If It Ain't Broke

A repair journey

Take a look at this:

It’s a back massage wand from Amazon, where lots of the products are unknown names without any real provenance. This one was double the price of a bunch of others, and the reviews suggested that it did well with regard to a common failure of these devices: the plastic that bridges the motor with the massage attachment cracks somewhere inside the machine. While the motor still runs, it can’t rotate/shake the wand anymore. Since that’s a little specific plastic part, it’s one of those things that in theory would be easy to replace, but in practice will never be available or cost-effective. In some cases, it’s possible the motor shaft itself is breaking, which isn’t really fixable in theory. Anyway, this model isn’t from a known brand either, but it seemed to be a cut above the others.

A little note on the products with no provenance thing. Most of them are made in China, and we’re accustomed to thinking of this stuff as low quality. This is what was said about Japanese manufacturing after World War II, but by the 1980s “made in Japan” was a mark of quality, and it still is today. So much of the generic or store brand stuff in discount stores in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s was from Japan. It must have looked like a bunch of unknown schlock. Some of it no doubt was. But the test of time has proven that a lot of this stuff was quite well made. The same thing will probably turn out to be true of Chinese manufacturing.

This higher quality wand feels very solid, the plastic is sleek, the box was sturdy and glossy, etc. It had the marks of being a fairly high-quality product. And it worked pretty well for a couple of years of light use. And then one day, when trying to get a deep tissue massage with it (and probably stressing the wand too hard), it broke. The motor turned, but the plastic shaft and massage attachment were loose and wiggling. You can see in this picture how the plastic post is at an angle from the unit:

I thought of trying to get a free or discounted replacement out of the company, but two years is a long time (although I’ve gotten replacements before from these no-name companies through Amazon). And we were thinking of getting a differently designed wand to replace it: maybe a less expensive but slightly more powerful plug-in model.

The other day I was almost going to toss the broken wand, but I was curious what it looked like inside, how easy it would be to take apart, and where exactly the faulty part was and how it broke. I’ve always been interested in a broad sense in consumer advocacy, the secondhand market, and ways of reducing what seems like too much waste in our society. And my little part in that is trying to fix things instead of tossing them right away, writing about consumer issues occasionally, etc. And plus, I just kind of enjoy working with tools and with my hands. Tinkering is fun.

So I was rather surprised and excited when, upon opening the wand up—six small Phillips screws, and voila—I saw this:

Forgive the slightly unclear picture, but on top is the motor and the shaft, and on the bottom is the plastic part that takes the motor shaft (inside the unit) and the wand attachment (outside the unit). This is the part that cracks. But the plastic is not broken. Nothing is broken. After massaging with too much pressure or at too much of an angle, the plastic piece had simply wiggled off the motor shaft, and was loose inside the casing.

TLDR: pop the plastic part back on the shaft, massage unit like new.

The manufacture of the unit has a very nice mark of quality: there’s a little connector clip on the wire where the motor attaches to the switch assembly, meaning that you can do what I did here, and get the motor and the plastic piece together, fully disconnected from the switch, which is on the other half of the casing.

It would be marginally cheaper to just solder those connections, but that would complicate repair. It’s pretty cool that this device is made in a way that it can be fully taken apart and actually worked on.

Here’s the whole inside:

It does have what I think is a design flaw: notice how the plastic piece has a lot of room to move inside the casing. It should have been designed so that it couldn’t wiggle off the motor shaft in the first place. For example, the screw posts could have been snuggled up against the left edge of the piece, basically holding it in place against the shaft. Because of that open space inside the unit, the piece had room to fall off and float around inside.

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Which brings me to a question: how many of the people reporting the cracking of this plastic piece in the reviews were actually experiencing what I was: nothing but the piece coming loose? How many people threw these sorts of machines in the trash when nothing at all was wrong with them that a Phillips screwdriver and five minutes couldn’t fix?

Which comes down to two questions: why are we so eager to get rid of stuff, and so incurious about it? And is a lot of this “junk” better made than we think it is?

The only trouble I had was sliding the rubber grip back onto the handle. I guess that’s a bit of a shortcut: instead of a rubberized handle, the grip covers the handle, meaning you can’t unscrew and disassemble the wand without sliding off the cover.

This isn’t really a defect; it’s one of many choices to make the final product to a desired price point. And I’m sure manufacturers have always done that.

So there you go. It did turn out to be a pretty good quality unit. Even better than I had reason to think until I opened it!

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Related Reading:

A Repair Journey Through Low-Cost Manufacturing

A Hard Day’s Wash, Part 2

Now, Folks, It’s Time For “Who Do You Trust!”

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