Alis's beloved toaster oven, France, had the irritating habit of not staying on when activated unless the door was propped open. This curious bug was the first clue to its solution.

After removing the side of the machine (fig 1,) we decided that the lever which was activated by the door opening was not a tight enough fit (fig 2,) so we wrapped some aluminum foil around the joint (fig 3,4.) Testing indicated that this did not fix the problem.

Reexamining the workings, we realized that we had the lever inside positoned wrong, and that the door wouldn't stay shut at all (fig 5.) This took some creative thinking and swearing (fig 6, 7.)

We realized that the weight on the cam that operates the door wasn't heavy enough to properly align and trigger the beginning of the cooking process, and tried bending it. This was especially clever because the oven happened still to be plugged in. I (Jack) sustained a scar (fig 8.) Alice felt nothing, but saw a great spark. The outlet became nonoperational. Do not try this. We acquired an extension cord and a circuit breaker to avoid some of these problems (fig 9) and managed to remember to unplug the toaster in all later operations.

Eventually, we also attached a small rock to the weight with electrical tape (fig 10.) This succeeded in starting the process (fig 11,) but opening the oven door no longer stopped it (fig 12.) More fine-tuning was tuned.

Eventually, the combination of reweighting and ciruit bending enabled proper function to France. Therefore, we are now SCIENTISTS.



(Special thanks to Sean for debugging the sf0 video player. It works just fine in Mozilla Firefox now.)