This week's puzzle...
The rotating brush in our 5-years old Lidl cordless vacuum cleaner has, more-or-less, stopped working. It barely moves, and after a few seconds the cleaner leds all flash which denotes a blocked powerhead. It isn't blocked, but I guess that the system detects a motor overload (temperature?) and shuts it down.
I think that the plastic "bearing" in the head has gone, but it isn't possible to get it apart. A drop of oil doesn't work, and would no doubt lead to a clogged mess with the oil/dust mixture after a while. The motor seems to work ok if the brush is removed.
However, I tried to get the whole power head apart to see if anything else might be wrong, and failed (I couldn't find anything on the internet about dismantling the head). The whole head is shown here:
After removing the 7 external screws on the underside, the back of the head opened a small amount, but not the front. After too much force trying to open it, part of the plastic cracked, allowing further access. What it revealed has puzzled me even more. There was an internal screw holding the transparent plastic and black plastic together, but how this was done eludes me. The screw fixed in the black plastic, holding the transparent cover, is shown here:
A side view is shown here:
The top of the powerhead, with an added red circle showing the position of the screw underneath is here:
There is only one screw, as the other side has the motor and there's no room for a screw. When shut, I reckon there is only a few mm clearance over the top of the screw.
Any ideas how this screw was tightened, and how it could be undone without damage?