I recently performed a fix on the soles of a pair of Adidas Gazelle shoes to use them as spares or garden shoes rather than throw them out.
Firstly, I soaked them in the sink and gave them a gentle clean to get the worst dirt off using soap water. I then washed them in the machine at 30 degrees and dried them out on the radiator.
The soles on the Gazelles are made up on the heal end with a series of square/rectangular shaped moulds which over time with use walking and particularly driving, tend to wear off.
What is not immediately obvious is the ones that remain often have minute cuts in, letting small stones or gravel to trap inside between the outer and inner sole.
Adidas Gazelle showing wear on heals
The following tools and products were required to do this:
Stanley Knife
Sandpaper (medium grade), or sanding file-chisel
Shoe Glue (I used “Shoe Goo”)
Inspect the Soles
A cursory glance should determine which of the moulds are already gone, which are breaking, and which are damaged but not visibly so.
Some moulds will look okay, but on close inspection may be slit and already have gravel inside. You could place a felt-tip pen mark on the ones that need to be removed.
Cut Broken Moulds
Next, use a Stanley knife to cut out the moulds you’ve marked for removal. Follow the line of the mould ensuring the blade moves away from you for safety. They are not super-deep so cut out quite easily.
Two Moulds Cut Out
Sand Inside Walls
Shortly, a glue will be applied to fill the holes. It is important that there is a non-smooth surface for the glue to bind to.
Use a medium-grade sandpaper, perhaps wrapped around a pencil to lightly scratch the internal walls of the sole. Alternatively a sanding tool such as a file-chisel would work just as well. It doesn’t need to be over-visible, just not smooth.
Glue Fill
This is likely the only cost of the project. A shoe glue suitable for sole repair is required to flood the exposed holes.
I used a product from Amazon called “Shoe Goo”. Consideration should be given to how much you are likely to need. It is about £8 for a 26ml tube which is sufficient to fix three or four moulds per shoe.
Shoe Goo – Filling Moulds
One tip before you start the filling. If the inside sole is broken or lose then the glue will squeeze through under the pressure. A small block of wood which roughly fits inside the shoe should be sufficient to hold it in place during gluing – but bear in mind that the shoe will be upside down when the glue is setting.
Fill all your mould holes, and leave for 24 hours to set.
Setting
After a day, observe the sole to ensure that the shoe glue hasn’t sunk. If it has, then repeat the process to complete the fill ensuring that you again sand the set glue slightly to enable a new surface bond.
If all is good, the glue may appear translucent and slightly proud of the sole surface.
It should be sanded again gently regardless to prevent the shoe from slipping when in use.
During 2023, I started a two-year Master’s Degree in Digital Technology with a specialism in data analytics. This had a lot of focus on AI and machine learning, for obvious reasons.
Inherent Bias
“Some people say that intelligence without ethics isn’t intelligence at all ” – Coded Bias, Netflix (2020)
From the outset I wish to acknowledge the importance of ethics and bias-control within the development and use of AI. I will post a dedicated article on the matter.
Is it AI?
Prior to studying the subject area, I have to say I was somewhat sceptical when products and services were advertised stating they “use AI”.
Part of that scepticism was due to within my day job in the telecommunications industry, specialist suppliers would often claim AI being used within their solutions, but when pressed upon the specifics were cagy at best, all claiming it being proprietary so they weren’t in a position to elaborate. So from a layman’s perspective, how can you tell?
Another part of the scepticism was due to what is actually a paradigm shift in thinking. As a programmer, it is very easy to be tunnel-visioned into code branches, thinking of every problem as a flow chart of possibilities (if…else…then), repeating code (do while…loop) and crashing out due to exceptions (on error) or simply dictating the end of a flow (end).
Software testing or business requirements mappings often take these branches of code to build a matrix to prove compliance or coverage. So all is good… so long as it is within the boundaries dictated.
I would see an advert, a promotion or an article and ask myself, what makes this AI?
What is AI?
When I myself first looked up “What is AI”, I was presented with many well-written descriptions from a variety of sources. There wasn’t however a consistent or unambiguous description to a beginner.
Take an academic school subject such as Science. We know that branching off of Science are Physics, Chemistry and Biology. For each of those subjects will be syllabus items such as Science->Biology->Cell Biology. This could be represented in a basic hierarchy diagram such as this:
So what would a similar diagram for AI look like? A good starting point was an article written by IBM in 2023 identifying at a high level, 3 types of AI but acknowledging that only one of those three types are currently in existence, the other two being theoretical. Which creates a nice starting point:
This enables us to build upon the one item that exists today – Artificial Narrow AI. Should Artificial General Intelligence and Super AI evolve into a reality, then it will be likely this diagram will need to be re-written as they will likely share methods with Narrow AI.
