Bash Street Kids
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Discoveries | 21 comments
My first car was a blue mini van. Low slung and basic, it carried my wooden toys to Covent Garden market and was my horse and carriage when I went to visit my mum, in Oxford. In fact it was when I was driving back to London from one of these visits that I heard on the radio that John Lennon had died.
The van had a small recurring fault – the carburettor would stick and we’d slowly grind to a halt. The AA man that appeared on the scene when this initially happened, showed me a handy trick – he knocked the belligerent part smartly with a hammer. From then on I carried a hammer in the van for this very purpose. Friends were impressed that I could ‘repair’ the van with just a hammer. I never let on.
This knocking trick has come in handy over the years. Our fridge freezer is a temperamental beast that often plays dead. A few weeks ago I discovered that by giving it a good whack and a rocky Strictly Come Dancing hug it eventually sprang back to life with a noisy whirr.
The fridge freezer feigning dead was swiftly followed by the dishwasher refusing to start when required. A smart tap beside the control switch with the back of my hand worked a treat and eventually it returned to normal – clearly averse to this daily beating.
Meanwhile the washing machine no longer likes to be controlled by the onboard computer (who would?) and has to be eased manually through each programme. The toaster has started to grill just one side of a piece of toast – I haven’t tried the bash technique on this yet as it’s rather flimsy. But I’m tempted.
Oh for an appliance that lasts for years. At least the hammer is still holding up after 28 years…
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I have an appliance that has lasted for years, my Moulinex food processor 13 years old and still going strong. This was a gift from my Mum and is used very frequently.
Love the idea of beating unco-operative machinery – very John Cleese!
They don’t make things to last any more. Where’s the profit in that?
My husband, an automotive engineer, calls it percussive engineering and I too, drove around for a long time with a hammer in the Datsun to belt the starter motor with. My Mum, bless her, shakes the computer mouse when it doesn’t respond quickly enough.
Fiona you are hence forth known as the Fonz…
and as I live with a computer person, (said in an Irish accent, from the IT crowd). “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
I would curl up and cry if my stick blender/choppy thing died. I would have to have a funeral for it.
Also, on the aged appliance side of things, when my mother’s freezer started failing to cope with summer heat, she realised it had belonged to her mother, and was probably late 1970’s date too. It now has a younger brother and is on light duties as a storage place for multipack drinks bottles!
My parents’ 1978 Bedford motorcaravan (currently retired in Spain) used to get a stuck solenoid, which also responded well to percussive maintenance. Trouble was, Vanule is a rather larger beast than a minivan, so the choice was between leaning into the engine at full stretch with the hammer, or lying on the ground underneath at full stretch upwards with the hammer… Once, we even managed to cure it with “the laying on of hands” on its bonnet, as we prepared to push it backwards out of a parking bay, one last try of the ignition sparked it back to life! Amazing how attached we all get to our old old vehicles!
Percussive maintenance has an honourable history. When the Americans went to the moon, they took a film camera with them. If the camera failed, thay had a check list of things to do to get it working. If all else failed, the last instruction was “Apply lunar boot”
Hey, my old mini had the exact same fault, also fixable with a hammer! I do remember using it on a starter motor in Hercules, our first car — really ancient Morris 1300.
Percussive maintenance has lots of applications. I remember years ago the hard disk in my computer at work failing. The maintenance engineer was a big guy with the build of a rugby player. After asking me if I had a backup, he brought his massive fist down on the casing with an almighty crash. Ding! The disk whirred back into life. But he replaced it anyway 🙂
Our electronics teacher at college actually did an entire lesson on where to hit things to fix them.
Loved the expression “percussive maintenance”! Must be the time of year for appliance malfunctions. My sister just had to replace a 25 year old dishwasher. It could have been repaired but given the nature of the failure – totally degradation of plastic bits – she felt it would just be the start of more repairs of a similar nature in the not too distant future and decided to replace. My 20 year old stick blender died last week mid leek & potato soup. I can’t believe it lasted that long as it took an early bath in the washing up bowl about 18 years ago. It wasn’t plugged in at the time and I left it to dry out for about a month before trying it again. 8 years ago I called time on a 30 year old washing machine. Again it could have been repaired but at half the cost of a new machine it didn’t seem worth it, although it was the first time it had needed repairing.