My daughter can’t use floss because of her braces, so I got her a Sonicare AirFloss. It died after about a year, but she loved it so I got another. When it also died after a year, I got curious about what was going wrong.
I needed a band-saw to open an old Sonicare toothbrush, so I thought the AirFloss would be hard too. To my surprise, the bottom almost popped off with a little wiggling. No potting or sonic welding here. Looks like that rubber O-ring is the only thing keeping the water out.
Now there’s your problem! Clearly the O-ring was not enough. Some water got down into the body and wrecked the PC board and battery inside.
On the next AirFloss, I’ll probably run a bead of epoxy around the body seam to keep this from happening again.
Since it is broken and I’ve got it open anyway, I wanted to see fancy compressor that generates the patented Microburst jet….
Hey! That’s just a spring loaded syringe plunger! It is actually a pretty neat little mechanism and the jet is surprisingly forceful. It could be useful in some project some day- maybe a tiny BB gun?
Here is what it looks like in action…
