screwdriver for open eventide time factor power supply

Opening the power supply is not recommended…

No reason not to open the powersupply IMO, if like me the wire coming out of the strain relief had cracked. Very poor design.

Anyway Eventide sent me a new one so there was nothing to be lost by trying to repair the old one. Its easy. You need a small hex drive socket. I got a set of these off ebay. Once you have the screws out, you will need a very sharp flat blade to break the joint, they use some glue but it is easy to part it. I used a sharpened flat scraper but you could use a stanley blade (not still in the handle).

Once you get it apart all the components come out easily. I modded mine so that instead of the moulded strain relief, it had a 2.5mm socket so that I could use any lenght cable, though you'll have to make your own, I couldn't find any pre-made ones.

Note, I fitted two sockets, but you can't power two factors from one supply, you get really bad hum.

This is a real hot-button issue for me. I'm with hywelq, and I've done this same mod a few times -mostly with those bloody Roland PSA's. These things, in all their stunning varieties, have to be a major cash cow for the transformer industry.

To begin, these moulded strain reliefs are not strain reliefs at all. They are strain multipliers. Try and bend a deck of cards and you'll see what I mean. Now, if the the same design were only attached to the wire right at the point of entry to the casing, and rest of the wire with its insulation was allowed to slip inside the strain relief when bent, then it might work, but with the whole length of the strain relief moulded to the insulation, a minor bending stress (for such a small gauge wire) is coverted to pure tension on the conductor which is far too small to withstand it. 

The idea seems to work well with heavier conductors, where the strength of the conductor in tension exceeds the strength of the relief in compression, as in the Line 6 and PowerAll designs for example, but with 20-28 gauge wire it's a guaranteed failure -a time bomb. Whoever designs these things this way and sells them, should be sentenced to 5 years hard labor, digging those millions of PSA's out of the landfills.

Achaput, it's agreed that opening the power supply should not be recommended, but that presupposes that the power supply is properly designed, and that requires that it also be properly specified. Now, since you are the customer in this instance, it only requires that you refuse to accept this junk and specify a unit with a properly sized conductor. There's more to sizing a wire than just its electrical properties.

And while we're at it, perhaps we might spec a right-angled barrel plug at the business end, too?

I love my TimeFactor enough that a few bucks more to make it right wouldn't be a deal breaker.

k

Appreciate this is a 6 year old thread, but I’ve have this problem with both my TF &MF power supply’s. They have both frayed at the same point, at the strain relief. As it’s out of warranty I’m trying this fix, however I’m struggling to crack open the block.
Any advice how to do this would be appreciated.
I do agree that the power supply’s are poorly designed and Eventide needs to sort this out.