So this week we were tasked with taking apart something and trying to find out how it was manufactured and put together. Serena and I both being over-achievers naturally went for what was probably the most complicated object that we had to choose from, a professional grade printer for the everyday home. The printer started out looking something like this:

First off, we opened up the scanner lid and began looking for ways to take the top off of the printer in order to actually get into the guts of it. This actually took us a while. It became pretty obvious that the manufacturer of the printer (Epson if you were curious) did not mean for the printer to be taken apart this far. There were many deeply recessed and even hidden screws, and tons of little plastic tabs built into the body of the printer. These tabs continued to be an issue until we had taken the entire thing apart. Having plastic tabs make it easy to put together a piece and use less fasteners in the process, but they also make it much more difficult if you want to take the same object apart.

Once we got the top off, things got a lot more interesting. I knew going in that there would be hundreds of parts within the printer and I was STILL surprised by how much we found in it. This thing was so ridiculously intricate, you would think a printer would cost thousands of dollars, but (I looked it up) you can get this exact printer for $100. Only a hundred bucks for all of this:

As we got deeper and deeper into the printer, we found smaller and smaller parts. one part on the back end of the printer that helps to grip the paper had these tiny little metal gears together with other small rubber gears in one larger assembly.

Another interesting part of this lab was actually comparing the construction of our printer to that of another groups. The other group had a much older version than ours and it was a pretty stark difference between the two. First off, ours had a lot more going on. Compared to their’s, ours seemed to be designed to fit as much as humanly possible in that amount of space. In addition to this, their’s used a lot more fasteners than our Epson. This again shines back on the use of plastic tabs in our printer. The designers of ours were obviously trying to make assembly as easy as possible and also enable the company to save money by not using as many costly metal screws.

Altogether, this project was a ton of fun and I was also able to learn a lot from it as well. I was able to observe not only how a printer was put together but also how it was designed to be efficient and designed for ease of manufacture. It is really astounding how much work probably went into designing every bit and piece of that one little printer.