Dirt Devil Can Vac

For the most part, dead vacuum cleaners aren't worth the trouble it takes to bring them back to the apartment. I can't even carry a full-size upright vac on my bike. I only grabbed ths little Dirt Devil, almost as an afterthought, because it was small and ther wasn't anything better being tossed out.

It's a fairly unremarkable vacuum, with the exception of the carrying strap. At least I think a strap is unusual. It may not be for all I know.

The wheels came off easily. There was no axle, but rather a round tab and slot system (or whatever the technical name for that is) that the wheel snapped into. I've seen that done on other small vacuum cleaners, and it always reminds me of how the wheels are attached to a lot of toys.

Those screw holes go deep, almost down to the midline of the vacuum. My screwdriver was barely long enough for several of them, and not quite long enough for the one at the front. I really ought to get a better set of screwdrivers. I had to use another screwdriver to pry that back piece off.

That sticker on the aforementioned back piece indicates that this vacuum cleaner was only ten years old. Maybe it was heavily used and just wore out, but ten years seems kind of young for it to quit working. My parents had the same vacuum for close to twenty years, and still keep it around as a backup for the newer one.

Once I exhausted what I could do with screwdrivers, I only had one other tool to use: the ground. I took the carcass out to the trashpile, then I smashed it on the pavement a couple of times to jostle the on/off switch loose. Not that it was that impressive a button, but the trophy count on this one was so low, anything was better than nothing. Plus it's fun to smash things.

Yep, that's it. Two buttons and the axle from the front piece.

Corningware blender

This blender sat on the bottom of my workbench for at least six months just gathering dust. I found it on top of a junkpile and grabbed it, but not as something to take apart. Instead, I wanted it for preparing ingredients for some...thermodynamic shenanigans. That particular 'science project' never came to fruition, so the blender has just sit there doing nothing and taking up space for months.

Incedentally, I didn't even know Corningware made blenders.

It still worked, but I wasn't just going to clean it up and set it in the kitchen. I have no idea where it's been, what's been in it, nor what might have leached into the soft plastics that might leach back out into a smoothie or puree. So no food, but I can't just send a working blender to appliance Valhalla without maiking it blend one last thing. Preferably something blenders were never designed to blend.
This is a leather belt that finally wore out last week. I wore this almost every single day for at least the past ten years. I got it when my Dad was going to throw it out for being worn out, so it's entirely possible that this belt is older than I am. Which means it's tough, and hopefully tough enough to kill a blender.

I put the belt in the cup, put on the lid, and hit the highest setting. Nothing. The blt was wrapped around the blades and they couldn't turn. It produced that straining motor smell that reminded me of my Mom's old Mixmaster. I ended up just running the motor and dipping the ends of the belt into the spinning blades. That still got caught in the blades a couple of times and made smoke come out of the blender.

I didn't grind the belt down to leather dust, but I did cause enough destruction to be satisfied, as you can see. Nor did I completely destroy the blender motor, since I decided I didn't want to risk tripping a circuit breaker.

I did mess up the teeth that spin the blades though. That's what was causing the smoke, not the motor as I first suspected.

I'm glad the belt-blending was as fun as it was, since the actual disassembly was rather dull. Not that I was surprised, as the base of a blender is basically a motor in a box, with a few buttons. I was surprised, however, at how flimsy the plastic of the case was. Corning is primarily a glass and ceramics company, so the cup was probably pretty good, but the base just didn't have the heft of a good blender. Come on Corning, you can make a better blender than this.

It also didn't appear to be built with disassembly and repair in mind, which in my experience is also a hallmark of cheaply made products. The motor looked like it was mounted in such a way that you can't get it out without destroying the plastic case. They didn't even have the decency to use reuseable wirecaps. Lame.

The amount of trophy parts I took is probably larger than it has a right to be. The quantity is much larger than the quality, as I have no idea what I will do with a bunch of chiclet-shaped buttons or the grey bottom piece with the oddly eyecatching vent design. Or any of it, really.

Panasonic tape recorder

Most of my disassembly fodder comes either from the sew/vac place or the campus's occasional purging of obsolete and broken electronics. These are fairly clean sources for junk, in the sense that they never have any nasty food trash mixed in with mechanical and electronic stuff. The piles outside of houses and apartments in anticipation of heavy trash day are generally 'clean,' but there's always a risk of food trash (or worse), so salvaging from them requires some discretion.

I almost didn't grab this one. It had just rained, and the junkpile that this recorder was in smelled as if it had some food trash in it, and I pretty much avoid trashpicking in anything that might have organic garbage in it. But the recorder was off to the side, and a cursory visual and smell test determined that it didn't have anything nastier than a little mud on it, so I took it back to the apartment. And washed it off, just to be sure.

All trash has a story, an object's history of use before it is discarded. Most of the time, the junked object doesn't give much indication of its 'life,' but sometimes it does. If I may play amateur detective/archaeologist for a second, the masking tape above the battery area seems to indicate that the battery cover didn't stay in place, which makes me think that at one point someone dropped the recorder and broke the latch, necessitating the quick-fix. Maybe the owner finally lost the battery cover altogether, prompting him or her to finally toss the tape recorder out.

