Abort face palm

Looking at the underside of the PCB at a space where a rectifier should be made me think, hmm why don't I just stick a rectifier in there from this side, just to see if the beast will boot up.

So I did, and it works! The professional electronic engineer should avert his gaze now but for everyone else here is my temporary kludge:

I have a huge collection of these rectifiers, I think they are International Rectifier (oh yes it says on the side) and they will do about 25A. They were used in a project by Nottingham university on wind power, apparently the implementation was done by contractors in Scotland on site, it seems they did not realise that these devices are really designed for crimp terminals nor did they have a soldering iron big enough to solder them, so they just put the wire through the hole and soldered it back to itself with a little extra solder for good measure. Out of about 50 rectifiers I have not found one good joint! Not that this is a lot better, but....

It works!! At least it does not explode and not exploding is always good in electronic circles! I get the proper (yet wrong) rectifiers tomorrow and will mount them properly also replacing the thermal transfer compound on the IGBTs.

Thank F for that!!