Why does punching an appliance sometimes seem to fix it?

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So I live in military barracks and i have a shitty fridge in my room. It started making this horrible noise, and out of desperation I landed a solid right hook to the side of it. Like magic, the noise stopped. This has happened numerous times in my life. Something is broken, and some brute force fixes it. What happens inside that could solve the problem from percussive force?

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19 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

“percussive maintenance”

Before the age of integrated circfuits, an electronic device had much more components with bigger connectors and soldering points. Solder itself is prone to oxydation and loosening over time.

In many cases, the problem came from oxydated connections. When you hit like an old tv, the scraping and moving of parts could scrape away oxydation and “restore” the connection

The problem is that without proper maintenance and repair, hitting the device would start to cause damage, something moving just a little losens up, things that were just oxydated and scraping on each other would dislodge.

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