Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am trying to fix a pair of headphones that popped a joint while I was off on vacation this week. Let’s get started!
I’ve had this set of headphones for a while now, and I’m not always the most careful with my technology. I often leave them on top of my cluttered desk or computer tower, and the household cats often pilgrimage to the window behind my desk. Be it from my cat or my klutz, the headphones often would wind up falling to the floor, and I would count my blessing when they still worked each time they tumbled.
Typically, I’ve had headphones fail at the micro-USB connection from the wire to the headset. This time, I stuffed them in a backpack along with a couple other laptops and a keyboard. Sometime between home and our second hotel, one of the sides had popped out, likely when a dog crate shifted into the backpack momentarily. I tried to push the piece back together, but I was afraid of damaging it, partly because we’d had the opposite problem happen to one of our dogs’ Gentle Leaders (a training tool worn on the dog’s head).
With the lack of enough progress on the Pi case I’ve spent months slugging on about, I noted the lack of broken-looking individual parts on my headphones and decided it wouldn’t hurt to disassemble the hypermobile joint and put the whole thing back together correctly.
I started by removing the four… three of the screws holding what was left of the wayward side together. The forth one was a little stubborn, but it eventually came out. The piece itself had a little more resistance, so my father and I coaxed it out gently.
Exploring the inside was a little disappointing. The first sign this wouldn’t be a successful mission was the tweaked, plastic fingers meant to hold onto a grooved peg (helpful for) earpiece rotation. Additional bad news came when I spotted an actual crack in one of the brackets.
For the purposes of the blog, I decided to pull the other piece off for comparison. Remember all those drops? The teeth on the “good” removed piece were well on their way to deforming in the exact same way. The backpack getting crushed must have affected only the one side and was either enough to finish the job or do it from scratch.
Either way, I won’t be able to repair them as I’d hoped. I wouldn’t trust my 3D printer with something so delicate, and even if I did, I don’t have a pattern or a way to scan the “good” piece (so it can be mirrored). The plan is to screw the pieces back where they go and either cache in on a warranty or save them for parts.
Final Question: Have you ever had to back out of a repair project when its apparent difficulty level spiked?