In a recent video [Sqwerks] does a deep-dive into the problem of disintegrating plastic enclosures of Nintendo DS consoles. These original NDS handheld consoles have a metallic-like coating that appears to interact with the ABS plastic, causing yellowing as well as extreme brittleness and correspondingly broken hinges. Unsurprisingly, this causes the shell to essentially disintegrate the moment you try to disassemble them for something like a screen replacement.
While somewhat the opposite of plasticizer migration into ABS from PVC insulation that we covered before, the underlying cause is probably similar, with the Transformers toy community having come to call it Gold Plastic Syndrome (GPS) based on the fact that it were mostly gold-colored parts on these plastic toys that seemed to be affected. Over time the additives used to add a cool metal sheen and swirls to the plastic appear to interact in a way that makes the ABS plastic very brittle.
Although the underlying cause of GPS doesn’t appear to be known yet, the Transformers community has documented this happening since the late 1980s and into the early 2000s, with even reports that some toys from the mid-2010s suffer from this. Whatever the underlying cause of GPS is, the result is always the same, with disintegrating brittle plastic and often a powdery residue.
In the case of NDS consoles, replacing the affected shell with a third-party replacement is still a viable option today, with [Sqwerks] recommending this solution. For other enclosures and toys where the plastic effectively is the toy, it might be that all we can do is watch them slowly disintegrate until we figure out how to revert GPS.
Continue reading “How Gold Plastic Syndrome Is Killing Toys And Game Consoles”
