How to Break Stuff Vol. 2 No. 2
Zen and the art of parts parts parts
The sacredness of the whole
The hardest part of fixing something can be taking it apart.
Sometimes that work is done for you — you are re-attaching parts because something catastrophic happened and you’re just figuring out how whatever remains fits back together. Like my old Volvo. Or maybe the country.
But often it’s the decision to dive in that keeps most regular folks from learning what they’re doing.
There’s a legitimate fear that, rather than fix whaterver isn’t working, you’ll just break it more if you start poking around with a screwdriver.
You’ve got to learn to work through that. You’ve got to learn to undo what I call “the sacredness of the whole.”
This might seem like basic advice, and if you’re an old hand with a socket wrench, it might seem tempting to skip over this. But I find its something I have to keep coming back to the more and more experienced I get.
Every machine, every appliance, every tool is just a set of systems working within rules. Every whole is just parts put together in an order and to certain tolerances.
When those parts get put together in that order we call the thing “a Thing” and it does “a Job.” Sure. But forget all of that. You’ve got to take the Thing apart.
Once you do, you realize some parts are pretty complex. But they too are only Things made of parts. The job from there is figuring out how those parts work in order to make the Thing work — and you’d be surprised how simple some of that can be.
It’s just a mental reframing. But once you acknowledge that the whole is just the parts, it becomes a lot easier to dive into a broken $300 TV or computer monitor and replace a $0.50 capacitor in the power supply that’s leaking and keeping it from turning on. Or replace the internal battery on your laptop. Or to apply a drop of oil in the right place to fix your kids’ toys.
This is a way of thinking that came in handy modifying NERF dart guns in my teens, and a way of thinking that’s helping me stay calm as I try to learn to sew and to weld.
So… a few tricks of the trade from an inveterate tinkerer.
Arrange a work space
For starters, when removing fasteners — like screws — lay them out on your work table in the order that they came out. For a while, two of the screws holding the bottom cover onto a MacBook Pro were shorter than the rest — and slightly so, not obviously. This drove me nuts, until I started laying the screws out next to one another the same way they sat in the computer, and each screw started going back into the hole that it came from.
These days I’m a big fan of these little silicone parts trays to keep tabs on things as I work:
They’re washable and come in different colors and that’s super helpful — but whether you’re working on a kitchen counter, a truck tailgate, or a tree stump… lay your fasteners out in the order they came.
A picture is worth a thousand swears
Was the red wire on the left or on the right? Unless your phone is what you’re fixing, use your phone to take a photo of each stage.
I had a beloved uncle who took up amateur watchmaking later in his life. He would photograph each step of each repair, like a path of bread crumbs to follow while putting a watch back together.
The more familiar you are with a given system, the more you can deduce what part goes back where. But it’s cheap insurance. Even though I’ve worked on Volvo engines for almost 20 years now, I’ll still take photos when I’m dealing with the routing of vacuum lines or re-wiring electrical connectors.
This also lets you put a project down mid-way through, knowing you can come back to it weeks later and remember where you were. To wit, here’s a photo I took more than a year ago to remember how the gears mesh on a Bulova wrist watch that maybe one day in a decade or so I’ll get back together:
Breadcrumbs
The common thread here is that the whole is nothing special — its just parts. If you can leave yourself a map back to the thing-being-whole, you can bail at any point by putting it back together and seeking more experienced assistance.
That means don’t force things. This is especially important advice if you don’t yet have a full box of tools. Most instances of forcing something involve using the wrong tool or attempting a shortcut. Move slowly and methodically through the thing you’re taking apart, and you’ll seriously minimize the chance you won’t be able to put it back together.
(I did force a gear off its pinion on that Bulova watch up there and I continue to be *not* happy about it!)
But if you want to be able to fix things, you’ve got to start taking things apart — comfortably.
If you have zero tools, go out and buy yourself a Philips-head screwdriver.
If you have only a Philips-head, pick a closet door knob in your home. Remove the mechanism and put it back on. You might mess it up a few times. That’s good.
If that’s too easy, get weird. Look for an old radio. If you’re good with a sewing machine, break down and rebuild a messenger bag.
In an earlier iteration of this blog I referenced the words I scratched into my crowbar many years ago while doing demolition after Hurricane Katrina: “Nothing is ever destroyed — only rearranged.”
Get comfortable in a world of parts — because that’s all there is.