I am a tinkerer(?). It gets me into pickles more often than I would like to admit.  Everytime I get clear of such situations I swear off ‘messing’ around with things…..and it lasts for a week or two before my next new big idea hits.

Well late yesterday afternoon I decided it would be a good idea to ‘clean’ out my PS3 with a little compressed air, no big deal right? Compressed air bottles come with small, long straws that attach to the spray nozzle to aid in forcing a specific stream of air into those hard to reach nooks and crannies.  Which is AWESOME.  But what isn’t so awesome is that those same straws aren’t exactly built to six sigma standards, so results do vary. A lot. 

I decide to take our little straw friend and plug it into the nozzle and then jam said straw into bottom most nether-regions of our PS3.  My ingenious idea was met with Sahara dust-storm worthy volumes of fine grey powder.  All hail the conquering hero!  I gave it a few extra squirts ‘just to be sure’ and on that last squirt it happened.  My little red straw buddy was propelled off the nozzle and directly into BFE PS3 Houston TX USA.  What I mean to say is that I watched in slow motion horror as the straw was launched from the tip of the bottle into the farthest corner of no-return of my Playstation.  For those who don’t aren’t familiar with the geography (up to this point I was a stranger to these lands as well) it is located between the two CPU heat sinks and the turbine worthy exhaust fan.  With a high-power light I could squintily see the red outline faintly hiding amongst the aluminum radiator fins and plastic curved blades. 

 

It took a few minutes to for my brain to push past the waves of panic and shock… I was in deep do-do.  I had a small vent area consisting of 1×1 cm breathing holes (conveniently just large enough for an air duster straw to be shot through) to view the hopelessness of what lay before me… I had no choice.  The straw was lodged firm; halfway into the exhaust fan preventing it from moving and halfway into one of the heat sinks just waiting to be melted into a smoldering, stinking pile of charred plastic.  I had to get it out or never turn on my PS3 again.  Sink or swim.  Time to go big or go home. 

 

Did I mention that I HATE IT WHEN THIS HAPPENS?!!!!

 

I was hoping that there was an ‘easy way’ to crack the cover off and have direct access to the heat exhaust chamber…NO.SUCH.LUCK.  Of course not.  Well here goes nothing… A quick YouTube video show me how to find the first screw and from there on out I was on my own.  I am sure I could have found another tutorial showing me how to disassemble it in the dark with my eyes closed and one hand-tied behind my back…but I am much too impatient to search for such detailed steps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Long story short it was an ugly 2 hour affair and at times hope seemed lost.  But by some miracle not only did I retrieve the offending article, but I also reassembled the flex-capacitor successfully!  And best of all it powered up and worked like nothing had ever happened…  *knock on wood*.

 

Moral of the story?  It’s a two parter:

        1) Leave well enough alone

        2) When using air duster, use a spare hand to hold onto the plastic air straw