We chose to break down a printer for the tear down lab, and I don’t think any of us expected it to be such a big undertaking.

We started by unscrewing any visible screws and unclipping any plastic clips we felt. We turned the printer over several times in order to try and find a good starting point. We started having some luck getting the top of the printer off, but we could feel that it was still being held on so we just kept turning it over.

We eventually made good headway on the side and got the whole plastic panel off.

From there we took off all the metal panels and exposed a bunch of gears and circuit boards:

We took out all the gears and circuit boards and we pretty much just hit a (literal) wall:

So from there we took apart any mechanisms that were on the plastic panels we had removed earlier:

And after we were done with those, we flipped the printer again and we started working on the top and the other side:

Unfortunately we didn’t get past that and we weren’t able to take the printer all the way down to its components, but we did get lots of experience taking things apart without breaking them and we got to see a ton of electrical and mechanical devices used to solve real life problems.