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?
In: 239
I’ve always known it to be called do it the Russian Way. But it’s more widely known as percussive maintenance, which has a low chance of success. If it’s something mechanical that spins or turns it can simply be out of alignment, like a fan. Hitting it can jossle it back into place usually only momentarily.
When thing in machine not where should be, human go smack, machine go shakey shakey, thing in machine go back to right place. Human happy.
If the problem is that something is loose inside that maybe shouldn’t be loose, or should be loose but is in the wrong place, then banging it can cause it to move to a different place.
In old electronics this could be a broken solder connection that moved slightly so it’s not making a connection any more. A wire rubbing on a fan is also a good example.
Banging on a broken thing has absolutely no guarantee of fixing it, but sometimes it does
In aviation, we call it concussive maintenance. The idea is sometimes circuit cards can wiggle out of their slots. With an appropriate amount of force, you can drop it and the card will correct itself within the unit, no need to open. This saves time over taking the unit off the plane, sending it to I-level, waiting for them to do nothing and send it back.
For your fridge specifically, I don’t know. Maybe it had the equivalent to a clot somewhere? That’s outside my field.
Source: Hooyah
Got a TV off the side of the road in college, it was an earlier version of a flat screen TV. LCD.
The screen had a little green line through it, and over a couple months the green line spread and took up a good chunk of the screen. Punched it one day, right on the screen. Green line disappeared and we used that TV until we moved out of that house
Asserting physical dominance causes the appliance to rethink its attention-hungry ways and forces it to quit playing the fool.
Lots of noise usually means there’s some mechanical blockage or misalignment and the jolt from an impact could shake things back into alignment or clear a blockage.
“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.
It’s called Percussive Maintenance. It shares the same military-related acronym with Preventative Maintenance, but don’t get them confused, soldier. Percussive Maintenance causes additional problems like structural issues. You could just tap the fan blade to reproduce the same temporary fix. In the end, you’ll need to replace the fan or motor. Put in a work order to have it fixed.
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