Boom Shaka Laka

     Unless you have been extremely gifted by the gods, chances are that you have had something break down on you once or twice in your life. When that happened, did you ever have the desire to smack or beat it to try and get it to work? If you have, then you, like many of us, have had the urge to perform untrained percussive maintenance.

     Percussive maintenance is the name given to the art of beating on something until it works. The most famous example of this is the one provided by the Fonz from Happy Days. In the show, the character of the Fonz used his expertise to fix a jukebox among other things. While you may be tempted to believe that this mystical fix is fictitious, there are numerous examples of percussive maintenance working in real life.

     NASA, believe it or not, seems to be a big promoter of percussive maintenance. One particularly great example is from the Apollo 12 mission to the moon. The following is a conversation between astronaut Alan Bean and a member of the support crew on Earth, Edward Gibson:

Gibson: There’s no change down here, Al. (Pause) That’s coming in there, now, Al. Okay, what change did you make?

Bean: I hit it on the top with my hammer. I figured we didn’t have a thing to lose.

Gibson: Skilful fix, Al.

Bean: I hit it on the top with this hammer I’ve got. (Responding to Gibson) Yeah, that’s skilled craftsmanship.

That isn't the only example from NASA. During Apollo 16, a malfunctioning alarm light kept blinking until commander John Young tried kicking it. When he reported success, the response from Earth was "It's an old American custom: kick it if it doesn't work." More recently, astronauts Robert Curbeam and Sunita Williams spent quite a bit of time shaking and pushing a solar panel into its case so they could move it to a different location on the International Space Station in 2006

     The people at NASA aren't the only ones who've used percussive maintenance, the people at Apple have as well. Back in the early days of Apple, they released a computer called the Apple III. They hoped that it would give them inroads into the business market. However, the computer had one small problem, over time, the computer would heat up and that heat would cause the connections between the components to become loose and caused the owners of the Apple III no small number of headaches. Eventually it was discovered that if you picked up the computer about two to four inches off of the desk and dropped it, that would re seat the components and the computer would be back in working order.

    While many people in the past have used percussive maintenance to their benefit, beware when using it on modern machines and components. Most modern components tend to be on the delicate side of things and unless you know exactly what you are doing, you may just end up with something that is broke worse than it was. Any one can hit a broke machine, but unless you know where exactly to hit it you might want to hold off.





1. http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2010/09/21/just-give-it-a-good-whack/
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percussive_maintenance
3. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PercussiveMaintenance?from=Main.FonzarelliFix
4. http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/printpage/Inside-the-Apple-III/1563