Paul Kaiser's Blog

“I don’t know why he has to always learn the hard way.”

I’ve heard that from a lot of my elders.

“It’s like he thinks I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Indeed, that’s pretty close to the mark.

I learn by doing, but I’m not opposed to taking advice from someone else. I don’t take advice from just anyone, though. Just because you’re a family member or an old friend doesn’t automatically mean you’re the best source for worldly life-guiding wisdom.

Share your past

If you have advice for someone, and you feel you’re qualified because of experience, you ought to share the experience in order to gain credibility. You might worry about looking foolish or looking less than perfect, but in reality, this just makes you more real, down-to-earth: believable.

Tell the person what you did that made you wiser. Field their questions about it. You’ll make a better impression than you would have up on your soap box.

Do you have problems with your Wii game system physically not pulling disks in all the way? I didn’t find any helpful information on the internet telling how to fix this, so I did it myself.

Fixing the Wii disk mechanism

Well, technically, I didn’t fix anything on the Wii, but I discovered how to work with the problem. You don’t need to take your Wii apart or do anything handy in order to get past this. That’s a good thing, because I had to:

1. Order a special tri-wing screwdriver from the internet to take out some special screws.
2. Find a decent video on the internet showing how to take the Wii apart.
   (In the video I found, the person’s voice was processed to sound like one of those witness protection things, where you couldn’t identify the person. I have no idea why they did that, but I thank them for taking time to create and post the video.)
3. Take the Wii apart and troubleshoot the disk mechanism while avoiding two curious cats and one bouncing child.

Yes, it was scary.

Discovering the problem

Wii Disk Mechanism Closeup

What I found was a thin metal part on the disk mechanism that keeps the Wii from sucking in disks until the two sides of the disk have entered partly into the Wii. Among other things, this keeps the Wii from sucking in objects that are not shaped like game disks.

Anyway, the entire disk mechanism was a bit worn from use, so things were loose like a goose in there. I started to bend the metal piece to compensate, but then found how difficult this particular metal was to work with. It would be difficult to bend it to my whim with any required precision.

But sometimes it worked

Through my testing, though, I found that if I applied gentle pressure to the left side of the Wii game disk while inserting it, the disk went in with no problems. I watched the disassembled disk mechanism as this happened, and realized this slight left-side pressure was enough to compensate for the internal parts being a bit loose.

Conclusion

If you Wii will not pull game disks all the way in, try simply pushing gently on the left side of the disk as it begins to pull in. Works every time for us, and I’ve even trained the kids.