Keeping the hot drinks going for the local school

내 문제

Another day - another repair 🧑‍🔧

My mom is a teacher at a local school here in Kyiv, Ukraine, and she asked me to have look at an electric kettle her class was using for years, but at some point it stopped working.

나의 수리

So here I was aiming the amazing Manta Precision Bit Set I won at some point from #iFixit at the triwing proprietary screws 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻. I mean this kettle costs probably around 10-15$, but why dumping it if it can keep on bringing hot beverages for the kids at school? Quite frankly it took me quite some time to figure this one out - I had to completely disassemble this kettle (and I literally mean it) and check all the wires for continuity.

내 조언

And that was the catch - the problem was that this kettle has two tiny ceramic rods in the heating module that push the springy power leads away over time because those are thin copper wires basically - as a result at some point those slim springy wires gone too loose and the contact was lost. It did not happen overnight because on one of the leads there were quite profound burn marks that I had to remove with a file. Having figured that out I managed to slightly modify the mechanism in order to avoid such a failure in the nearest future to say the least.

P.S.: I wonder if it is a part of the planned obsolescence and if it was done on purpose 🤔