I wanted a clock radio to wake up to in the morning. Not having a TV I like listening to the radio to hear the news and feel like I’m staying in touch.

When I mentioned I was going to buy a new radio to my wife it reminded her of an old Sony world radio she had buried away in the cupboard which she dug out for me. It fitted the bill perfectly so I popped some new batteries in and sat about trying to tune it in, unfortunately to no avail. Something was not quite right but I had no idea what.

In a bid to find the problem I turned to the Sony website and searched for a user manual, but the radio was too old to have any electronic manuals online for it. So I did a general search for the model number through Yahoo! and stumbled upon some really detailed instructions on how to fix the exact problem I was having. The instructions were put together by some small repair shop in Germany and included detailed photos of how to open the radio and replace the faulty capacitors to fix the problem. Fantastic, but I didn’t have a soldering iron or know where to source new capacitors from so I did another search, this time for electronic repairers in my area. In the results I happened to find a guy who lives literally 3 streets away from me and who does small scales repairs like this. I emailed him the instructions I had found and asked him to quote on doing the repair. He said he would do it for $60 and I dropped it over to him just the other day.

You’ve gotta love the web!