411–420 of 464 posts
I've had a similar idea, except in addition to toasters, it's midsize pickup trucks, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers... What I've found is that regulations make it impossible to sell simple machines, labor costs make it impossible to compete on price, lawyers make it impossible to go to market without being sued, and consumers who say they want reliable, well-made goods will balk and buy cheap stuff en masse wh…
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To be fair, washing machines are extremely simple. The trucks, a little less so.
A washing machine spins at up to 14-16 hundred RPM, while contain weight that shifts and changes based on the water added. I wouldn't necessarily define that as "simple", either.
I've had a similar idea, except in addition to toasters, it's midsize pickup trucks, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers... What I've found is that regulations make it impossible to sell simple machines, labor costs make it impossible to compete on price, lawyers make it impossible to go to market without being sued, and consumers who say they want reliable, well-made goods will balk and buy cheap stuff en masse wh…
> midsize pickup trucks, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers... "simple machines"?
A lot of great comments already but I'll add my opinion on search volume for 'toasters made in usa'. My feel is that a bulk of it is people looking for old fashioned toasters like showcased in this link; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y
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I have wondered for the longest time what the BAGEL button actually did, because on my cheap toaster, it seems to do very little. Unfortunately I still have more questions after reading the schematic. SW4 (BAGEL) allows current flow through R9/LED3 (BAGEL) which raises Vbe on Q2, forward biasing it, allowing current flow through Q2, dropping Vcs. Meanwhile, power has been flowing through the main switch, with RL3/RL4…
The bagel button makes only one side of the slot get hot (or at least makes one side hotter than the other). Your toaster probably has a bagel icon on the top showing you which way to put the bagel in (cut side towards the center in every toaster I have seen). Source: I'm not married to toaster moguls but I do peer into operating toasters to see which wires turn red. Feel free to replicate my research and post your o…
OK now I'm starting to think we live in the matrix - I've spend the last 24 hours (unemployed currently, you see) looking at toasters and designs, with the same idea. And because my toaster just broke. The state of toasters seems quite dire. Most are basically the same mechanism internally with different style covers. Some quick learnings/thoughts: - why are they open at the top? Some expensive Japanese toasters are…
> why are they open at the top? Because of convection, heat rises, and allows the non-toasting part of the frame, etc., to remain safe to the touch. It would be very bad to take an existing toaster and try to operate it on its side. Plus, the simplest way to get even toasting is even heat on both sides of the bread (except when you do Bagels).
I can see an argument about hot air rising, leading to unevenness, or about hot air drying out the bread, but 'the toaster would get hot' doesn't make sense to me.
Regarding horizontal toasting, that is something I had in mind. I might hack my broken toaster to try this out.
Yes, you should do this. Will you add your contact info to your profile, or contact me from mine? I've been thinking the exact same thing about toasters. Here was my recent comment in the "Generation Junk" thread a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38796570
Love it, I've considered doing toasters. I run a space startup in Australia making hardware for satellites. Would love to chat. I've been a long time lurker but made an account for this ha ha.
When you do the math focused on the manufacturing task alone, you can come up with a baseline estimate on what it might cost to make each item and how that compares to what it will sell for, wholesale of course since this is just manufacturing.
This would be your "toaster baseline".
Now you may plan to produce an artisan product but toasters themselves are not only a commodity but the market has been saturated for quite some time.
You can't expect to compete with the mainstream on price or volume, but that's OK you're not going to be able to make that many to begin with.
Never mind how few you make, if you make money on every one, and through some excellent good fortune you can sell all you make, you will be profitable.
Whether that's enough profit in comparison to other oportunities, well you have your baseline to work from.
You might be able to find an alternative product (most likely addressing a completely different market), which can be produced at similar unit expenditures in similar facilities, but sell for a better price into its market in such a way as to be a much better choice. Maybe better off with something that's not a commodity, maybe so, you have to do the math.
If you're expecting the manufacturing phase alone to be a core value-adding operation.
I married into toaster moguls. When they sold out in '97, domestic toasters had been infeasible for years already. And this was for a company where all the knowledge, equipment, and facilities had beed paid for many decades before. (They invented the electric pop-up toaster for certain definitions of electric pop-up toaster.) Toasters are refined brilliance, if done right. The concept of "done" is computed using an a…
Your inlaws had the best information in '97 and wealth of knowledge about specific products but the right entrepreneur might see it differently these days. (e.g. your inlaws could sell out and get into another business because their brand still had value) I went to Best Buy to buy a microwave oven last weekend and noticed that all the microwaves: (a) had a Proposition 65 label (see https://www.mychemicalfreehouse.net…