Bill Sheehan
Well-known member
I just got a little Kustom PA-50 personal p.a. system. I have previously owned one and liked it so much that I decided to add another, as they can be "daisy-chained" for certain situations. The carrying handle on these little units is much like you'd find on similar pieces of equipment, and consists of a strip of flexible plastic-y material, about six inches in length, held down by a little steel bracket on each end (each bracket being screwed down to the top of the unit with a single "machine" style screw about an inch in length); there's enough "slack" so that you can slip your fingers under the strip to pick the unit up. It weighs about fifteen pounds. Whenever I get an item like this, I like to take my screwdriver and kind of double-check to make sure that all of the screws have been tightened properly at the factory. On this unit, I noticed that one of the "bracket screws" seemed like it didn't give a lot of resistance when I checked it, and when I started to tighten it up, I could tell that I might soon be in danger of "stripping it out". So I carefully removed that screw, with the intention of doing the old "toothpick" method of firming things up in that screw hole. However, when I inserted the toothpick section, it fell all the way into the unit; so it appears that this particular screw hole goes all the way through the top of the unit. Under these circumstances, would my best option be to just get a screw with a slightly larger diameter, or is there another approach that might work better? So far, I have wrapped the existing screw with plumber's tape and re-inserted it, and although it feels fairly tight (maybe a "seven" on a scale of ten) and probably isn't going anywhere, it's bugging me a little that it's not super-tight like the other bracket screw. Any thoughts (including "leave it alone!") would be appreciated as always! Thanks!