Percussive Maintenance

Time honored tradition of repairing electronically or mechanically complex devices with blunt trauma. All good technicians carry a PrecisionAdjustmentDevice to allow for such repairs. If the method didn't actually work occasionally, there wouldn't be a need to do it.

Striking a skipping record player is a good example of this. -- PedroCartagena

"Good old Earth technology" -- DoctorWho

For perspective: http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_abuse.shtml

Ah, this is part of the point of PercussiveMaintenance, as I was discussing with Pete this morning.

If it's slightly broken, you try hitting it again and maybe it will work. On the other hand, you might break it completely. Then you know it needs replacing.

Blunt trauma was often effective when connecting to an off-site computer via 300 baud modem and a telephone handset. I'm racking my brain trying to remember the dial-up procedure where I used to work in 1982. It involved hitting control-d (if I remember correctly) at a certain point. Sometimes hitting control-d failed to send the appropriate (ACK?) signal. And so I'd lift the left side of the keyboard about 1 inch and drop it. That almost always succeeded. But every few weeks it didn't. In that case, it was time to remove the handset from the modem cups, bang it on the table top, and replace it in the cups. Banging the handset loosened the carbon powder in its button microphone so that it could transmit the signal properly. I don't know about dropping the keyboard, but banging the handset had sound (in more than one sense of the word) engineering principles behind it. -- ElizabethWiethoff