The kid is 3 and used to being around dangerous household objects. At school there’s a stove/oven and a clothes iron just sitting out for (supervised) use. He knows how to clean tables and mirrors and rugs with various spray cleaners. I could go on, but suffice it to say he’s capable of restraining himself when told something is dangerous.
The plan was to do this in a supervised way, mostly as an excercise in tool use and understanding the logic of how the parts fit together. Just getting a general idea of what the different pieces do, e.g. the electricity goes through these wires to the motor, which spins these gears to wind the tape.
The idea was to not mess around with the circuit boards, beyond disconnecting and removing them in one piece and maybe naming some parts. Desoldering things will have to wait until elementary school.
He’s thankfully past the foreign objects in mouth phase, so ingestion of toxic, magnetic, or sharp components is not a problem.
Pinching and cutting hazards sound minimal and controllable. Besides lead solder, is there likely to be anything else that poses a poisoning hazard through casual touching?
The TV is out, and no microwave ovens or cameras either. I realized the linked article was meant to show that CRTs really aren’t that dangerous, but there’s too much that can go wrong in amateur hands.
As for other shock hazards, which seem to be the big risk, we would need to look out for batteries and capacitors. Anything else?
To be honest, after perusing images online, I not confident I can identify and discharge or otherwise render safe every single component that might hold a significant electric charge.
Between that and the small but non-zero risk from lead solder, I’m going shelve this idea until he’s big enough to build robots or radios or whatever, then he can salvage parts from this stuff.
Any suggestions for safer, perhaps mechanical instead of electronic, stuff to take apart?