Next, we must consider the types of AI methods which are applicable at this level. Machine Learning is the key method of AI, which itself can be broken down further. The diagram would now look like this:
There is a subset of Machine Learning called Deep Learning. Deep Learning uses neural networks that can learn and make intelligent decisions on it’s own with little human intervention compared with traditional machine learning – but we will come back that in a later chapter, for now we just need to acknowledge it in our diagram:
Machine Learning itself has 4 key types which we will investigate in the next chapter. For reference, those types are:
Supervised Learning
Unsupervised Learning
Semi-supervised Learning
Reinforcement Learning
Adding them to the diagram may start to look a little messy, so let’s redesign it a little for ease of viewing:
In this example we can see that the blue boxes are equal subsets of AI, with Machine Learning (ML) (green box) being a subset of Artificial Narrow Intelligence. ML contains it’s own subset called Deep Learning (yellow box), and has four typical learning methods associated with it – supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and reinforcement learning.
The focus of Chapter 2 will be based on the green box above (Machine Learning).
Examples
For the sake of future posts on the subject, I will refer back to the following three publicly available examples citing the use of AI. These have been purposely chosen as examples as they demonstrate subtly different types of AI implementation:
Another term often is used is generative AI – AI used to generate content in various forms of media. A useful example is the o2 “Daisy” service to simulate a customer when a caller is known to be fraudulent or suspicious:
Why? I hear you ask. A laser disk looks like a CD but is the size of an LP (30cm diameter). I thought as a winter project, and in preparation for a grand launch on New Year’s Eve after a couple of tins of Brew Dog from my Christmas Advent Calendar, a bit of karaoke would be interesting.. if I could restore one to a working condition.
A quick bit of history…
Wikipedia reliably informs me that the laser disc was conceived in 1978 and came to an end in 2001. There’s some collectable movie titles out there including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, not to mention copious amounts of karaoke from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. With the supreme confidence in being able to fix anything, I purchased Star Wars Trilogy, Casino, and a well dodgy selection of karaoke laserdiscs for testing from eBay. I just needed to choose a player to restore.
The Sherwood brand…
It’s probably worth just acknowledging some copyright and trademarks. “Sherwood” was (past tense it seems) the home brand of the Inkel Corporation, Korea, along with it’s superior brand, “Sherwood Newcastle”. There is still some lingering information available on the Inkel Website, but sadly it is somewhat outdated, with 2014 being the last obvious updates. I’ve tried to contact Inkel to verify some facts and to provide suitable references, but all contact details seem obsolete. This is a shame as there are plenty of Sherwood audio units in circulation and this particular project demonstrates how fixable they are. With that in mind, you may recall the logo badged on the front of their units:
The Sherwood Brand Logo (trademark owned by Inkel)
In a future post I will try and accurately summarise the history of Sherwood. I do hope that given the global market, the internet, AI, 3D printing and plenty of enthusiasts out there that Inkel may respond to me and perhaps agree to the open-sourcing of the user guides and service manuals to enable the kit still out there to live on.
One of the most useful features of the Sherwood hardware was a feature called DigiLink (often mis-spelt on eBay as “DigiLine” due to the font used on some units making the “K” look like an “E”). This nifty feature enabled Sherwood units to be interconnected using a single male-to-male RCA cable with the tip and receiver ports coloured in green (as opposed to red/white for audio, and yellow for video).
Sherwood LaserDisk LDK-6800 unit faceSherwood LaserDisc LDK-6800 unit rear – DigiLink RCA ports green.
The interconnection allowed the amplifier’s remote control to control any connected Sherwood accessories in the stack system rather than having to search for separate unit controllers. The protocol was proprietary, so again there is no real information on how this could be modified – a shame as with Raspberry Pis, wifi networks, iOT and mobile apps it would be a fun hobby project which could maybe be useful for diagnostics and unit control.
The LDK-6800
The Sherwood LDK-6800 support both laserdisc and video CD (VCD) – the latter having a 3-disc carousel.
As I have the Sherwood stack system made up of several components already, I thought it would be interesting to see if Sherwood had manufactured any laserdisc units. eBay quickly returned just two units, both located in California. Described as “used, with signs of wear, but working, no accessories”, I could see from the photos provided that they did indeed have the digiLink (v3) RCA ports for connection to the stack (presumably as a CD player as the tray accepts VCDs, Laserdiscs and CDs).
Whilst it had a US plug on the end, it did have a 110v/220v switch on the rear so it seemed like a viable purchase. But would it survive the journey to the UK?
No, is the short answer. When it arrived I added a plug adapter, switched it to 220v and powered it up. The power was fine but the disc tray was confused at best, eventually not working at all.
