Happy Holidays Hive! I'm sure you're all having a sweet, stress-free, and joyous year end holiday season 馃榿.
We don't often do much for the Solstice Holidays (winter, if you're wondering which) other than throwing together some gift bags of hand crafted foods, ointments, and other.
This year our dear Hedge Witch, who does all that putting together of bags, has some out of state family coming to visit with her adorable neices and nephew, so we wanted to Christmas the place up proper.
Hedge Witch has a very impressive collection of adorable ornaments that light up and talk. Most are themed around the popular characters from Peanuts, A Christmas Story, or Cat in the Hat. Most of them are pretty old now, and haven't always been stored properly, so they were in need of some minor repair, mostly to the battery compartments.
Forgive the blurry photo, the Christmas lights don't agree with my cheap phone. If you know the movies, you can see well enough which scenes these are from, except maybe the glass Bullwinkle mug, which is from National Lampoon's Christmas, and plays quotes from the movie.
The biggest problem with battery operated things that don't get used very often is that if you don't take the batteries out, they tend to ooze out some nasty stuff that corrodes the battery contacts. One of the negative contact springs has corroded right off this poor old Charlie Brown. We'll get to that later, I'll start by cleaning up the ones that are still here.
The flatter contacts for the positive ends are easy to clean with a file, or anything else that you can scrape them with. For the springs, you can scrub them a little better if you get under the end with a flat head screwdriver, like you see in the picture above. A butter knife also works well for this.
A lot of people will throw out old things like this once they quit working, when often all they need is to have the battery contacts cleaned like this.
To replace the broken springs, I'll scavenge some from this old battery pack out of a small flashlight. The flashlight had dim, old style LEDs, so I didn't think it was worth repairing. Just because a thing is broken doesn't make it not useful, and I've held on to this for quite some time. Now it will bring life to this amazing old Christmas toy. The springs pull right out of the battery pack with a pair of plier, and I just stuck it in place where the old one used to be. No gluing or soldering required, in most cases.
It took me a couple hours to get through all the broken ones. The large Peanuts characters are my favorites... if they're close enough together, they all start playing together when you push the button on any one of them.
I posted a video on 3Speak so I could share with you the joy that made it all worth the work, I hope you enjoy it (i hope this link works!). Happy Holidays everyone!!!
