For the Take Apart Lab, we opted to disassemble a Samsung printer.

We started by taking off the back and front enclosure panels and removing the printer ink cartridges. The yellow one seems to have exploded, so there was yellow dust everywhere.

To take off the hinged panels we slid them to one side and pressed the opposite side panels outward, freeing up the hinge rod. The rest of the plastic enclosure was snapped together, so we pulled it apart, which freed up the internals and exposed some surprises.

After that we used a Phillips head screwdriver to remove around 163 small metal screws.

After removing some plastic housing and other components, we were able to get at the moving parts of the machine, specifically the paper feeder, ink rollers, and some electrical parts. All of these were held in place by a chassis of bent sheet metal.

From there it was just a matter of undoing more screws to break down the pieces more and more. Some of the gears were held in place on metal rods by little C clips. We were able to remove these using a flathead screwdriver and some needle nose pliers.

Overall it seems that this machine was assembled by a human, using a mix of off-the-shelf and proprietary parts. The ink cartridges and rollers and parts of the feeding mechanism, as well as the PCBs and the enclosure would all need to be made specifically for this machine, while the screws and metal rods and gears might be generic. In addition to snapping together the enclosure, screwing so many parts together, and fitting the hinges between the side panels, assembly would also have required attaching and connecting all of the electrical components.

I do not think that the manufacturers intended that the average consumer be able to disassemble, repair, and then reassemble this product. There are no parts that are welded or otherwise permanently attached, but given the variety of fastening methods and the complexity of the machine, I think it was meant to be taken apart and put back together by trained repairmen only. Consequently, if it were to break, the consumer would have to decide whether to get it professionally fixed or to discard it. If they chose the latter option, not many parts can be salvaged and repurposed, and a lot of it is made of materials that are not commonly recycled.

From this lab I discovered that printers do not make good houses for lizards, and that dry yellow ink leaves brown stains on your clothes. I also learned that modern printers use considerably fewer screws that older ones such as ours. Further, I discovered that helical gears, like most of the ones inside our printer, operate more smoothly and quietly than typical spur gears. Also, instead of having multiple motors to drive all the moving parts, some companies (Samsung) choose to use a single motor and distribute its rotation to many different areas using a lot of gears.