipping sometimes result in cracked, shattered, or dented televisions. Useless? ShopJimmy.com doesn't think so. The Minnesota-based company had a revenue of $3 million this year by salvaging functioning parts from damaged televisions.

Every week, ShopJimmy receives between 800 and 1,000 broken TVs to disassemble in search of sellable parts for small repair shops.

"We're looking to limit the random e-waste that ends up in landfills," said Ryan Zarlengo, marketing director at ShopJimmy.com. The company is also sparing resources by lowering the demand of brand-new replacement parts (which are far more expensive … Read more

Vehicle Manager Fleet Edition from Kaizen Software Solutions is a professional-quality vehicle inventory and maintenance database. Using it, business owners and fleet managers can track mileage, fuel use, service intervals, and repairs, and cross-reference each with tools for managing personnel such as drivers, vendors, and other contacts, and parts and materials. It simplifies the daunting task of keeping track of a large fleet of cars and trucks, but its real benefit is in keeping every vehicle serviced in a timely fashion, and in keeping track of every repair and part. It can save you money in the front office and … Read more

We've all read those blogs that "reveal" the parts cost of a fill-in-the-blank, Kindle, iPod, or Palm Pre. If you ask me, this simplistic, by-the-numbers gambit overlooks most of the costs of bringing a product to market.

First and foremost, products, all products, are priced to what the market will pay. I don't care if it's a 16-ounce bottle of Poland Spring water, Coldplay concert tickets, or a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano, retail prices are determined by what the market will pay. And luxury products have higher profit margins than mass market stuff. Oh really?

But the mindless rash of blogs that purport to add up the parts costs, for example $39.51 for the display, $15.96 for 8 gigabytes of flash memory, $15.41 for components, and $12.39 for the 3-megapixel camera, to calculate the cost of anything are hugely misleading. The writer merely subtracts the parts cost from the retail price and concludes the difference is the "profit."

Does the writer assume the company's factory doesn't pay rent or for electricity or heating and air conditioning? And that the factory labor force works for free?

These articles completely ignore other costs, such as research and development and engineering expenses associated with creating say, a Kindle. Manufacturers also pay significant licensing fees for technology used in their products.

Shipping costs of large products such as flat-screen TVs must be factored in before determining the final cost to the consumer.

Oh, and what about the online or brick and mortar retailer? They have their own set of expenses for rent and employees. Some of whom might need health insurance. … Read more

This dandy little Windows gadget has a name longer than its apparently simple function. If you like to tinker under the hood, or if you run a small business restoring or repairing vehicles, you'll want to check out this search utility.

Auto Car Parts Finder installs a small interface as a gadget in Windows sidebar. It includes two fields: one for a search keyword or phrase, the other with a drop-down list containing Replacement Parts, Performance Parts, Accessories, and Tools. In our tests, launching a search with this free tool returned quick results. The search results are a bit … Read more

Because it lacked any kind of real help feature, our first impression of this free utility was not a good one. But after we played around with it for a few minutes, it proved to be a decent screen capture tool.

Once activated, ScreenParts introduced a transparent window to our desktop. We found that we could easily resize the window by dragging and dropping the corners, but it wasn't quite clear where to go from there. A right-click revealed a menu that contained options for resizing the window, resetting the capture counter, and configuring the capture timer. In Settings, … Read more