How To Repair A Salad Spinner

Repair and improvement of a broken salad spinner.

This is another classic example of an otherwise well made product ruined past a single fatal flaw. My sister gave me this pull-cord-actuated collapsable salad spinner as a gift. I quite like the design of it, and it is very nice to use. Still, subsequently but a couple of months of normal use, the pull-cord broke. I contacted the visitor to try and get a replacement (since it failed so soon), simply they ignored my attempts at communication. So I dug into information technology to see if I could repair it, and perhaps make information technology Betterstrongerfaster™.

The cord was strong nylon, merely somehow snapped. How did this happen? Permit's find out...

The underside of the spinning mechanism had four moulded plastic plugs that looked like they might hibernate screws. Drilling out the plugs, revealed... screws! Huzzah! This may be hackable after all.

Nether that embrace was a geared bearing surface which slid off to reveal another screwed-on encompass. Under that was the drive railroad train for the spinner. Information technology consists of a spring loaded cord winder geared downwards a bit to increase torque on the bearing surface. In between lies a slotted idler gear which allows the bearing to freewheel while the string winder retracts. Clever! Here we can also see the shredded remains of the pull cord. No clue as to why it failed yet.

Further inspection of the cord's route through the mechanism revealed the flaw! To pass from the winder through the comprehend, the string passed through a metal grommet. This grommet has a sharp edge that touched the cord. Over time, that edge was gradually shredding the cord inside the spinner, until one 24-hour interval it snapped. It looks equally though the grommet was damaged during manufacture, hence the exposed edge.

And so, with the point of failure identified, the question becomes whether we can fix it and make sure the failure doesn't recur. Get-go, of form, I pulled out that metallic grommet. The hole is polish plastic, and the grommet was certainly doing more than harm than good. Now, what to replace the string with?

My start attempt was to utilise dental floss. I've always been impressed with the tensile forcefulness of dental floss, and information technology winds and unwinds very smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, that the spinner operates at a considerably higher speed than earlier.

Sadly, later a couple of uses, the dental floss snapped. Inspection revealed that the dental floss was prone to tangling on the winder, which led to backlog strain and eventual failure.

My 2d attempt was a shoelace. These are too very strong, and I had extras lying around. Sadly, it was a bit also thick, and the winder didn't spin smoothly with the shoelace wrapped effectually it.

Alright, time to get serious. If 550lb parachute cord doesn't concord, I don't know what will. This stuff is actually cheap, actually. Less than 10 cents/human foot. Good to have around! This string is also a scrap too thick for the winder. However, paracord is really several smaller strands housed in a sheath (the blackness outer coating). You tin can cutting the sheath, and use as many of the smaller inner cords every bit you need. Three strands seemed about correct.

Success! I knotted the other end of the cord around the handle, and put a driblet of superglue there to hold the knot. Hither'southward the reassembled unit (shown here with lettuce installed). So far it's performing very well, and should extended the life of this tool past many years.

Yous learn a lot near a production when you take it apart. You lot might recollect that the premature failure of this tool made me dislike it, merely in fact the opposite occurred. By dismantling it, I saw how well made it actually was. The plastic was sturdy, everything was held with multiple well-placed screws, and the gear train was clever and robust. It was just a tiny manufacturing flaw in the grommet that caused the failure, and that sort of thing is frankly bound to happen. If only their customer service had been improve.

What's next for this intrepid spinner? If the cord fails again, I expect electricity may be involved in the subsequent version…