A look inside the case revealed a pretty dusty but otherwise decent looking setup. The LDK-6800 changer ejects in two parts – the first part to enable the 3 VCD wells to rotate, and then a little further still to enable the larger laserdisc to be inserted. Three motors each with three gears control the tray and lens manoeuvres, and my working assumption was that they would need testing and the belts replacing. All three motors were still functional but i did grease them a little and manually rotate them to ensure movement was smooth. I replaced all the rubber belts. I gave the laser lens a clean and cleaned the visible PCB boards with some compressed air. Surely it would work now?
Sherwood LDK-6800 Chassis Opened & Tray Fully Ejected
No! absolutely no difference. After a few more hours of tinkering to no avail, I decided to completely dismantle the unit. I carefully removed each component (I did check archive.org in the hope that some good-sport-audiophile had uploaded the operational manual, or better still the service manual, but no such luck), and systematically checked everything. The very last component I checked (which ironically was the second component removed, the first being the disc tray itself) was a bespoke (and I mean bespoke) 10cm diameter, imperial gear located just at the front of the unit directly under the disc tray in the center. Whilst it looked like it was in immaculate condition in position, upon flipping it, the potential issue became apparent. Because of the extended tray ejection to accommodate the laserdisc as well as being able to rotate the 3 VCD pods, the gear had a hidden channel groove on the underside to guide the laser mechanism. The groove wall had snapped meaning that the laser mechanism was veering off-track without the channelling to guide it. Easy fix, buy a new gear.
Inside unit with disc tray ejected – (large black) bespoke gear visible in center with no obvious damage
Wrong! It’s bespoke. In fact the only thing that came close was a Bang & Olufsen Century gear which performed a similar task, but even that was incompatible.
The Magic Fix
I spoke to a few engineer friends to discuss the viability of a 3D scan and a 3D print of a replacement gear. However I performed a home fix using some rubber cord and Gorilla e-poxy resin.
I took some electric wire which fitted perfectly in the channel groove as a temporary measure to follow the line of the snapped channel. With that firmly in place, I placed a second piece alongside it to act as the missing channel wall. Between the two I cut a cable tie simply as a barrier between them. I then e-poxy resin’d the outer piece to the gear base and clamped it for twenty four hours. The next day I removed the cord which was in the channel and the clipped cable tie leaving just the glued cord in place forming a new channel wall.
I lubricated the channel with white lithium cream (which is commonly used on audio mechanisms except belts), and re-assembled.
Bespoke gear when removed – visible side is in good condition.Unit with gear removed showing the plastic pin which runs through the underside of the gear mechanism.Gear fix – ePoxy cord bent to simulate the broken channel wall. Lithium white cream brushed through entire channel.
When I powered on again and pressed eject the door flew open, and to my amazement the laser disc operated first time.
Further tinkering found another important setting – the bespoke cog, when fitting back in harmony with its partner gears cannot afford to be a single tooth out of position, whilst one tooth out looks like the tray returns into the unit correctly it will not be sufficient to trigger the lens mechanism to move into position.
Remote Control
No accessories were included, but through an unbelievable stroke of luck, PicClick.co.uk reported a spare RC available for the LDK-6800… but guess where from? Illinois, US. No complaints though, in working and excellent condition. I gave it an obligatory clean and fresh batteries and it was fine.
Sherwood LDK-6800 LaserDisc Remote Control
The RC is not strictly necessary if you are using the digiLink system with the amplifier remote – however the limit of the shared controller will be CD functionality, anything specific to the LDK-6800 won’t be possible on the main control.
Wireless Microphone
The LDK-6800 comes equipped with two microphone input ports for wired microphones, each with separate volume controls.
As an alternative, I picked up on Amazon a pair of wireless microphones and a receiver (all USB re-chargeable) which could be inserted in either one of the microphone sockets. This too worked first time to enable a sing-along leaving one mic port free should a wired one be plugged in.
I then decided to give the chassis and front panel a good clean-up. In fairness, given the age of the unit possibly dating back to 1997 based on the serial number it was not in bad nick.
The following products I have used with success on this project – and of course all of them will be reusable on other similar projects.
I’ve used a few products to polish the unit, with two different scratch removers, brush and fibre cloth after a good blasting with an air blaster. A few deep scratches remain, but I am working on a remedy for those which, if I have any success, will post an update on.
Demo
The audio RCAs can be run through the Sherwood amplifier, but for demonstration I have connected them along with the video-out RCA straight to the TV just to prove it all works OK. And here are the results.
Unit LD-6800 working – Sherwood screen loaded.
What’s Next?
For this project, I think an electrical safety test now I’ve effectively serviced all the components and maybe a Star Wars Trilogy evening is in order.
If anyone happens to own either the service manual or the operating instructions for this model, then please get in touch.
Credits & References
I am grateful to the following sites, organisations and reference material for being able to make this a successful project, and to be able to share for others to benefit from:
Sourcing the materials to restore the player and accessories
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