Unhinged: how one of my hinges broke and how I "repaired" it

[josch]

Two weeks ago the right hinge of my classic Reform broke. The symptom looks like this: https://mister-muffin.de/p/2Ng8.webm

I bought my Reform in 2021 and I’m taking it to work and back and on trips etc, so it gets opened and closed multiple times per day. I guess I can live with the thing breaking after having been exercised a few thousand times. Somehow the pins that hold the two metal parts you can see below together snapped:

I’m traveling to MiniDebConf Hamburg next week and since the hinge itself is broken and needs replacement anyways, I attempted a desperate fix: The tiny bolts that broke are quite a bit “softer” than the steel that the remainder of the hinge is made of. So it was possible to drill into the bolts, effectively removing them from both parts and widening the hole a bit until it was 2mm in diameter. And at that point, 2 M2 screws were able to do the same job that the metal bolts did before:

Lets see how long this survives.

[josch]

Unsolicited follow-up: I didn’t have any M2 nuts at home and no shop in my town sells nuts this tiny. But I still had a stack of press-fit threaded M2 inserts for using with 3D printed PLA:

By shortening them a bit, these were able to fulfill the job a M2 nut would otherwise do:

I definitely have to stock up on more M2 compatible material for future hardware abuses.