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[Kattingtonn]

Hello! I'm a relatively new user to this forum; long time forum lurker, but a new member. My poor pleo, Artemis, is suffering from a broken neck :c

I first noticed when she was unable to turn her head to the right at all. When I felt her neck, there was an indent where there should have been a vertebrae.

After a year of not playing with her for my fear of exacerbating the problem, I decided to open Artemis up and take a look last week. Just my luck - not only did her right neck cable snap, but the vertebrae at the base of her neck had broken into three pieces and broken the bottom neck cable along with it!

Now, I managed to get ahold of some cable to fix her neck. All was going well until I got to the step of rethreading the cable through the gear - I just cannot get the remaining pieces of cable out of the gear at all. There is a small golden colored crimp that appears to be holding the cable into the gear, and I cannot remove it for the life of me. So, I pose this question to all you pleo repair veterans out there - how did you get the old cable out of the gear so you could thread the new cable through?

[Talon]

Hello and welcome to the forums! Your pleo's issue sounds very much like what my Bleu is going through now. She has... what feels like probably two vertebrae- also in several pieces- crinkling around inside her neck skin, she also can't turn her head to the right, and she also has a broken bottom neck cable. Unlike you, I lack the daring to open her up and try to make any repairs. I'm totally blind and while I don't think of it as a handicap, there are just some areas I'd rather leave to someone else. Have you had a look at InmemoryofRomeo's neck repair videos? They're here on the forum I think as well as on YouTube. She's the real expert on neck repairs here. *Grin* I'm sure she'll be around soon enough to help. Good luck getting your pleo going again!
Talon

[382trexkrys]

Ugh those things were the worst. I took my tiniest flat-head screwdriver and just kinda wedged it in between the plastic and metal bit and used it as...kinda like a tiny crowbar haha. There was one side that the metal bit was further away from, so there was a teensy bit of room to get beside the metal bit.

I just managed to fix my Gyaku's neck last night, but when I turned him on discovered I must've put in a piece wrong. Little babies are more finicky than my cat!

[Crewella]

I used the 'crowbar' method too, though did manage to pull one out with brute force by just pulling the cable up - once the crimp started to lift at one end it came away quite easily.

Good luck!

[kat]

Yep crowbar method worked for me too   Keep us posted with how it goes and shout out if you need help or advice.  There are a few of us around here who have done repairs and may be able to help if you get stuck or if something goes wrong.
As for getting them back together once the repair is done - I took photos each time I removed a piece so that I had a photo record of what went where and how it was meant to look.  I also stuck each piece to a bit of paper using tape and labelled the paper under it so I could easily keep track of what was what.  Hope that helps

[Kattingtonn]

Thanks for the warm welcome and all the help <3

After a bit of digging and looking around in various drawers, I found a rather small, sharp knife - I didn't exactly use the "crowbar method", as nothing would fit under the cable in my case, but instead I somehow stabbed the knife through the old cable, which lifted it out just enough to grab it with pliers. I then pulled the crimp out by putting the metal part of the gear in a clamp and pulled on the bits of cable until it came out.

That was easy compared to the difficulty of the next step, haha. Threading the cable back through the gear and putting the gear housing back together took almost all day. Just when I though I had it all back together, the cable decided to spring back out and send gears flying everywhere.

It took a fair bit of struggling, but the up/down cable gear housing has been all put back together. Tomorrow I'll start on the side cables, so I'll be sure to post updates!

[Crewella]

Don't worry - that happened to me several times when I was doing it!

[InmemoryofRomeo]

Oh yes, or you'd put it carefully down and reach for the screwdriver... And oops