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<\/a>The Patient, pre-operative state<\/p><\/div>
\nOne half of our 4-slice Black and Decker toaster hadn’t been working for several months. I finally decided to take a crack at fixing it, as I so often do with broken products. The hardship of insufficient independent toaster ports had become unbearable (or more accurately, I couldn’t resist tinkering with the thing.) I suspected a broken filament from the outset. Here’s what I did for this repair.
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<\/a>The nasty triangular screw-head<\/p><\/div> Toaster Innards, pre-vacuuming!<\/p><\/div> Toaster electronics<\/p><\/div> Toasty the Happy Quad-Slice Toaster Rides Again<\/p><\/div>
\nFirst, I noticed that the toaster probably had been designed to prevent repair attempts by an amateur like me. There are about 12 screws holding the base access plate onto the toaster, and those need to come out to gain access to the toaster innards. All but one of the screws were Philips-type (inferior American product compared to the great Canadian Robertson screw head :-), but easily removed). However, the final screw that needed to be removed had required an odd triangular-tip driver. That was likely an intentional impediment to disassembly.
\nI suspect the manufacturer selected that to foil repair attempts by the likes of me, but I’m not easily foiled. I found that a standard slot blade from a precision “jeweller’s” screwdriver set gave enough purchase in the screw head that I could rotate it out. Problem 1 solved.
\nFrom there, it was easy to get the cover off the toaster, revealing what you see in the next 2 pictures.
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\nOddly, I found upon opening up the toaster that there were spider webs throughout, with crumbs stuck to them. Our household Shelob had been busy. I vacuumed all that away. As you can see in the photos, this toaster has a few circuit boards loaded with electronics, so is a bit more sophisticated than the old simple ones with just heater wire and some thermal switches and mechanical linkages. My next problem was that in order to access the filaments that I needed to look at, I had to straighten out many bent metal lugs that are used to hold the internal toaster frame together that you see in the photos with the cover off. Although that lug construction does make repair a bit more of a challenge than removing screws, it makes sense for a device that goes through a wide range of temperatures in normal use.
\nHowever, on inspection and some checks of the filament resistances on left and right sides of this double toaster, the problem on the left side was obvious and had nothing to do with the circuit boards. There was a break in one of the heater filaments near the base of the inner heater card where the filament went past a mica insulator there. I repaired the break using a small crimped copper tube culled from some small “bullet”-type crimp connectors I had lying around. (Do not try to fix such a broken filament with soldering; apart from the obvious problem and safety issue with heating of lead-tin solder when the red-hot filament is in normal use, you’d have a hard time soldering to the tungsten anyway. Don’t even try that.)
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\nAfter fixing the broken filament, I reassembled the toaster frame and bent the lugs into place, then screwed the cover back on. However, this time for the cover, I replaced the weird triangular-headed-screw with a common Philips-head one. After inspection, I tried out the toaster. Note in the picture that filaments on all toaster slots are red-hot. Success!
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