Thursday, January 16, 2020

Attempting to fix a 30 year old Wind-up musical carousel @Redwood City Public Library Fixit Clinic

On December 14, 2019, a Fixit Clinic was hosted in the Redwood City public library. Starting at 12:00 PM and ending at 3:00 PM, the session saw a variety of items being brought in to be fixed, from a wonky clock to a dead space heater. I attended this event and experienced the early Christmas spirit associated with attempting to fix items.



Few images of the fixit clinic frenzy:

Surprisingly, I was only able to work on one item that day, and it was an antique  Christmas-themed, wind-up musical carousel brought in by a nice old lady. The problem with the carousel was that it had been left stationary for nearly 30 years, and it wasn’t functioning at all. In order to create a possible hypothesis for what happened to it, I and a fellow fixer brainstormed some ideas about it. Usually, wind-up items have issues when it comes to gear teeth being stripped, a component being lost or blocked by a foreign substance, and finally, the item’s spring not being able to perform its duty of making the device work. So, in order to get to the bottom of the issue, the only option was to take it apart.

To start with, the pin that rotates the spring could be screwed out of place, along with a brass knob on the side that could also be screwed out. Three screws at the bottom held the entire mechanical assembly in place, so those were also taken out. In order to isolate the entire mechanism, however, it would have to be extracted from an oval wood housing. There was a piece of sheet wood preventing the mechanism from being slid out which was held together by three screws. With a little bit of prying and shimmying, We took those screws out and extracted the entire mechanical assembly. Based on mere visual inspection, the mechanism was alright and gears or other parts weren’t falling out of place. We attempted to rotate the mechanism to try and sort of jumpstart it, and it did function but barely and very slowly too. This meant that the wind-up spring that’s supposed to drive the mechanism had lost its springiness, and it had to be replaced. If we had gone any further, it would’ve damaged the item instead. So, we put it back together and also got to know that a few pieces of the carousel decoration had broken too, and we glued those back into place. It wasn’t a complete fix, nor a total failure, but more of a “work in progress”.




By the time we finished poring over the item, the Clinic had ended. As always, thank you to Peter Mui and everyone else for hosting this event. I wish you all a merry Christmas and Happy new year.






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