General Electric cordless phone

No entry last week because I just flat ran out of time.

Somewhere between last Saturday and today was the first anniversary of me keeping records of my junk disassembly hobby. So, I figured I'd use the occasion to post about a phone I took apart several years ago. This was the first time I had attempted to document the taking apart process, from complete appliance to pile of parts.



This is from November 2004, about a month before I moved to Hawaii, hence all the boxes and stuff in the background. If I remember correctly, I had set the table up to sort out erector set parts for sale, then realized I had a broken phone, and decided to take it apart.



I didn't think/bother to document the process, so the documentation sort of skips to an end shot of all the parts. For some reason, I didn't separate the parts I kept with the ones I trashed. If I remember correctly, I kept the housing of the cradle, the cradle's antenna, and possibly the receiver housing. It's been a while, and not all of my junk is in the same place. Also, it seems like my photography skills have not really improved in 4 years.



As I was taking the phone apart, I decided the cradle housing looked sort of vehicular, so I got out my collection of broken toy parts to mock up a dune buggy/ATV type configuration. The white thing on top is a piece of cardboard, and the two (well one and a half, anyway) action figures were there to try to work out the best scale.



I made a crude mock-up in MS Paint to show where I wanted the wheels (black rectangles) and engine (grey rectangle). Unfortunately, the project has yet to move past the vague design stage. I should still have all the parts, so I may get back to it once I move to an apartment that's a bit more conducive to hobby work..

Singer Stylist 534 sewing machine

Hey, look, it's another sewing machine that didn't want to come apart. I'll get through this quickly since there's not much to say about it.

This looks like an older model, based on the font styles and amount of metal used in its construction.

Taking the panels off reveals the usual selection of fasteners that won't unscrew.

The underside of the top panel. That semicircle piece took a lot of effort to remove, probably more effort than it will ever be worth.

The parts haul was basically some circle things and some unusual machine screws, some of the few that would come loose.

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Since I ran through that so quickly, I'll add a bit of a bonus entry here at the end. I keep my large plastic parts, such as appliance bodies and vacuum handles, in a clothes hamper. For most of these big pieces, I'm only interested in keeping parts of them like large flat areas, or certain shapes, but I haven't gotten around to cutting off the pieces I want and tossing the rest. A few weeks ago, I ran out of room in the hamper, so it was time to cull through the collection.

I decided to just throw these away. Looking over them, I really couldn't envision what I would ever do with them.

I kept all the stuff in these two groups. That's not to say I want the whole of each piece, it's just that it's easier to keep these whole for now.

This is the group of parts that I chopped up. See how bulky all this is?

This is what I reduced it down to. Between the reductions and placing the remaining parts back in the hamper carefuly, I now have plenty of room for more.