Or not. I don't know for sure, and on a strictly practical level I really don't care. But I do think it is instructive to think about trash beyond just 'that stuff they take to the landfill twice a week.'

Anyway, I knew from previous experience with tape players that this disassembly was going to be at least somewhat more entertaining than the past few things I've taken apart. Yep, lots of little pieces, though I was disappointed in how many of the little screws didn't budge. Also, note the detatched carry handle in the upper right of the picture above. It's made of metal. You don't see that much these days.

The signal traces (i.e. printed wires) on this circuit board are much less compact than those of more modern electronics.

A few trophies that I don't what I'll do with. I like the shapes of the buttons though.

Koss UR19 headphones

Most of the electronics and appliances I take apart either come from trashpicking or interceptions of other people's junk on it's way to the garbage can. "If you're just going to toss that, can I have it?" That kind of thing. These headphones, on the other hand, were actually mine to begin with but they finally quit working right.

I try not to buy crappy appliances, and what I buy I try to take as good of care of whatever it is as I can. Though when something does break down, I have no qualms about immediately ripping into it.

These headphones have lasted me at least five years, then they fell victim to the same thing that kills all my other headphones. One of the speakers dies. And it's never just a matter of the wire's connection to the speaker coming loose. It's always much more subtle than that.

Here I've taken the malfunctioning speaker out and inspected it, but it looks fine to my admittedly untrained eye, which means I don't know what's wrong with it in order to fix it. So now I officially have to drop some cash to get a replacement. Oh well, might as well take it all the way apart.

I didn't bother to take a picture of the other ear disassembled. Looks pretty much the same as that one.

I took the housing off the sliding volume control on the wire, and the whole assembly is exactly as uncomplicated as you would expect. That control housing reminds me of a motorcycle gas tank; it might have a place in some future art project of mine.

Basically, I tossed the guts and kept the outer shell of the headphones. Who knows, I may get industrious one day and make a boom mic style headset for a cellphone hands-free microphone, since apparently no one makes those anymore.

Umax Astra 1200S scanner

This is only the second scanner I've ever scrapped. I got both of them at the same time, but I took the other one apart a few months ago. I saved this one because I was hoping it might still work, and that it was only being trashed because it was obsolete. I don't have any pressing need for a scanner, but it's one of those 'rather have it and not need it' kind of peripherals. And even if it was a few years old, it was free.

Turns out it didn't work, so I released it back into the waste stream. But not before I derived a little entertainment from it.

It's essentially a hollow box with a few other pieces inside. The thing about scanners is that there's not much to them mechanically; all the impressive stuff is electronic, and I don't know enough to know which of those components are still good, nor what I would do with them if I kept them. Steel and plastic, wheels and springs, I understand that stuff, more or less. Electronics are still basically voodoo to me.

Sometimes, even knowing basically what's inside something, there's still an element of surprise. Interestingly shaped pieces or unusual configurations, things like that. That's why I still bother with dead computer keyboards, despite the fact that they all work the same way. Unfortunately, this scanner didn't really have anything like that. The last scanner I scrapped had a cool pulley system to move the optical parts, complete with a length of very thin braided steel cable. This scanner had a much simpler system.

What this one did have that the other one lacked was what is essentially a very long spring that protected the wiring.

The spring is the thing bent at a right angle in the above picture. I have no idea what I can use it for on a practical level, but it's fun to play with.

Oh, and I pulled some other crap too, but the spring is definitely the star of this show.

Singer sewing machine

My current apartment is located a couple of blocks from a sewing machine/vacuum cleaner place, so I've taken apart a disproportionate number of sewing machines over the last year. I was snagging one or two every week for a while. However, they don't seem to be throwing out very many recently. That's just as well, I suppose, because they generally aren't the most interesting things to disassemble. Oh, they've got a lot of interesting moving parts inside, but those assemblies usually won't come apart with the limited tools I have, so I'm limited to whatever is on the outside (knobs, dials, controls, etc.). Relative to other appliances that I've run across, sewing machines seem to have a wider range of disassemblability (It's a word because I say it is); some I can barely remove anything beyond the knobs, and others I can get a lot further into.

This Singer falls in that first category. Hell, I couldn't even get that big control dial all the way off, just the inner knob.

See all those mechanical goodies inside? They had to stay there because those screws were on too tight for me to budge. It makes me wonder if the repair shop had the same issues and just decided it wasn't worth the effort to repair.


These are the few pieces I kept from this machine. I like to take a few trophies off of everything I take apart, partly as mementos (I've been doing this since I was a kid, but only recently started taking pictures), but mostly as parts for projects I keep telling myself I'll build one day. Most of these hypothetical projects are of the found-object sculpture variety, but I keep more universal components like wirecaps and nuts and bolts for more practical repair jobs.