As I stood in my little workshop, waiting for glue to set on the fake Crocs from which the puppy removed significant portions, I noticed the laser portion of my printer dissection. I assumed it would need to be broken open, but now picked it up and saw it had four little plastic tabs – piece of cake!

And very cool! The laser is at the arrow on the right. The hexagonal disk has mirrored edges, and is attached to a motor. The bizarrely-shaped plastic lens is obviously very carefully designed to very precisely deliver incredibly tiny dots at incredibly high speed. The arrow on the left points to a tiny mirror whose purpose remains a mystery to me. Amazing technology.

---

The plastic bits on the right represent a slightly less amazing technology. I was unable to plug in a Schuko plug to an adaptor (maybe the very one labelled C in this post from 2012). I thought I’d take it apart, which it turns out involved breaking it, but the stuck safety gate shown here dropped out. So I glued the broken parts back together, and voilà – another silly little project done.

You may have read my account about dissecting the dead kitchen scale, and maybe thought well, that’s a silly thing to do. And maybe you’re right.

---

I had pulled my wife’s desk back so I could work on a window, and a certain dog who is not allowed upstairs apparently got upstairs while we were out, went to look out the window, got tangled in wires, and pulled a computer and laser printer from the desk. I immediately ran diagnostics on the computer (a Mac Mini) and it seemed to be fine. The 9 year old printer, on the other hand, wasn’t working right at all.

The local computer place techie looked at it, identified one part was cracked and basically not replaceable. So I had two challenges: 1) find another printer, and 2) take this one completely apart without breaking anything.

68 screws, 17 springs, and 12 gears later, it was done! The heating element (black and red rollers to the left) was the single most difficult challenge. Amazing the ingenuity that goes into putting pieces together – little tabs, rotate this, pry back that….

The number of springs surprised me. I did break a couple of small pieces of plastic, but on purpose to save time, not because I couldn’t figure out their assembly.

In addition to admiring the design and engineering wizardry, I can hardly imagine how they created the incredibly intricate molded plastic parts.

As with the kitchen scale, there’s nothing particularly useful for other projects, though I’ll save some of the bits of wire and springs, and chuck the rest.

But wait! I see at the large plastic pieces are identified as ABS for recycling (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, but you knew that). So in addition to having a fun hour or so, disassembling the printer allows for recycling at least some of it (bits of aluminum as well) that otherwise would have gone to a landfill.

And oh by the way, I found no evidence of a crack or break in the part the techie indicated. But it doesn’t matter: the printer no longer worked, and wasn’t about to get fixed.

 

 

This is a pair of fake Crocs my wife bought at Géant for a few bucks. They turned out to be just a half size too small for comfort.

And she prefers open-toed shoes for summer.

All it took was a few minutes with a razor blade and voilà!

---

Do they sell razor blades in Uruguay? I have no idea. I almost didn’t bring these from the United States. I’ll explain.

When we flew to New York in 2012 for my niece’s wedding in Connecticut, we had offered to bring an absurd amount of stuff back to Uruguay for people.* My last-minute packing operation occupied a significant part of my sister’s living room floor. I kept reassigning goods to different suitcases. It took a while, but finally everything fit.

But just before we headed out the door for the airport, I suddenly realized I needed one more item reassignment…

…because going through airport security with two box cutters and 100 razor blades in my carry-on bag didn’t seem like something that was going to end well.

 

*no more!

Just in case you were wondering if the ladders were really that bad, look at what was left on the chopping block after splitting seven steps from one into kindling.

As you can see, much of the inside of each step has been turned to dust.

It reminds me of buying new rustic furniture in Mexico. Within days, you’d find coin-sized perfectly round mounds of incredibly fine wood dust on the floor beneath it, and have to apply some horridly toxic liquid to every square inch of its surface to kill all the tiny critters.