Looking for schematics for Fire-Lite MS-424A

Yes, I've already looked at the 7-page "install" manual on firelite's site. Unfortunately, there's not much useful in there, and all of the manual links I've found via google are copies of the not-so-useful manual. I'm looking for someone who has a PDF or paper copy of schematics. If I can't find that, I guess I'll be creating my own...

If you are planning on doing actual electronic repairs to boards etc I strongly recomend against it as you would be violating UL label and leaving your self open to a major lawsuit should a board fail , board repairs should only be done by factory authorised repair person.

Dood...send it back to the factory for repair...or triple your liability insurance coverage.

These are for my own experimentation, so I don't really care if I void UL approval, and I've actually repaired fire alarm systems for a past job. I am just hoping for something to help me out, so that I don't have to spend as much time figuring out what's broken on them.

This is proprietary information. No one has factory schematics but the factory.

Others have spoken about the liability so I'll just speak to the sheer irresponibility of perfoming unauthorized repairs on a peice of life-safety equipment.

Then again, for someone who is prone to trying to repair a board rather than replace it, my guess is you would more attentive to the money it would cost you rather than the lives you are risking.

If a board has proper power applied and all the appropriate inputs but does not generate appropriate responses then the board is bad. What more do you need to know? Replace it.

Or would you truly be comfortable looking into the eyes of someone who lost a loved one due to your cobble-job and telling them, "Well, it was cheaper to do it that way, and it seemed to work okay..."

For f*ck's sake, do the job right or get another job.

1. The man just wants schematics so that he can experiment on some old boards.
2. He stated that he has been previously employed repairing fire alarm systems.

He may be qualified to do board level repairs, or he may not. If he is, he'll do it as well as anyone at the "factory". If he wants to assume liability, how is that any skin off our noses?

On Nov 27, 1:58=EF=BF=BDpm, "alarman" wrote: .

Well, I think the concern is ..... that he may not know or have considered the ramifications of his "repairs", especially if he isn't in the installation trade. He may have repaired PCB's, ( as have I,, but in another industry) and even fire PCB's, but not being in the installation business, doesn't realize what "unauthorized" repairs can result in.

The "skin off our nose" ,I think, is the concern over his actions being the cause of of harm to someone. Once it's been determined that he realizes the "ethical" downsideside of him doing "unauthorized" repairs and he decides to do it anyway, THEN .... it's on his head.

And what difference does it make? ................. no one here has the schematics anyway. So he's on his own. We can only hope that if he didn't realize what he was doing ............ and if he now he does, ....... he will not continue.

If he was though...he'd know better than anyone here where to get schematics, no?

Probably, but knowing where to get them and being able to get them are not necessarily the same thing.

No, he wants to experiment so he can more readily troubleshoot the board later. Why would he need to do that if he wasn't planning on field repairs?

He said he had repaired fire alarm systems for a past job - how do you know he wasn't the maintenance man at some church?

Yeah, a solder job done on a garage work-bench is always as solid as one done in a factory setting.

I'll admit I assumed the worst case scenario, so if the OP can assure us that I have it wrong and these refurbished boards will NEVER end up installed in a life-safety situation then I'll be happy to apologize.

But it's kind of a sad statement that someone risking the lives of people we don't know is no concern of ours.

In Pa. we have a catch all law called risking a catastrophe. and if he did put such a board in service and it failed and caused major damage ,injury or death he would be facing felony charges if AHJ so desired. This law also effects professionals who fail to notify or otherwise fail to stop a problem from happening that is with in there power. So yes it is other peoples buisness who posts what on this board . So as a professional I posted the approriate response with out getting nasty.

I still repair industrial electronic boards mostly power supplies for equiptment no longer made or supported but nothing which is lifesafety oriented or would pose a hazard when it fails.,

We do board level repairs on DVRs and the higher wattage emergency light units when we can identify the specific component that failed. On one job involving a Notifier 5000, I noticed that the system wasn't detecting ground fault troubles of any kind. On closer inspection, some Nimrod had cut a resistor in the ground fault detection circuit. I knew the responsible party and reported it but all he got was a discrete letter telling him not to do it again. He's still out there performing his brand of trouble shooting. The ground fault which he couldn't trace resulted from the improper installation of a remote annunciator. To top it all off, the verification agency he hired passed the job. We replaced the whole board. On another job involving an Edwards 8500, a rat (the four legged kind) got into the FACP cabinet and chewed through a couple of wires on one of the paging amplifiers. There were turds all over the entire rack of amps. I changed the amp and cleaned out the panel. When I originally saw the turds in the bottom of the can, I was reminded of that scene in the movie "Mouse Hunt", where the exterminator (played by Christopher Walken) picks one up and examines it, then tastes it and remarks that the mouse has a slight calcium deficiency.

Yep...and have we ever seen proprietary schematics? No and never.

Methinks you'd have to be insanely passionate about repairing a board to backwards engineer a schematic !

Or from Belgium

bring on the tinfoil

My point was that he doesn't need a nanny. If you can help him with schematics, that's fine. If not, then why assume that he's an idiot?

Oh, jeez. Get over yourself.

Good point - I let my emotion carry the day - I probably could have said the same thing without getting personal. For that I would apologize for the way I said what I said. But the sentiment stands.

Because some idiots like me collect these things for the fun of it. If you don't believe me, try searching YouTube for videos of people demonstrating them. These panels are discontinued, and hardly state- of-the-art, it's not like I'm asking for schematics on a Simplex 4100, which is a current product (and much more complex).

FWIW, I've installed and repaired systems (down to board-level repairs when we could obtain schematics) while working for Purdue University as a student. If that scares you, well, I don't know what to say. What I've got is the "bad" systems that I purchased from Purdue's surplus outlet. I'll probably go talk to my old coworkers to see if there are any schematics in the shop, considering that it seems like I'm not going to get anything useful out of here.

Who says that I don't have the proper tools like a temperature controlled iron, proper DVM and o'scope, and other tools that they'd have in the factory. And, if we pretend that I were going to use these in a "life safety" situation (which I've already said that I'm not), who's to say that the person at the factory is going to do a better job at the repair that I am? I certainly would rather trust my own life to something that I repaired than something that was repaired by a $2/day worker in the far-east. I've worked with crappy, lazy repair techs, and am just as disgusted by them as Frank said he is.

The only thing they have over me is insurance, and troubleshooting experience (and the appropriate service manuals). If I get service manuals, and am insured (I don't know, maybe if I were doing this as a business and finished getting my PE), that would put me basically on the same level as a factory repair, wouldn't it?

Ok, but you have no evidence that I was going to use this information in such a way, you just blindly assumed it..

Pat