The funny thing is on my 16th birthday which falls on Oct 5th the principal called me into his office and gave me two choices. My options, he would kick me out or I could quit school of my own accord.
I told him that I would quit and that he could reimburse me for my book rental fees, from this time on my education begins.
Back to appliance timers, the ones I'm familiar with are purely mechanical these are easily rebuilt. Usually its the contacts that supply heavy loads to the motor or heating elements that burn out.
On each non working timer that gets tossed you will find a set of heavy duty contacts untouched, people are creatures of habit, the lady of the house will alway wait until she has a full load before doing the wash. So the full load heavy duty cycle will have th most use on the contacts while the gentle load will have very little or no wear on the contacts.
Since the contacts are only riveted on you can easily salvage a good inventory of contacts from your discarded timers. No matter who the manufacture was of your particular timer it appears they all purchase the same style of contacts making them interchangeable.
Anyone with half an ounce of ambition could rebuild a timer from salvaged parts as most timers are built from the same design its the plastic cams inside that program the cycles.
For those with a higher knowledge of electronics tackling a newer timer would be a snap, usually the component that is gone will show up as a burnt item on the board, replacement parts can be purchased from places like Digikey
Electronic Components Distributor | DigiKey Corp. | US Home Page
There are shops that even rebuild and recalibrate an old over thermostat for your vintage stove that your about to restore.
Thermostats rebuilt, Thermostats restored*
At one time I even looked into repairing ammonia absorption fridges aka RV fridge, there's a market for the
cores. I'm just giving this url as an example of whats out there.
RVCOOL.COM - Supplier of rebuilt cooling units for Norcold and Dometic RV Refrigerators.
The point I'm trying to make is that you can do anything you set your mind
to.Don'tte your time going to school there are plenty of opportunity you can take advantage of with out being certified.
Besides once you get to be good enough at what your dong you can challenge your ticket, its called Grandfathering a ticket, you'll have to write the test to get a trade qualification. About the only gain here is that you can now work alongside other tradesman on Union jobs.
The only trade i run into that protected its trade people was commercial refrigeration, I could still do domestic with out a ticket, but they covered the basis with the purchase of
freon. But then if I was determined to continue repairing fridges from home I would reclaim my
refrigerant from discarded units for reuse.
Ammonia Evaporator
Mulden 
Originally Posted by gustavus
The funny thing is on my 16th birthday which falls on Oct 5th the principal called me into his office and gave me two choices. My options, he would kick me out or I could quit school of my own accord.
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