2 Jul
2007
2 Jul
'07
4:40 p.m.
How do you
break the pins? I most often see the plastic parts that grip
the pins breaking more often.
That is correct.
In a lab full of college students, I noticed two behaviors associated with
broken door hinges of Tandon drives. Instead of gripping the door between
thumb and forefinger and easing it open, some students hooked it with
forefinger, and snapped it open, letting it slam against the stop. A few
others would poke the upper part of the door to make it slam open.
Actually, I've found pressing on the upper part of the door to be much
kinder to the pins than pulling the door open from the bottom edge (think
about what the applied force reacts against). The trick, of course, is
not to let the clamp arm slam open, but to guide the door open gently and
let the arm rise slowly
Instead of replacing the drives, we bought a large
quantity of doors and
hinges. When the college switched to mostly new machines, the college
administrators threw out our box of repair parts, rendering all subsequent
ones that broke "unrepairable".
:-(. I'm getting low on replacement doors too. I may have to start making
those hihgt parts from scratch.
Of course I've kept the parts I removed from this drive. If nothing else,
the door itself is fine, and the broken parts of the hinge may be useful
if I do have to fabricate one.
-tony