My retro related activity today (well, yesterday really) - repairing/bodging some PC speakers that I've had for about 19 or 20 years, though they're being used on my main modern day system as they still sound damn good!
I have the Cambridge Soundworks Desktop Theater 5.1 DTT2200 speaker set and for years I've been putting up with the failing potentiometer issue, whereby the volume levels will fluctuate at random, high & low. The issue would go away for ages and only reappear from time to time. The recent heatwave we had seemed to have brought the issue back in full force and I'd finally had enough and in frustration ended up damaging the potentiometer.
The thing is soldered down and welded together, so no easy job of a clean & repair and it would only be temporary anyway, plus you can't seem to find exact replacements for these particular potentiometers anymore. So I decided to just bodge it - found the schematic online, chopped off the volume control and shorted the relevant wires together to achieve power on + full volume. It's working well, can just use Windows to control the volume levels for now.
I've bought another set of Cambridge Soundworks speakers, but the lower model 4.0 surround version. The volume control, whilst looking different, seems to use the exact same connector, so I might be able to just use that instead and keep the 4.0 set as spares. But further down the line I intend to purchase a different potentiometer and attempt to build a replacement volume control to fix the temporary bodge job, albeit sacrificing the left/right balance control - which I never used anyway.