I got a text this morning from my neighbor, asking if I had any broken small appliances that I could give her. Her son's school is having a Take Apart Day tomorrow. This school also has a garden that the kids plant and take care of, including during the summer. It's a great way for them to learn about where their food comes from. Not everybody has a dad like I did who was an engineer and a gardener...I think it's great the kids are exposed to things that aren't strictly academic, but that are still interesting. And useful to know about.

I thought we had an old kitchen blender with a failing motor set aside in the garage to take to recycling, but it was already gone. I reached out to some friends and Arjun will be taking a vaporizer to school tomorrow to take apart.



(update: Another neighbor contributed a dead sawzall....)

Ooh...ooh...I have an old broken blender!

My kids’ schools do not have a “take apart day,” but I enjoyed taking things apart with my kids. So far we have taken apart an old ultrasound humidifier, an old electric water heater/thermos (a Zojiroshi, no less), a circa 2007 Dell laptop, a CyberPower uninterruptible power supply, a dual drive dock, a couple of hard disk drives, and the biggest “take apart” project of them all — a Dell multifunction scanner + color laser printer unit.

That multifunction printer was from the mid-2000s, weighed 80 pounds, many circuit boards, many integrated circuit chips, lots of wires, lots of metal plates and metal structural support pieces, even more fasteners like screws, nuts, bolts, tie wraps, etc. Given all the parts and labor needed to assemble the thing and the trans Pacific shipping, I could not believe Dell sold the thing for the price it did; the assembly appeared rather tedious and complex. Lots of electrical, mechanical, and optical things to show the kids while taking it apart.

Get ‘em started young and they’ll keep that curiosity for the rest of their lives.

Yesterday I took apart a snowblower. Fascinating thing - much more complex than I expected. Chains and belts and levers! A six speed friction drive system that is nothing short of brilliant!

And rust. Lots of rust.

I like is much I’m going to put it back together.

But cleaned up, I imagine.