Before:

This scanner was our group’s device of choice to break down. When we first picked it up from its residency in the dumpster, it seemed much smaller and simpler than the other group’s projects. I thought we would get through it pretty quickly. We ended up barely finishing it time.

Taken apart in all its glory: 

(On a side note the picture seemed to have degraded in quality after being uploaded to the website)

 

 

 

 

The first thing we immediately did was to take off the white cover plastic, which came off very easily with a tug. We then went after and unscrewed all the bolts that we could find, but that was when we hit our first roadblock. Even after unscrewing everything, the blue glass screen still wouldn’t come off. We found two locking mechanisms on it and flipped both off, but the screen wouldn’t budge. We found two more on the back, flipped those off, but the screen still wouldn’t budge. Faced with no choice of doing this cleanly, we used a screwdriver as a crowbar and forcibly jammed the screen out.

Dr. Wettergreen came over then and discussed with us why the manufacturer made it so hard to open. We concluded this model was probably a relatively cheap scanner that people were supposed to throw away and rebuy when broken rather than  try to fix. I was wondering then if this scanner wasn’t necessarily sold for cheap – the company just didn’t want people to fix it because buying one a new one nets the company more profit.

After the glass screen finally came off, the rest came apart fairly smoothly. We found the motherboard, memory cards, metal fasteners, sliding mechanisms, the camera lens, film, mirrors, and gears.

As opposed to the outside where we found regular hex screws, the inside of the scanner was all secured by Torx screws. I was curious so I looked up the differences between the two on the internet and ended up spending like an hour reading about the history of the many types of screws. The gist of it was that the hex screw that we are all familiar with is the least efficient version. However due to patenting, the superior square and Torx screw were not able to catch up in popularity. It was an interesting read.

Overall this was a fascinating project. These type of electronics are a part of my everyday life, but I never had any idea of how they were actually built or functioned. Now I have a more concrete idea of how they were designed and how they are supposed to work.