Several months ago, my wife and I bought our son a Tonka Mighty Motorized Garbage Truck
from Costco to give him for Hanukkah as he's a bit scared of the garbage truck coming down the street and we thought that this could help him. We gave him the truck last night and within 5 minutes, the lifting mechanism stopped working. My wife got new batteries as it shouldn't like the motor was dying, but that didn't help. After a few online searches, my wife saw many horrible reviews of this product with the same problem.
I told our son that I'd try to fix it after he went to sleep. Well, it has triangular shaped screws which made it a bit hard to take apart. However, a small flat head screwdriver seemed to fit and turned the screws. I disassembled the entire truck and found the problem. One of the gears wasn't firmly attached to the metal shaft. I used some super glue to glue it onto the shaft and presto, it started working again. Yeah! However, this little repair job took over 2 hours! Tonka doesn't make toys like they used to, so the $20 we spent on the toy was topped off with 2 hours of repair work making the toy a lot more expensive than $20.
Our son was delighted that his garbage truck was working again. He probably has one of the only Tonka garbage trucks that is still working. While it is still early, I'm crossing my fingers that my repair job worked.
We, as a society, keep demanding lower prices on products, but in a lot of cases are willing to accept poor quality.
Note, it appears that Tonka has licensed its name to a company called Funrise Toys. That's too bad because I always thought that Tonka trucks were well built.
Comments
February 2nd, 2010
susan
kind of random, but could you tell me how you fixed your truck. my son’s conveyor belt fell apart at the pin and i’m trying to figure out how to dissassemble it to get it back on the track. so far, i’ve unscrewed four of the triangular screws, but i can’t seem to get in the conveyor belt mechanism part. i put in about 2 hours last night also. silly the thing we do for our kiddos…
if you have any adice, i’d love to here it.
thanks,
susan
February 2nd, 2010
Scott Gruby
It is such a pain to repair it. I had to repair it a few times and finally it broke beyond repair. We bought another one online then exchanged it when that one didn’t work and returned the replacement as the gears slipped and it didn’t work either. Since we got the original one at Costco, we returned it to them. Luckily my son has forgotten about it and we’re going to leave it at that. It’s too bad that the Tonka name is no longer synonymous with quality.
February 2nd, 2010
susan
thanks for such a quick response. we got ours at costco also, so guess it might need to go back if my next attempt fails. i also have the fire truck which is still in great condition. even though the trash truck is kind of fragile, i think tonka continues to make it because it’s so fun for kiddos. every kid and even some adults that have played with it, enjoy it fully. thanks again.