I decided to kick things off here at Making and Breaking with a fairly easy break. This lovely singing/dancing cheerleader moose thing was almost given away as a white elephant gift, but after testing it with fresh batteries right before I wrapped it, I discovered that the poor thing no longer worked. Oh well. One less crappy white elephant gift for somebody else, one more breaking project for me.
The first thing I did was make a small incision in the fabric near the base of the moose, using an Exacto knife. I then used some fabric scissors to cut the fabric all along the base. After that, the entire moose hide was able to be peeled off like a rabbit skin.
At this point, there were two items still remaining inside the moose skin. The first was a lollipop-shaped piece of plastic in the head, that was used for structural support. The second was a pushbutton switch hiding in the mooses's left hand (see the yellow wires leading into the moose). The switch was held in place by a few threads, and was easily removed.
After that, it was a simple matter of removing a bunch of screws. All of the screws were easily removed with a small phillips screwdriver, and they were all easy to locate as well. The screws were rather small however, and a couple of them were recessed, which required a screwdriver with a rather small shaft. I have found that having a set of small screwdrivers is essential if you want to start taking things apart, so invest in a set of these now, and save yourself a lot of time and frustration.
I should note that for some breaking projects, I'm not totally concerned with how the object works. Especially if the object is broken to begin with so I'm not completely sure what exactly it is supposed to do.
As you can see, this IC (integrated circuit) looks like a big mess. If I wanted to, I could have removed the glue, and noted that this particular IC is fairly simple. It wouldn't be too hard to figure out exactly what is going on here and how it works (although there is a mystery chip hiding under that black epoxy blob). I was more interested in salvaging useful parts though.
Not bad! With only minimal time and effort (it took me less than 10 minutes), I successfully removed a small motor, a very small speaker, an on/off switch, a pushbutton switch, and three capacitors (which probably all have long enough leads for me to reuse). I should add that if I had really wanted to take the time (meaning that I would have had to do some desoldering), I could have also removed two transistors. Additionally, there was a decent battery case (for three AA batteries) that I removed, but it was a bit oversized/clunky for my liking, so I didn't bother keeping it.
Nothing that I removed is particularly valuable, but it was cool to see how few parts are required for a singing/dancing moose. Not only that, but you never know when you'll need an extra switch or motor, even if it's just for a prototype/test build, so it's good to have spare parts like these just in case.
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