sandall

6 hours ago, kerry davies said:

TRY THIS  which is the latest I can find.

They also do a 24-page guide to maintaining Portable equipment, but I don't have a link to hand.

To wrap this up - thanks to the kindness of kgallen & DrV I now have a working mic. If anyone wants to try this at home -

The cover that holds the red button can be levered-off by inserting a sharp blade over the locating tab on the body. The switch is a custom 6mm tactile, (presumably) surface-mounted on to an inaccessible PCB. In both my cases the little metal cover-plate had already been forced off by the users, so the plunger & tactile disc were loose. NB: the plunger is a very small keyed octagonal piece of plastic, very easily lost, & not replaceable. As has been suggested above, a replacement tactile disc can be sourced by cutting a standard 6mm tactile switch apart, but the discs come in various pressures and, more importantly, different diameters. The correct diameter is 4.5mm (4.8 won't fit; 3.5 will be too loose & may not switch reliably). Using a piece of sticky tape to hold the red button in its hole might save you accidentally turning the mic over & losing all your bits. 

Cheers Dave. PM sent

8 hours ago, timsabre said:

I think the metal click disc is an integral part of the switch

It is, but it should be extractable with a bit of brute force. I can't change the switch, so need to drop a new disc into the existing switch body.

12 hours ago, sunray said:

Or the effort of desoldering a used component.

No iron required, just a tin-opener - I only want the little tactile disc.

Suggest you send the photo to Steeldeck, who took over Hall Stage. I don't recognise the track, but to me nylon runners are quite modern, rather than very old🙂

7 hours ago, DavePallant said:

 you can always make up an order value with their 100 off AA batteries!

Thanks for that Dave, though the last thing I need is any more AA batteries😃

6 hours ago, sunray said:

10 x Tactile Tact Switch Momentary Switch 6mmx6mm Push Button Switch 12V 4PIN UK | eBay   10 for £2.49

Thanks Ray, but at that price it's hardly worth getting your hacksaw out😃

37 minutes ago, Mr Steve said:

What is the best approach in this scenario? ....... Is it simply to provide some side fill and pay careful attention to mic and speaker placement?

Short of going down the IEM route, this sounds a good starting point.

No local noise boy you can get in for the day for a few cans?

For what it's worth - back in the days of fixed-freq crystal txs I remember being able to use a mix of makes on 173.8, 174.1, 174.5 & 175.0, but adding 174.8 caused intermod with at least 1 of the others.

Thanks Dave, certainly looks very similar. I may be sorted thanks to another BR-er, but if not am I just looking for any 6mm tactile switch?

4 hours ago, kgallen said:

I've got some. Tell me what you want measuring

PM sent, but couldn't work out how to add the sketch. Diam is 4.5mm. Might be what's inside a 6mm Alps switch?

1 hour ago, timsabre said:

you still sometimes get the nightmare jobs that sounded like fun in the first place but then go downhill rapidly for varying reasons. I don't feel I can walk away from a job having accepted it so there's no escape then until you get to the end!

Likewise. I'm currently spending hours on the phone (that I can't/won't charge for) trying to source a probably non-available tiny piece of metal, just to save a friend's church the cost of a Sennheiser repair.

No, but take off the plastic outer & it well might. Well spotted, thanks. I'll have another chat with the spares man & see if I can persuade him to measure the width.

Unfortunately it's not really a "switch", just 3 loose parts, held in place by the cap, sitting on a bit of pcb. Dismantling a tactile switch is a thought, but how many would I need to destroy before I found one with a 4mm diam disc with 1mm travel? 

Just realised that both my sons are older than I was when I "retired"🤔

I recently posted about vandalised XSW power switches. Having got the replacement buttons (thanks Stuart) one mic is now sorted. The active bit of the switch is a tiny dished metal disc, which clicks in when pushed down & clicks back when released. Unfortunately the disc in the 2nd mic has lost its mojo & just reverses its shape when pushed. It's not listed on Sennheiser spares list & the church can't afford a new mic, or even a Sennheiser back-to-Germany repair. Now to the topic title - has anyone got, or know of, a dead XSW-1 handheld gathering dust? Doesn't need to be complete, & doesn't need to work, provided that when you push the power button you hear a click. Already tried fleabay & all the dealers I know. 

Well, the only way to remove the bit of body that covers the switch seems to be brute force with a sharp penknife. That's the easy bit; the "switch" is actually 2 tiny pieces of metal & an equally tiny piece of plastic, all of which need to be orientated correctly, & all of which will fall on the floor when you pick the mic up!! Unless you have good eyesight, a good lighting & good luck you may never see them again, in which case you now have a non-mic😥.

I once had a guitarist park his pedals a floorboard's thickness away from the loop feeder cables - also quite exciting.

(Still somewhat off-topic, but...) The EV horns I used were similar to your metal ones, but with curved ends & made of GRP.

Re the flow-chart - if you're showing feature-film DVDs (which one of "my" churches does) then it needs to be stereo, but even if it's all "yesses" a small worship band should probably still be mixed down to mono.

21 hours ago, sunray said:

In my experience rectangular horns are very different to columns and usually not in situations where I've noted lack of coverage.

I have several HBD12s, used them for "budget" events, where both coverage & throw tend to be more than adequate, but my first experience of outdoor horns was big EV (very) rectangular horns, where vertical mounting gave a noticeably wider spread.

Returning to topic - it sounds like you have plenty of scope to mount speakers where you want, Richard, so a centre-cluster is probably your best bet.

Re Jon's last post - for my last 2 church jobs I retained the existing pair of Philips columns, which were still fine, & added a couple of full-range speakers below them for music. Stereo in both cases, but maybe I should have stuck to mono? 

Those are the Evolutions - with a different PIA button problem🙁

Thanks for that. I suppose I'm going to have to collect them & work out how they come apart.

One of my local churches is killing the power switches on their Mk.1 XSW handhelds. Does anyone know whether Sennheiser still mend things?