[Today’s run 6+ miles with Boardtown Runners]
We have this fancy electronic toaster. I don’t know any reason why a toaster needs anything close to a brain. There have been working non-brain toasters for decades. But this toaster has a brain of some sort, and it failed.
Quite awhile ago the right-hand slots quit working. You could hold the lever down and the elements would heat up. But the lever would not stay down. Who wants to stand there while the toast is toasting?
This morning the left side also failed. For my breakfast toast today I stood there and held the lever down.
Ok, so either we fix this toaster or throw it away. Turning it over, first off I made a big mess because the thing was full of toast crumbs. Does anyone ever clean out their toaster? It’s a wonder we don’t have more toast-addicted critters in houses across the nation. When we get mice, they are always under the kitchen sink. There is nothing to eat under the kitchen sink unless you like to munch on scrubbys and drink 409. Why the mice don’t go straight for the toaster is definitely a mystery.
Where was I? Yeah, so I turned it over and found 6 screws. One was a fancy-pants consumer-preventer screw, but I happen to have a set of screwdriver bits for all of those types. I got the screws out and lifted the cover off and the first thing that happened was an electrical part fell out. It looked like a transformer or coil of some sort.
To shorten the story a bit, the transformer thingy was actually the coil that acts as an electromagnet to hold the lever down while the toast is cooking. On one side of the toaster it had fallen off the circuit board and the other one was about to fall off. Either the manufacturer did a really bum job soldering or the heat of toasting had melted the solder over the years. Solder alone was holding that part in there, which is a stupid design as it is: they should have had some kind of mechanical attachment like a strap or screw.
I soldered the magnet coils back in and now the toaster works again. I shook out all the crumbs. I did not clean off the buttery fingerprints though.
Next time I see a 40 year old toaster at a garage sale I’m going to buy it. There is no reason to have circuit boards and electromagnet coils, etc. etc. in a toaster.
