Bosch PS10 Disassembly
A couple of months ago an extension bit broke off in my Bosch PS10 drill driver. The picture below shows the part that got stuck – I couldn’t mange to extract it with pliers or tweezers; so I set about dissembling the drill.
Since most of my experience dissembling things is with various consumer electronics this was a night and day comparison. You can clearly tell the bosch was designed to be serviced. First off the screws holding the housing together were clearly visible – none of this hiding behind rubber feet or anything. The only small complication was that after taking out all the screws there was a little white clip which slid into a slot in the bottom holding the two halves together. Since that area is fairly thin I assume there wasn’t enough material to use a screw.
After the clip issue everything was smooth sailing. Another example of the serviceability of the bosch with the housing removed all the components just slid out of their various slots and cubby holes. Not a single funny little snap together connection to be found. I found it pretty interesting how the control components worked – from the outside I would have expected them to be more complex. All except for the clutch control they were just simple switches. The clutch control seemed to be some sort of linear conditional resistor which was neat. Here’s a picture after I removed the innards from the housing with the control components labeled and arrows indicating where they came from.
Now that everything was exposed it was on to the chuck. There are four screws holding it together. Once those are removed the two halves come apart and you can remove it from the motor assembly. Turns out everything is held in place by the housing and so with it off you can just pop out all the parts. At this point I was able to push out the broken bit end out from the back as shown in the photo.
After that it only took about half an hour to put everything back together. Most of that was spent screwing around with the chuck assembly. Since its held together entirely by the housing itself and has 5 or 6 parts it required some manual dexterity to hold in the right position. Even though the reassembly process was a little tricky overall I am very pleased. Since the disassembly process was relatively easy I can always clean the mechanicals or add grease if I feel like it which is reassuring.