Thanks to 3D printing, my headphones are fixed!

Earlier this week, one of the hinges on my headphones broke. One moment it works; the next moment it flops around and doesn’t sit right on my head.

Like many other times where expensive things break, I initially got pretty bummed about it. It’s easy to blame myself for being too rough with things because, well, I am. Regardless, sooner or later, everything will inevitably break in some way. Quite often, something that should be a cheap fix will cripple a device because of a lack of spare parts.

But now, unlike most of my life, I have the power to do something about that! 3D printing technology has become way more accessible in recent years. Replicating plastic parts to a reasonable level of precision is so much easier and cheaper (once you put in the initial investment of at least a few hundred USD).

I was lucky to find a printable model online, so I didn’t need to do any modeling myself this time. It printed in less than half an hour without much hassle, besides a few blemishes from support material that weren’t too difficult to clean up.

Thankfully, these headphones seem to be designed to be taken apart. Getting at the hinge was just a matter of a few screws that were easy to reach, and a couple of plastic clips.

The most annoying part of this process was actually getting the original hinge out. A cable needs to run through the hinge to get to the other ear. In the new part, there’s an open channel for the cable, but in the original part, it completely surrounds the cable - it is stuck on there like a bead on string.

I ended up taking flush cutters to the part to free it from the cable, but I nicked the cable in the process. It still works for now. In hindsight, I now know that it would be way easier and safer to open the ear assembly and desolder the cable in there - then it could be unthreaded more gently.

Whew. After all of that, we are so back.

These headphones have lasted me almost 3 years before needing repairs. It would have sucked to effectively lose $100 because of a piece of plastic. I’m fortunate to be able to fix it for just a few cents, plus a model provided by the collaborative efforts of a massive online community.

It’s not often that my printer pays out dividends like this. But this is one of its greatest and most satisfying superpowers - singlehandedly improving the repairability and longevity of many devices. I’m hoping that it continues to do so for me and for many others.