A while ago I was talking about purchasing a microphone snake and had decided to buy a $40 one off of eBay. It arrived a little while ago, but I soon realized why you don't buy $40 snakes off of eBay.
The above was one of the female connectors on the snake. I decided to take a quick look at one of the connectors, just for the hell of it and I am sure glad I did. You can see in the picture that the cold lead is so stripped that you wouldn't even know that it had insulation! Other connectors had too much insulation stripped off of them so that all the leads were shorted together. At least I didn't wait until the time of the recording to find out that the snake was unusable. Luckily the company was willing to give me a 15% refund on the product so I can repair it myself. But this only came after I accidentally gave them my school address and had to have a friend send it back to me, even after telling them about the mistake and them telling me it was all taken care of. Oh well, buyer beware I guess. This is what I'll be working on today.
In other news, I took the WV-V3 outside to see how it performs with good light. I used the alignment card with the now-fixed manual iris knob and the results aren't too bad.
However, I did notice that there may be a burnt-in spot on the blue tube, because there is a yellow spot in the lower middle left of the image. You can see it best near the white cross-fence in the video. I don't know when it happened. I hope it wasn't because of my efforts. I do have to admit though that I was somewhat wildly throwing the iris knob around. The spot does seem to appear in some earlier footage that I took without aligning the camera and before I threw it into manual iris. Oh well.
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