Greetings! I know, this forum is pretty much dead, but i thought i'd share this anyways.
I only found out about pleos the very end of last year, and not much later i bought an RB myself that i named Kiwi.
Within a month of use, cables started to break, both in the neck and tail.
With not much information about repairs online and a broken pleo, i wasn't exactly sure what i was getting myself into, but i decided to repair it.There's gonna be a lot of images of Kiwi's insides, so take a look.
Skin removed. Two vertebrae were broken, one in the tail and one in the neck.
I fixed those by melting them back together using a soldering iron, melting a steel cable around the middle into the plastic and covering it in epoxy adhesive. This is much stronger than printing new ones.
The insides of the front with the entire neck and head removed. They really filled these to the brim with electronics, there's not much space to work with unless removing parts from the body.
As you can see, that cable has snapped and needs to be replaced.
Kiwi's head
Next up is the tail. the back was a little more confusing to open. There were a couple of screws well hidden under the touch sensor. Other than that it's much easier to rethread than the front.
Up/down gearbox with replaced steel cable.
The skin is very stretchy, so it was still possible to take it off and get it back on. There's only some minor damage. Glued the skin back on at the battery bay and neck.
There's only a small tear at the battery bay, but other than that it looks about the same.
here are the results after a couple of weeks of messing around with kiwi.
https://youtu.be/6Fb_7XynZ88?si=crEsc-0XaBCPOROh
As of right now the up/down tail cable has snapped, and i'll still have to figure out why exactly that is.
Bought new steel cables, but it'll take a month before it arrives. So i won't be working on it for some time.
It took me way too long to make this post, i'm not used to ancient websites.
